It was the family of four playing Frisbee with bandannas over their faces that finally broke through. I’ve been fine throughout this pandemic, and have purposefully been mute about that fact everywhere publicly, given that the first of my “coronavirus rules” is “don’t be smug.”
And, yes, I’ve been fine. Baking! Cleaning! Postcarding! Crafting! I pried every key off my keyboard to soak them in soapy water—not from fear of germs, but because it was something mundane that felt necessary at that moment, and for the following 120 minutes or so that filled the first of these weekends. I’ve made nutritious, tasty meals; less nutritious but just as tasty baked goods, with the more homemade components the better. (Did you know that treacle is just a watered down caramel, basically?) I’ve Zoomed with far-flung friends I should have been Zooming with all along, and Zoomed with those I should be having drinks with instead. I’ve comforted, or at least I’ve tried to; I’ve tried to project calm, and it hasn’t been difficult, to be honest. Frankly, I feel mentally healthier than usual, perhaps because the world’s collective anxiety has consumed the fog of depression that likes to dance around my head.
But that family in their coordinating bandannas? They reveal something else. That all of us who are fine—really and truly fine, all told—are not fine, precisely because of that “all told.” I’m talking about myself mostly, but also about them: What I assume was a mother, a father, and two daughters , maybe 8 and 11 years old playing Frisbee together in the park on a 59-degree sunny day while covering their faces per the New York City preferred coronavirus guidelines must be shaping those children’s definitions of “dystopia” in a way I cannot imagine.
They seemed happy, to be sure. I couldn’t see their smiles, but I could hear their cries—congratulating one another on a fine catch, laughing at clumsy misses. Their body language was almost that of a joyous quartet. But were those children’s spines always so rigid? Was their posture always so alert? Their limbs swung carefree, but their trunks, containing all the viscera that is absorbing this changed world, were stiff.
Or maybe that’s just how these particular girls move. I don’t know.
Really, though, I’m talking about myself. In my just-fineness, I was on a walk—not a run, because my back is getting that twinge that it gets when I overwork it, and if my physical fitness is taken away from me things will certainly be more difficult to handle—after having done my at-home lower-body workout and mobility exercises. I’d cleaned the kitchen, made olive tapenade for tonight’s muffalettas, and attempted to harness the yeast clinging to the dried dates at the back of our cupboard because the stores have been out of yeast for weeks. I’d grocery shopped that morning, sporting my own handmade face covering, made of an old pillowcase I’d kept for guests and a cut-up silk scarf I bought in Vietnam for around a dollar in 2009. It was the first time I’d been out for groceries since the stores changed their policies; only four people at a time allowed into the Italian market, five in the greengrocer.
Overnight, the city had gone from what I’m estimating to be a 40% face mask rate to closer to 75%. I chatted with other people in line at the Italian market. Conversations with strangers when you cannot see their full expressions are different than they would be otherwise: more earnest, fewer attempts at humor, more willingness on everyone’s part to let the conversation end at its natural point. We talked and then looked at our phones.
What I’m trying to say is that even though it has only been 35 days since the first confirmed case of coronavirus hit New York City, and even though the pace of progression from alarmist to alarming is staggering, we’re all sort of doing what we do. We’re living our lives: playing with our children, feeding one another, working (or not working), gardening, sleeping, watching Netflix, worrying, telephoning, shopping, exercising, planning. Playing Frisbee. On occasion it even feels genuinely normal for a moment, a fact recognized only after that moment of normalcy has been punctured.
My own moments of puncture aren’t particularly jarring; it’s just my head resurfacing a fact that I already know, so perhaps it can’t be jarring, by definition. But witnessing a family in the midst of a simulacrum of normalcy, this attempt—perhaps successful, I really don’t know—to try to draw a connective thread from the life they lived before and the life they are living now: That was what jarred me, startled me out of my walk, revealed that my my video-game-like method of maintaining social distance with other parkgoers was a pathetic form of gamifying something terrible, and terrifying.
I went off the walking path, into a patch of grass, made sure there was nobody within six feet, and wept.
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I haven’t written in here for some time, and have no idea whether I’ll keep this post up or delete it. Going from beauty to Trump to global pandemic is a strange end to one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, not to mention a bit of a whiplash for anyone who might still have this on their feeds. On my list of things to do during this unusual time is write a follow-up/conclusion/farewell post here, because I never did that and I’d like to. We’ll see.
All I know is that for the first time in a long time, after seeing that family, I had an urge to make public this small moment from this strange time. If that urge happens again, I will update here. Consider this a return to the blogs of yore, I suppose—a quiet shoutout from one person’s corner of the world.