Post 286 - December 22, 2020
Day 286…
The Christmas tree lights are lit. It’s otherwise dark and quiet. The cat is curled around his olive wood dish from the Holy Land and Michael is still asleep.
It’s all so still.
I tend to thrive better in a busy environment. I’m used to blocking out conversations around me so that I can focus in on whatever I happen to be doing at the moment. Sitting here this morning in the dead quiet, I wonder if I will still be able to function in mayhem when we all go back.
This being New York City, dead quiet is, of course, a relative term.
I can hear a garbage truck outside. Some sort of emergency response vehicle with a siren went by just now. They must have been blocked in traffic because they were broadcasting someone speaking. I assume it was some variant of “get out the way” but from up here it sounded like the garbled wah-wah of adults in a Peanuts special. The day began long before I woke up.
The city these days is busier than it has been. People are out and about. Far fewer people seem to be dining out, but many more appear to be shopping.
While at nowhere near the levels they would have been in in recent years, people have been gathering in Times Square, the Bryant Park Holiday Fair and Fifth Avenue near Saks and the Tree. These places seem crowded in terms of COVID-era gatherings, but I would say that, at most, there are still only about 10% of the people around those places who would normally be there.
Usually, we will brave the crowds once during the season. When we finally decide to do it, we have to grit our teeth and just dive in.
You end up with a selective memory of the experience. We try and remember the lights and how beautiful everything looked over the heads of the dense throng of people, and we try to forget all of the pushing and shoving and unpleasantness around it.
This year, I’ve been drawn back to these places several times, because they really feel like they belong to New Yorkers this year. Nobody else is here. There’s no shoving at all. Tourists are, for the most part, staying home.
To be fair, there are a few hardy souls from other countries who seem to have come to look at the lights and eat outdoors in temperatures that are close to freezing. Even they, though, seem to be different from the usual unthinking visitor who just progress from spot to spot - ticking them off their lists as they go and taking selfies to prove they were there.
This year, those intrepid travelers are here to experience something that will be unlikely to be repeated in the future. At least, that’s the hope.
Rather than winding up as a series of obligatory stops that can be checked off a rushed holiday list, during this holiday season those places seem to be more like symbols of our resilience.
Walking near them, you can see that people have gotten used to keeping their distance from each other. Certainly, there are always people who seem either clueless or actively defiant, but they really do appear to be the rare exceptions rather than the rule.
I’ve gotten pretty adept at looking at the sidewalks ahead and changing direction if things look too crowded. I rarely even notice that I’m doing it these days.
When I drive a long distance, my mind starts to wander after a while. It’s not that I’m not paying attention to the road, it’s that a different part of my mind takes over with the driving, and I can think about other things.
The same thing happens these days out on the city streets. I can navigate through them almost unconsciously - keeping my distance and avoiding groups that have stopped somewhere while my mind is a million miles away.
In photographs it looks like people are flouting the rules. They really aren't all that much. I think it's because you don’t really get a true sense of depth in a picture. Even during the George Floyd protests and the city-wide party the day following the election, people didn’t really clump together.
There does not appear to have been a spike in cases following those events because the virus lacked two essential elements that it needs to transmit - time and proximity. People kept moving. They were outside so there was plenty of air circulation.
Under normal conditions it seems that the virus requires a certain load level matched with about 15 minutes of exposure for it to successfully leap from an infected host to a new one. Outdoors and moving, that rarely happens. Indoors and sitting, it’s a completely different story.
Dr. Anthony Fauci just received the Moderna vaccine on camera.
To the right of the image of the nurse injecting him, is the, now ubiquitous, CNN running tally of COVID-19 cases here and around the world. Over 77 million cases worldwide with about 25% of them right here in the United States. At one time we had lowered our case numbers to the point that we were closer to only 20% of the global cases, but this recent surge has put us right back up to a quarter of them.
Yesterday, we hit 18 million cases.
In a normal year, about 2.8 million people pass away. That’s without COVID-19 as a factor. As of this morning we have lost 319,466 loved ones just to the virus.
There’s actually a United States Death Clock online that ticks up every couple of seconds indicating the speed at which people are dying. It’s somewhat gruesomely mesmerizing.
It is possible this year that the rate of death from causes other than the virus will actually go down. Social distancing measures are not only keeping the virus from transmitting, they are keeping everything else from transmitting, too. Even if only half of the country are respecting those mandates that is still a lot of people being responsible.
On the other hand, with healthcare practitioners so overwhelmed with COVID patients, people with other conditions may not be getting the attention they need. We won’t know for a while what the overall effect of all of this will really be.
The new British version of the virus that has a higher infection rate has still not yet been detected here in the US. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t here yet, it just means that it hasn’t been identified yet. Now 40 countries have banned all transportation from the United Kingdom in an attempt to contain it. That’s ten more than yesterday.
The United States government has still done nothing.
Governor Cuomo has taken matters into his own hands and made agreements with three major carriers who operate between the two countries. Delta, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have all agreed to require that all of their passengers prove that they have a negative COVID test 72 hours before they are allowed to fly into New York.
The Governor cannot ban flights from the UK because that power only lies at the federal level, but he was at least able to do this. It does nothing, of course, to protect against people flying into any other state from London, but it, at least, creates somewhat of a barrier for us here in New York. Other states would be wise to do the same thing in light of the vacuum of leadership we currently have on the national level.
Thanksgiving was a great practice session for the December holidays. All in all, we ended up celebrating with more friends and loved ones than we ever had before. Sharing food with neighbors in the hall and then eating with our families via Zoom calls made for a lovely and memorable day. Christmas will hopefully be the same.
We all seem to have gotten our family gifts out early this year. Fears that the post office would become overwhelmed got us all done early and, except for one package that we are expecting later today, I think that everything has gotten to where it needs to be with our families.
There has been an unfortunate rash of mail robberies in our building recently. People get buzzed in, rummage through the boxes and run off with the ones that they can carry.
The other day, I noticed as I was leaving for a walk that a box had arrived for me from a company called Gilt. When I came back it was gone. I have no idea who it was from.
Gilt is an online clothing site. If anyone reading this sent me something from Gilt, please know that my not thanking you doesn’t mean that I’m not grateful, I just have no idea what it was or who it might have come from. I called Gilt to see if anybody there could track it using my address, but they couldn’t. (That seems ridiculous.)
While unfortunate, it’s not going to ruin the holidays. I’m guessing that whoever took it, needed whatever it was more than I did.
The day is well underway now. It’s brightened up considerably.
Michael has gone out shopping and the cat finished his nap on the bowl and is now sleeping on the bed. Construction work started up outside a few doors down. Horns are honking and I can hear a plane flying overhead.
In other words, it’s a quiet day today here in New York City.
The stimulus bill has passed through both Houses and now needs the President to sign off on it. Will he, I wonder? He is so off the rails these days that nothing would surprise me. We will have to wait and see.
In the meantime, the third to last window needs opening on the Advent calendar.
The day’s a-wastin’. Time to join it.