Post 562 - January 19, 2024

There’s a stand of American Elms in Central Park that I fell in love with during the pandemic. They stand in orderly rows alongside the Mall, and their long branches twist and bend making them look like dancers.

It’s one of the largest groves of Elms left in the country. In the 1920s a fungus carried by a bark beetle nearly wiped out the trees. 70 million American Elms all across the United States died.

The blight originated in Asia, or so it’s thought. It hid out in beetles that then burrowed into timber that was first exported into Europe and then into North America. By the 1970s, England had lost more than 25 million of its trees and 95% of all the Elms in France perished.

I have now had COVID-19 three times. It affects everyone differently, but the three times that I’ve had it, the symptoms have been the same. It starts with a headache. It’s a very specific headache in a part of my brain that had never hurt before. I didn’t think much about it the first time I got it because it was before the shutdown, and I didn’t know that it was a thing. The second time, though, the minute I felt that throb I was certain that I had it. The third time I didn’t even wonder. All I could think was, “Great. Here we go again.”

In my case, the main illness lasts about five days and then takes maybe an extra month to fully get out of my system. There’s a 36-hour period in the middle that is completely debilitating, but the rest of it is endurable. What I am left with afterward is mostly fatigue that no amount of espresso can overcome.

Several times since my first bout I have gotten a strange flu. It’s respiratory. There’s no headache and the few times I’ve had it, I always tested negative for the virus. The worst part of this new flu is that it lingers. For weeks. I am not a doctor so I can’t say for sure that the two are connected, but they certainly seem to be.

The ubiquitous COVID testing centers are all but gone now. I passed a storefront center on the street yesterday that had a big “for rent” sign in its window. It was empty inside.

When we first started back to work after the shutdown, we had to learn how to navigate through all the testing protocols. How many times a week should we test? When should we wear a mask and when shouldn’t we? Every restroom had a sign posted near the sinks with pictographic instructions on how to wash your hands.

Almost all of that is in the past. There are still stickers on the ground in some places advising us to maintain a six-foot distance from each other but most of them are so worn they’re hard to read.

I find this almost impossible to believe, but we are fast approaching the fourth anniversary of the onset of the shutdown. Having been here in New York as the changes to our lives from the pandemic slowly rolled out, it’s sometimes hard for me to recognize them.

Many restaurants have kept their ancillary outdoor dining spaces. We were all thrilled to eat in them that first year during the winter. Nobody seems to relish huddling around tables in our parkas anymore. Eating in those spaces is now a summertime activity.

Working from home has also taken a bite out of the Food industry. Very few workers are back in the office five days a week. Once or twice, maybe, but people decided they like working from home and that hasn’t changed.

Restaurants were particularly hard hit by the pandemic in terms of labor. People fled from those jobs in droves. That sector, however, has seen the fastest recovery in terms of job numbers. They are still not back to their pre-pandemic levels, but more restaurant workers have returned, or taken jobs for the first time than have those in the retail sector.

Tourism is bouncing back but is not yet at pre-shutdown levels. That may help account for why restaurants are not fully back. There has been an upswing in American visitors to the city and a downswing in foreign visitors.

Yesterday, as I took my first long walk through the city in about a month, I really tried to see what felt different. While there were plenty of tourists out and about, there were no large groups of Chinese people. Chinese tour groups have always been the bane of existence for those of us who needed to be in midtown regularly. They seem to travel in enormous groups and make navigating the sidewalks impossible.

The same thing happens to American tourists in foreign countries, mind you. Americans, who don’t speak the language of wherever it is they happen to be visiting travel in these enormous packs lead by a beleaguered local holding up a colorful umbrella so that they can be easily spotted and followed. The groups are so large that you need to wait until they pass before you can get anywhere.

Michael and I were just in Rome and, the American throngs there, like the Chinese in New York, have also not returned. Those Americans are now probably going to New York instead. They don’t need to swarm together here because they all speak the language and understand the customs. More or less.

I thought I might be imagining things in terms of Chinese tourism, but a quick dive online confirmed it. Chinese tourism is way down. Historically, Chinese tourists stay in New York longer than any other group and spend the most money. The Chinese economy is somewhat in a shambles these days so few there can afford international travel. They, like many Americans here, are choosing to travel closer to home. The US and China just agreed to up the number of flights between our two countries to 24 a week. Pre-pandemic, there were about 340 flights between us and them each week.

Speaking of us and them, the manifestations of racism seem to have changed a bit over the last few years.

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, nearly four years ago now, too, ignited a firestorm in this country. Before we were all shut down, the senseless murder of a person of color would have briefly grabbed some headlines. It would have then been pushed aside by something else, though, like the fashion missteps on the red carpet at some Hollywood event.

In 2020, however, that murder had our full undivided attention. We took to the streets. Manifestos were written. Demands for change were made. Did any of that happen?

Something has changed. At least here in New York City, the story we are being fed is not the same one that it was four years ago. I am sure that it isn’t nearly enough, but there has definitely been a shift.

We are besieged by advertising everywhere we go. Billboards, busses, subway stations, and storefront windows beam a steady stream of imagery at us in such a relentless way that we stop looking at it. We may not be conscious of it, but make no mistake, it’s getting in there.

During my walk yesterday, I decided to look at all the advertising. In every picture I saw throughout the city, there were people of color. The only all-White ad I saw all day was the guy from The Bear wearing Calvin Klein briefs. (He wore them very well, I might add.) Otherwise, White models, if they were shown at all, only appeared in group shots alongside Black, Hispanic, and Asian models. Looking up at all these disparate images, for the first time in my memory, what was being shown to me was what I was seeing on the street around me. For the first time, the two worlds seem to match.

I have always maintained that Barack Obama got elected in large part because of actors like Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert who portrayed great Presidents on TV and helped us get used to the idea. Will & Grace, in turn, normalized gay life in our living rooms to the point that gay marriage became a reality. Now, new shows are flooding the airways with multi-cultural casts. Broadway shows have moved beyond tokenism in their casting into what is starting to be very real integration. I’m not saying it’s perfect yet, there is still a way to go, but our popular culture has always been an important agent of change. And it’s beginning to do just that.

I’ll speak about theatre because that’s the business I know. The Black Lives Matter movement, at least here in New York, opened the door for many people, who had been denied entry and access to the best jobs. It wasn’t easy at first. Some people weren’t ready for it. Either the established folk weren’t ready to accept the influx of new people, or the new people didn’t yet fully have the skills needed to accomplish their jobs. Four years in, some of the people in that first wave have left the business. The work may have been too hard and too demanding. Some, however, excelled and are now fully a part of it and are doing amazing work. That’s how it’s always been. For White people. Some succeeded and some didn’t. White people, however, had a far easier time getting started. Now, maybe those doorways are beginning to open for all of us.

Change is never comfortable, but it doesn’t seem like change any more. It seems normal. What everyone jokingly referred to as the new normal has become simply normal. As I said, we aren’t there yet, but I do think that at least some steps have been taken. What started with an unspeakable tragedy is now something that is starting to turn the ship ever so slightly in a new direction.

The one place where advertising seems to have stayed resolutely the same is along uptown Madison Avenue. The wealthy white consumers who live there are still seeing themselves, and only themselves reflected in their neighborhood retail stores. It was a remarkable enough difference compared to the rest of the city that once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. We aren’t there yet.

My neighbor just got over a case of COVID and her son is in the middle of one. I am sure I will get it again eventually, too. I was trying to figure out when I’d last had it to know whether I could get the booster vaccine yet. Neither Michael nor I could remember. It was so unremarkable when it happened again that I didn’t even note it on my calendar. Finally, Michael remembered a show that we had tickets for in Brooklyn that we couldn’t go to because we’d tested positive. It was September 15 of last year. Success! It’s been exactly four months since then which is how long we are meant to wait after we’ve had it before getting re-jabbed.

New blight-resistant Elms are being planted all over the place. It will take a while before they reach the stature of some of those which still stand in Central Park. Those are over a century and a half old. They were planted by the park’s original architects Frederick Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in 1850.

The Mall leading up to Bethesda Fountain was the only formally designed aspect of the park that its creators included in their overall design. Once built, wealthy people would be dropped off at its downtown entrance near 66^th Street for an afternoon stroll along its shady length up to the fountain at about 73^rd Street. They could then get back into their carriages there and head home.

Statues of literary figures line the Mall’s southern stretch. A new statue dedicated to the pioneers of the Women’s Rights movement was unveiled there in August during the first year of the pandemic. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony didn’t always see eye to eye with Sojourner Truth and yet they are all portrayed there as working together. Stanton claimed that should women not get the vote she wouldn’t support the Black vote.

While I think it’s important to remember that while things weren’t perfect by a long shot, I think that it’s far more important now to see those three women sitting together dedicated to a common goal. After all, while the statue commemorates the past, it was put there to inspire the future.

That stand of American Elms are survivors. I was so inspired by them during the pandemic that they are what I chose to use as the banner for my blog, here on Substack.

They made it this far and so have we.