Lonely No More

Pondering how we collectively will remember 2020 and all things COVID has me thinking about one of my most vivid memories of the early days. I can't find evidence that I wrote it down, so maybe better now than never? It'll be interesting to see if I remember it the same way 10 years from now.

So ... early days. Early in COVID there were a lot of things that were just plain impossible or difficult. I ran into one of them when I decided to build Mila a playhouse for her birthday instead of throwing a party. I initially ordered all of the lumber for said playhouse online and paid for it to be delivered to our house. That cost me a few weeks in the whole project schedule, but it was worth it because remember how we all tried to stay home at first? I was trying to stay home.

But then Lowe's screwed up and the lumber was delivered to a store instead of our house and blah, blah, blah ... it was going to take them WEEKS to fix the whole thing. Or I could just go pick up the lumber that day. Considering that would make it a curb pickup situation, I decided to do that. The only problem was that it wouldn't possibly fit in my SUV, so I needed to rent a truck. Back then, you couldn't rent a truck for an hour from Home Depot because COVID and I couldn't find an hourly rental from U-Haul or any of the alternatives either. Thus, I had to rent one from a traditional car rental place, which led me to having to go to the airport in the middle of a pandemic.

For those who have forgotten how the Pittsburgh airport is arranged, you -have- to go inside to get to the car rental counters. Long story short, I found myself nervously walking through an airport in the middle of a pandemic but I'm not sure why I was nervous because THERE WAS NOBODY THERE. Seriously, there were more people standing outside naked in Antarctica that day than there were in the airport. It was ... weird. So weird. I've been to that airport thousands of times and it isn't that empty at 2:00 am. It was stunningly clean and vacant, much like I suppose it would be in some sort of freaky horror film right as the super scary guy is about to pop out of a restroom to murder you.

ANYWAY. I rented a truck, picked up the wood, dropped it off at home, and it all worked out. But one thing led me to the other thing and I found myself driving through the Robinson shopping area. As in, I drove through the IKEA parking lot and the plaza across from it and YOU GUYS EVERYTHING WAS CLOSED THEN.

It was a ghost town. It was probably 5:00 in the evening on a Saturday when this all went down. At any other time in all of life, those parking lots would have been packed with hustle and bustle. Instead, they were abandoned like some sort of scene out of The Walking Dead. Except that there weren't even zombies groaning in the corner to make things a little less creepy.

It was so quiet.

And so empty.

And the thing I kept thinking was that I wondered what would still be there on the other side. Which stores would survive the closures? Glancing through the windows of TJ Maxx, I wondered how long it would be frozen in time. They had an impressive Easter display at the front of the store, even though Easter was most definitely over at that point. Shopping carts blocked the doors so that looters wouldn't get any bright ideas and just bust in to take the 2' tall tacky Easter Bunny that stood guard over all of the odds and ends candy. Inside the store it was mid March, but outside it was early May and it was so very disconcerting.

And lonely. I think that's the feeling that will endure. Loneliness. Even as we were gathered at home with our loved ones, the world felt lonely because it was so empty.

Now you probably can't drive through those same parking lots in less than 20 minutes because they're probably packed. So much can change in a year. THANKS, SCIENCE.

Always with the Shenanigans

Remembering

Memory is a weird thing, you know? No matter what you do, it slips away like water cupped carefully in your hands. It changes shape and shifts to fill the gaps that call out to be filled, constantly fighting to slip away. There have been a lot of studies looking at the ways we remember but misremember and even more articles written about the shared oddity of collective memories. Here is a recent one that builds on that knowledge about shifting memories and poses the question, "How will we remember the pandemic?"

Blogging every single day, even as events such a pandemic unfolds, adds a new layer to the whole remembering thing. I've captured the memories as they were happening, so I can go back through archives and catch the subtle nuances that have shifted as time has slipped by. I think I tend to remember things I've written a bit more accurately than I would have otherwise, but I can still go back and find an occasional blog post where I'm like, "Huh. I thought that unfolded a little differently."

It's wild.

What's even wilder is that I can already point at some ways the girls are recreating their own experiences with the pandemic. Their ages influence the whole thing, so Alexis' recollection will be more accurate than Mila's. Mila has been largely shielded from the worst of it all. We've lost family members to COVID-19, but she won't remember that because they weren't people who were in her life every day and then suddenly weren't. She was absolutely clueless as the adults struggled through mountains of uncertainty, especially early in the pandemic. Remember when we didn't exactly know how COVID-19 was spread? People were cleaning their groceries and using gallons of hand sanitizer and all sorts of things that turned out to not be the culprit of the worst of it all. Mila had no idea any of that was happening. She was just stuck at home a lot.

Mila is going to remember COVID-19 as this thing that made her wear a mask and attend school via a computer, but I suspect she's going to tell stories as an adult that will paint the pandemic as much more fun than anyone who has lived it in a different way. While some kids will tell a tale of losing someone and having their lives altered forever, I'd bet that Mila's most vivid memory of the whole thing will be the Zoom lunches she had with her friends early on.

There were only a few of them and they all took place in April and May of 2020, but Mila -still- talks about them all of the time and asks to do one again. They were as simple as me giving her a laptop and a Zoom meeting while she sat at the kitchen table and ate lunch with her favorite two friends, but apparently they left a permanent imprint.

I think Mila's overarching pandemic story will be one of missing her friends, but finding ways to still connect with them.

As for Alexis? Well, that kid keeps a journal. She has lived a very different life this past year from that of her sister, but she's captured her thoughts along the way. My money says her recollection will be pretty close to reality.