I exchanged “good mornings” with a couple my age during my morning walk the other day. They were wearing masks; I wasn’t. The man offered me a hello. The woman’s eyes telegraphed an apprehensive smile.
It’s May 2021 — 14 months after the pandemic’s global death count began and, as the saying goes, that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a Buddliner bearing down on us. The all-clear signal on going back to restaurants and ditching the masks is growing louder and louder, and most of us are ready to respond.
On March 19, 2020, my wife issued a rare marital edict. “You’re done with the pool. Hang up the towel and goggles and start walking.” I obeyed and haven’t missed many mornings since that first one when I said goodbye to swimming laps at the Lynn Y.
I miss the relaxing, meditative experience of one stroke followed by another. I miss the banter and joking with the locker room crew and fellow swimmers.
I plan to return to the Y, but my personal definition of COVID-19’s end in my little corner of the world is when vaccination rates in Massachusetts hit 80 percent and COVID-19 case rates are no longer published in the newspapers or broadcast on television — because there aren’t any cases.
What’s your definition? Are you ready to rush back into that “normal” life we were living in late winter 2019? Have you scoffed at COVID-19 for the past 14 months and lived your life, masks be damned, the way you want to live it? Have you worked at home since March 2020, sanitizing the groceries, wearing masks if people visit, and connecting with people via Zoom?
I’ve been in my office since June 2020. I wear a mask at work and I’m vaccinated. I gave the Moderna injections I received —thanks to hardworking Lynn Community Health Center employees— about as much thought as I give the flu vaccine the nice people at Walgreens give me.
I not only believe in modern medicine, but I thank my lucky stars that I live in a time and a place where I can get the very best that medicine has to offer. I’m old enough to remember suffering as a kid from childhood asthma because steroids had yet to be invented as a medically game-changing weapon in the arsenal against asphyxiation.
But that’s me. Everyone approaches COVID-19 and its life-altering impact on our world differently. I have colleagues who think the pandemic is much ado about nothing and ones who take mask wearing as seriously as a death in the family.
Let me tell you something you already know: We aren’t going back to the world we remember 14 months ago. We will be more cautious and, hopefully, more considerate to the precautions taken by others when we eventually go out to eat again, fly on a plane, return to the workplace, attend a concert or see a movie and spend time with family and friends.
We’ll probably end up getting an annual COVID-19 booster thanks to modern science and its continuous progress in identifying and fighting virus variants. We will continue to hear from and, for the most part, tolerate the people who gripe about government’s intrusion on their rights in the name of COVID-19 and we will probably read story after story about this person suing that person and this group protesting that decision relating to mask enforcement, workplace return rules, and all manner of other perceived or real infractions related to our collective recovery from this global horror show.
I want to go back to the Y and eat on The Barnacle’s patio this summer. I hope you get to do everything you want to do once we collectively — and, hopefully — speed our way out of the pandemic tunnel.
