Last year about this time, my beau and I (married going on 23 years then) headed to New York for a magical Valentine’s Day weekend that featured watching our amazing daughter in a show with fellow dancers from her university. The weekend also included seeing Ed Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird, an extravagant dinner or three, even one with our nephew living in the Big Apple, a couple of trips to the M&M store in Times Square, where I trolled my employer with a photo of all the goodies, a few foolish photos of our family in a tiny photo booth, and long, long walks (one day we happily walked 8½ miles)!
What we didn’t know was that would be our last trip out of the state of Massachusetts that year.
Last year, around this time, the previous occupant of the White House was fresh off his first impeachment trial, and pundits were saying, yes, even though he committed high crimes and misdemeanors by trying to tie Ukraine’s promised funds to looking to discredit presidential candidate Joe Biden, we should have let the voters decide. We didn’t know that letting the voters decide (by 7 million more votes) would result in an even higher crime in the first month of this year.
In fact, despite the early stirrings of a mysterious respiratory virus coming out of Wuhan, China, there was a lot we didn’t know in the early days of 2020. And yes, most of us can’t predict the future, but who saw the dumpster fire rolling toward us this time last year?
We didn’t know that the weird quirk of people in some Asian countries wearing face masks because of pollution or illness (theirs) would become a fight between people who wanted to stop a deadly virus that could hurt themselves and/or others, and people who believed the inconvenience of covering their noses and mouths in the presence of strangers was oppression. That is, when they weren’t claiming the scientific evidence of a virus was a hoax by power-hungry Democrats.
When the NBA abruptly canceled its season, we didn’t know that was another harbinger of a world forever changed. We knew this could be bad, but did we know it would get this bad?
When my daughter opted to spend her spring break with friends on a trip to Colorado, we were glad she had a great time. She was a junior. We didn’t know it would be her last college spring break.
When she got back to campus, only to be told it would be shut down for a little longer while they figured out what to do about this strange rapidly spreading virus, we told her to come home for the next two weeks. She packed lightly, said goodbye to her roommates and headed back east. Two of her roommates were exchange students from China. She gave them her number in case they needed some place to go (they couldn’t return home at the time). She never saw them again. She came home in the middle of March. What we didn’t know was that she wouldn’t go back to school until the middle of August.
Here at The Item, we had an emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting soon after the NBA shut down. We talked about how to keep the paper going should we have to work remotely. For some of us, we had the capability already, borne of a few snowstorms that made it more prudent to work from home than to venture out on unplowed roads.
But could the whole operation (obviously, sans front office jobs) be moved off campus? We talked about doing a dry run. We never got the chance to test our capabilities. What we didn’t know was that not long after, we went from theoretical to this-is-not-a-drill mode, as we moved to our respective households and communicated by text, phone, and the dreaded Zoom. There were a few left to hold down the proverbial fort, but for many of us, the commute to work became much, much shorter.
What we didn’t know was that being in a newsroom, an office, a school, a dorm, an apartment building, a gym, is part of our social makeup as human beings. Some people went out and sought the company of other social creatures. There are more empty animal shelters these days as people realized sheltering at home wasn’t as lonely with a fur buddy. If you got a dog, you could at least venture out for a walk.
We didn’t know that birthdays, graduations, family and religious celebrations, and other life markers, would become drive-by affairs or Zoom squares. We didn’t know that if we followed the guidelines, our Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other gatherings would be limited to only a few people, or avoided altogether. Not following the rules could mean someone in your sphere could get sick. Or die.
What we didn’t know was that a year later, with close to half a million people in this country dead from COVID-19, there are still anti-maskers, virus deniers, anti-vaxxers, or people so fed up with the pandemic, they’re just going to do their own thing, everyone else’s health be damned. What we didn’t know was that not only did this virus reveal health disparities in poor and minority communities, there would also be people who would go into those communities to elbow their way to the front of the line for the much-needed vaccine.
Last year at this time, we didn’t know that 2020 would show people at their best and, unfortunately, at their worst. But now we know. Plan accordingly.
Cheryl Charles can be reached at [email protected].
