Inside

On Friday, March 13, 2020, my life on pause began. Elaine and I went out to eat at our favorite restaurant that night (Thai food) and made a quick run to the supermarket, where I took a photo of an aisle emptied of paper towels and toilet paper. I remember that empty aisle as a sign of strange times. We then drove to play music for services at the Jewish community center (I’m just a fellow traveler) and made a fast exit before the oneg. These were pre-mask times, and I remember how uneasy I felt that night sitting in a restaurant and looking around at the other tables. I remember how uneasy I felt everywhere.

On March 14 I wrote in my datebook: “Inside the house as of today.” Well, more or less. One or the other of us has gone to get take-out from our Thai restaurant every Friday (minus the weeks when they’ve closed for holidays). We’ve shopped for groceries every two weeks, or, now, every three. We’ve made three stocking-up trips to our nearby “beverage depot” (read liquor store). And thank goodness for beverage depots. We played music for friends on Play on Your Porch Day (everyone masked and distanced). We marched in a Black Lives Matter march. We made an urgent, unexpected day-long drive to New Jersey to bring my mom to Illinois to move into an assisted-living residence and did all the necessary legwork to make that move happen. And we’ve taken a walk nearly every day, weather permitting.

It’s been a year of without: without bookstores, without concerts, without movies, without museums, and, most acutely, without our children and grandchildren in three dimensions. But we have ourselves and we have our lives. When we were walking today, I was listening to a This American Life segment about vaccination, and I thought about how many people aren’t here now, as I am, waiting for a shot.

On March 13 last year we made it home a little after 9:00. Now, as then, I am inside in the house.