V day

As others lose their livelihoods—and their very lives—to the pandemic, I inhabit an isle of security amid the treacherous waters. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a companionable husband—and a little room I can escape to when I’d rather be alone. At 70, I have Medicare, Social Security, ample savings—plus a part-time job I can do from home. My salad days may be over, but then so are my sandwich days: the senescent parents I struggled to care for are dead, their ashes scattered, and my kids, now grown, are scattered too—though just a borough away. The shadows that darken my life are cast by awareness of others’ misfortunes, not my own.

When the pandemic hit, it became clear that as a member of a “vulnerable” population, I am a nuisance, as are any activities I engage in outside my home. The most helpful thing we O.K. boomers can do is stay home and stop hogging hospital beds. 

For many New Yorkers, the lockdown has been catastrophic, but for me it is a weird adventure with many novelties. 

There’s work-from-home software to tame. Like the pandemic’s trajectory, my learning curve with tech has been steep: I accidentally canceled a company-wide video meeting and scheduled my own in its place, and then did it again a few weeks later. Amazingly—horrifyingly—hundreds of fellow employees accepted my invitations. 

Ordering groceries online was more complicated than one might think, and scrubbing them down with Clorox required a two-person multi-step assembly line of decontamination. 

There has been new vocabulary to master: fomites, aerosolization, asymptomatic transmission, spike proteins, receptor binding. 

It is not exactly fun, but it is interesting. I’ve been living amid history unfolding, with the evening news providing a daily documentary. 

Meanwhile, I’ve continued to take yoga classes, but now by Zoom; still see friends, but onscreen or on park benches. Thanksgiving was a little wan without guests, but there were no dishes to wash either and, best of all, no congealing leftovers. I’ve suffered the guilt of well-being, but opportunities for home-based do-gooding soon came my way: stitching masks for distribution at food banks, phonebanking, writing exhortations to voters, tithing to nonprofits.

Blunders aside, the new normal has been comfortable for me, still is. Even the much maligned mask: I am prone to skin cancer but haven’t used sunblock since February; a mask protects me, cheeks to chin. And now, as the icy wind whips off the Hudson and across the West Side, my face is warm behind its covering, my lips unchapped. Don’t even get me started on little kids in masks. It’s a Halloween of cuteness all year round. 

So, on a good day, I manage my worries well. But in the night, when darkness falls, the truth rises, like zombies from the dead: we are screwed—you, me, everyone else, everything on earth, and earth itself. Trump accelerated our descent into chaos and disaster, but we were headed to hell long before his sulfurous fulminations made it all explicit. Our sinners’ history of environmental desecration; racist, sexist savagery; greed breeding gluttony; soulless mendacity. 

So, vaccine schmaccine. I know I’m supposed to celebrate today, but the pandemic was really the least of our concerns.


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