Two years in…
I am sitting in a rehearsal studio.
While the snow swirls around in the gray outside, we are inside working on a new play.
I tested myself at home this morning and uploaded the results on a COVID questionnaire. When I got here, my temperature was taken, and I was given a new mask to wear for the day. All of it was expected and not even worthy of comment.
When do we declare the COVID pandemic over? Forty years in, the AIDS pandemic is far from being over, but we don’t think of it in those terms anymore. AIDS is something that we all navigate on some level or another, but probably don’t think about nearly as much as we did in the 1980s when it began. The same thing is starting to happen with this.
Certainly, there are people close to me who still seem consumed by anxiety regarding the virus, but there are also others who appear to not give it a thought. For me, I would say that I continue to be aware of it, but I have gotten so used to the rituals around it - mask-wearing, testing, social distancing - that I rarely consciously consider it. I don’t need to be reminded to social distance; my body now does it automatically. I sometimes walk out of a store without being able to remember when I put my mask on to go in. When just walking, I don’t wear a mask unless it’s cold. When the temperature hovers near freezing, a good mask keeps my face gloriously warm. My mask comes on and off without my needing to monitor it.
In Virginia last week to attend my aunt’s funeral, I walked through her town trying to remember what it had been like when I was a kid. A million years ago, downtown Lynchburg was not a place where anybody went. Stores were boarded up and there was no real reason to ever go there. These days, downtown Lynchburg has a thriving arts community and many of the old industrial buildings have been beautifully restored. New and trendy restaurants have popped up throughout the area as have art galleries and boutiques.
In one of the newer galleries, I talked with a photographer who had moved down there from New York some years prior. I walked in wearing a mask, but nobody else in there was. She and I got to talking and she asked me how New York was doing. I told her that while it seemed to be coming back, there were still no throngs of office workers and not nearly the same number of tourists that had once been here. She said that as long as the mask and vaccine mandates were in place that nobody would come. Why would they?
I think that for those of us living here, none of the protocols seems like a hardship. I get asked for my vax card and ID several times a day. I don’t even think about it. For this person, however, having to do that would be something that ruined her trip.
She works alone in her studio and does not need to deal with anything near the level of population that I encounter every day in the city. She, however, didn’t see that there was a difference in our situations. The pandemic didn’t affect her very much at all. For her, it’s over because, aside from businesses near her shutting down, it never really began.
Like many New Yorkers, I can remember walking past the refrigerated morgue trucks that were parked outside our hospitals. I can remember walking past the tented field hospital that was set up in Central Park. I can remember the endless lines of people out in the street waiting to be tested. I can remember all the people we know who died.
Two years ago, our city changed overnight, and the changes kept coming. As we learned more about the virus, what we did changed to adjust to the new knowledge. It has become harder and harder with each passing day to notice the differences anymore. There was a period when handwritten signs started changing into printed placards with artistically rendered graphic designs. That’s when these new behaviors started to feel permanent. What was new this past week was that signs and demonstrations were not about the virus or masks or vaccines at all. They were all in support of Ukraine.
Decades ago, my mother, sister and I had a ten-hour layover in Frankfurt on our way to somewhere in Africa. It was a national holiday there and most everything was closed. I had done some research and discovered that Goethe’s house was open for sightseeing, so that’s where we went. We had landed in Germany at the crack of dawn without having gotten any sleep at all, but we got into a taxi and headed over.
My mother has a habit when she is confronted with the inexplicable of saying, “huh.” Goethe’s House was many stories tall and each of its many high-ceilinged cavernous rooms looked identical - heavy dark oak furniture with gigantic ceramic beer steins and stags’ heads on the walls. We could barely keep our eyes open, but we trudged up and down countless staircases to a new floor and each time we walked into yet another similar uninteresting room, my mother would say, “huh.” It started us giggling and then laughing. I am shocked that we weren’t kicked out because by the end, we had tears running down our faces. That “huh” has become an ingrained habit of mine, too, as I am sure many of my travel companions will attest.
As horrific as the unfolding events in Ukraine are - and make no mistake, they are truly horrific - it feels like “huh” is our collective response. We are so wrung out from two years of upheaval that we look at the scenes of destruction and we are too tired to let them in. “Huh.” Millions of refugees are flooding into neighboring countries. “Huh.” A children’s hospital is bombed. “Huh.”
Yesterday, President Biden said that the US and our NATO allies would not fight the Russians in Ukraine because that would lead to World War III, “something we must strive to prevent.” President Biden is not given to flights of hyperbole. I think that we can take him at his word on that. In this conflict, he is seeing a possible path to a third World War. “Huh.”
I don’t think that the COVID pandemic is over, but I do think that its novelty has passed. I’ve been counting the days since it started and, while I now realize that I got off on the numbering somewhere along the way anyway, this two-year mark feels like the end of that way of thinking. We are just living our lives now in this new and strange way and COVID is just a part of them in the same way that AIDS and the Spanish flu are. It’s been added to the list of what can ail us, and life goes on. We will probably see isolated spikes in the months and years to come, but I don’t believe any of them, barring some new lethal variant, will be big enough to close us down again.
I will still wear a mask in a crowded subway car or inside a theatre or a store. That’s going to take me a while to get over doing. As summer approaches, however, I will likely stop wearing them at all outdoors. The habit will start to fall away. Our extra tests will end up in the backs of our closets. We will be on to something else.
As we enter year three since it started, let's hope that when we are looking at pictures and reading stories that remind us of what these past two years were like, our collective responses will be, “huh.”
Something else will happen soon enough and most everyone reading this will be lucky enough to still be here to experience it.
"Huh," indeed.
❤️of course you’re in a rehearsal room…🌟🎭agree COVID is not over, me too still following protocols, instinctively.
what a message this war is to me, I am astounded by the strength of people
A silver lining again, amist tragedy
life never ceases to amaze me
So greatful to be alive…❤️