Thank you, Will. You are a wise and perceptive observer of the world, and this COVID reflection was so true. Watching people absolutely and happily “memory hole” it, and worse, totally distort and demagogue and minimize it, is a symbol of our country’s shallow and selfish and tribal mindset today. I am not bullish on the USA, Trump or no Trump. He has to be gone sometime, right? We are not a serious, sober or moral or thoughtful or kind people, and we have asked for our own demise I am afraid. This is spoken as a 71 year white, straight married male, evangelical Christian, vaccinated 6(or is it 7?) times for COVID, who never voted for the vile one, who lives in Texas of all places. I seriously feel like an engendered species, and like I do not know my fellow citizens especially in my personal world. The cognitive dissonance I see and hear every day from people is disorienting at best and dissociated at worst. Thanks for this today.
It almost seems like I can physically feel the weight of this date coming on the horizon each year. Maybe it's the weather starting to shift into spring mode that does it? Some vague sense of "Nice, warmer weather! Baseball! And what else happened in March?....."
Living through it all in New York City felt, at times, like the closest thing to an apocalypse I ever want to experience. We live on an ambulance route near a massive hospital complex in central Brooklyn. On an average week we'll get ambulance sirens screaming past our house a few times a week. You get used to it, eventually. Just more background city noise. But during the height of the pandemic we had 8-10 ambulances a day. And the dramatic lack of other traffic noise on the streets meant that you could hear them coming and going from much farther away.
The massive memory-holing around the pandemic that's been happening in popular discourse is maybe the least upsetting thing going on these days, but it still sucks.
I managed the anxiety and stress of the post Covid springs by becoming the head coach for my son's little league rec baseball team. It was a fantastic way to stay busy all spring doing something positive and productive, and the group of kids and parents involved were all fairly wonderful.
And on another good note, that same son has decided to get into sportswriting. He's 16, and after listening to the Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur podcast with me for the last few years, he's gone ahead and published his first Substack post. I think it came pretty well for a first-timer, I even managed to learn a few things about Zack Wheeler and arm angles that I didn't know before.
My daughter's 3rd birthday party was the last time I saw any of my friends for months, because it was the weekend before March 11, 2020, so by the following weekend, my school had already had students stay home on Friday while we teachers planned for how the hell we were going to make school work from home on Monday. At her party, there was some chatter about Covid, speculation about what might come, but it still felt very academic, abstract.
Last night we had my daughter's 8th birthday party. Half a dozen of her friends came over, and they had a blast together, and none of them spent a moment thinking about five years earlier, something that can't be more than a fuzzy memory for any of them. I barely thought about it either, but there was a moment, while I listened to a group of 2nd graders screaming Harry Potter curses at one another, when suddenly I felt myself in March of 2020, just before everything changed.
My last normal day was February 29th. I had traveled from Ohio to Glendale, California to attend a benefit concert for autism (Check out the Wild Honey Foundation). One of my friends, Iain Matthews, was performing in this tribute show to the Lovin’ Spoonful, whose three living members would be performing together for the first time in over 20 years.
It was an exciting weekend hanging around during rehearsals and backstage before the show with all of these musicians whose music I loved.
Word had been spreading about an illness in China that was a bit worrisome, but that weekend was all celebration!
Even so, as a physician, I starting paying a bit more attention to the news, and the more I learned, the more alarmed I became.
Heading home on March 2, I started seeing a few masks in the airport and wished I had a few in my bag.
I recall talking to my wife and adult kids and expressing my growing alarm at the news. They laughed at me a called me a worrywart. I admit, that I am usually the worrier in our family, but still…
When I returned to work, I rounded up a half dozen N95 masks that I had saved through the years at work. Our hospital mandated fit testing for these for years and gave us a new one each year. I sent them out to my kids and grandkids and asked them just to keep them handy.
It seemed to accelerate rapidly from there. My oldest grandson was turning 4 on March 15 and a party at a local bounce house was planned. It never happened. I remember how broken hearted I was when I heard him say his party had been cancelled because of “my germs”. Try to explain a pandemic to a 4 year old!!!
I tried to get my wife to leave and go live with one of my sons. I was terrified I’d bring something home from work and make her ill. Thank God she refused to go. I wouldn’t have survived it without her.
She didn’t leave the house for 3 months. Since I had to be out in it, I did all of the shopping etc. I remember early on taking off my scrubs before coming inside and taking them straight down to the washer so she didn’t have to touch them in case it could be transmitted by touch.
The hardest part was not seeing my children and grandchildren. It was weeks before a day arrived when I heard some rustling around in my back yard and looked to see my son, daughter in law and two grandsons standing in our back yard. Although we didn’t hug, just seeing their faces reduced me to tears.
We ultimately agreed to shrink our circles as much as possible and begin seeing each other and having physical contact again. I was still terrified I’d make someone sick because of my exposures at the hospital but I was exceedingly vigilant in taking all of the precautions needed to prevent that. Being able to hold those little boys in my arms and kiss them again was perhaps the greatest joy I’ve ever experienced.
I was actually one of the lucky ones. None of my close family or friends died of the disease, but still the toll was high. I couldn’t follow my breast cancer patients like I used to and I worried what might be missed without my usual vigilance. The sheer numbers of ill and dying patients in the hospital was unprecedented In my 30+ years as a physician I’d never seen anything remotely like it. And, although as a breast surgeon I had little responsibility in their direct care, the cost to my fellow physicians and nursing colleagues who did so selflessly care for them was enormous.
I’ll never forget seeing my critical care nurse friend Emily in the interventional radiology suite helping care for a patient with life threatening bleeding. Emily was amongst the happiest, most positive young woman I’ve known. Despite working in an ICU, she always found the positive in even the most dire circumstances. But that day she looked awful. There was no smile and the stress on her face was devastating. When I asked if she was okay, she just said no and walked away. It was one of the worst moments I had experienced at work to see her so defeated.
And I won’t even talk about the toll the public and political discourse took on these wonderful caregivers who risked their own lives each day to take care of people, many of whom had denied the illness that had hospitalized them and flaunted the precautions they were asked to take.
The costs linger to this day.
And then I will always remember December 23rd, 2020, the day the first vaccines finally arrived. Our VP of nursing at the hospital knew how much the pandemic had affected my life and the emotional toll it had taken. To prepare for the mass vaccinations they planned, there would be a trial run of a few people to be sure their process would be efficient. She asked if I’d like to be one of the trial patients.
I walked into the auditorium from where the vaccines would be distributed and rolled up my sleeve and became the first person at our facility to get the vaccine. It was another of many times that I cried during the pandemic. It felt like finally there might be some light. It was an answer to many, many prayers.
It’s easy to forget those times, but we can not afford to forget what it cost us.
Let’s never forget the many families, our friends and neighbors, whose dinner tables are smaller because of those that were lost.
We can not allow our public health services to be dismantled and our trust and faith in science and medicine to be weakened.
If we do, this will happen again.
So let’s celebrate the fact that vaccines finally helped us to get to a point where this disease is manageable. Let’s celebrate the brave and selfless caregivers (my colleagues) who stood in the front lines and fought to help others even in face of significant personal risks.
We owe it to them and ourselves to do all we can to prevent this from happening again.
Your post brought back memories I’d hidden away. One, surprised and saddened me. My family is full of healthcare workers. They were all on the west coast when the pandemic broke out. We had moved to Georgia and, after 15 years, had decided to go home. We missed our family and travel was not as easy or much fun as it had been. I was terrified for my granddaughter and daughter who were both involved with direct patient care. We texted daily. Things just got worse and worse. One morning the news station I was watching posted a picture of the hospital where my daughter worked. Hanging from the entrance was a banner stating simply “Heroes work here”. It made me cry to see their sacrifice honored. I sent the picture to my daughter. Her response was “oh no. That’s like putting a target on our backs”. I asked her what she meant and she told me she and other healthcare workers had been spit at, pushed around and followed to their cars as they left the hospital by people screaming that the healthcare workers spread the disease. Now I was really frightened and so disappointed in people. How could they not appreciate that hospital and the people who gave their all to help them?
And then that wonderful vaccine arrived. That was the turning point.
My loved ones survived, though they all got Covid. We lost lots of close friends. Our move was delayed until July 2022. My husband has leukemia so we couldn’t travel until his doctor gave the all clear.
We’ve been back in California for three years. My family still work in healthcare. My granddaughter is an ICU nurse. She is amazing. I’m so proud of her. She’s been honored several times by the hospital and patients she’s taken care of. My daughter has transitioned out of direct patient care but still works at the hospital. Their dedication to helping others never diminished even when it was not appreciated.
Unfortunately we have a group in power of our destiny who are incompetent and ignorant. This is truly frightening.
I will say that I have truly loved reading many of the stories below, and in emails sent to me, of memories from this time five years ago, and lessons learned (and not learned) in the years since. Thank you all for them.
As always, thank you, Mr Leitch. March 11, 2020 happened to be my 50th birthday.
I have been divorced, helped care for my stepfather and mother as they died slowly one year apart, seen my oldest son struggle with college (leaving it at that) and lost more friendships than would have seemed possible on 3/10/20.
There's more. Not much of it's better than the above. It's a sunny day today, though.
My daughter was working at CNN in NYC as an AP and loving it when Covid hit. They had big layoffs as a consequence, and five years later she and many of her colleagues still have trouble finding work as the entire media industry was similarly affected. Plus we ended up with Trump and his dementors.
Man all this stuff hits close to home. Our third kid was born 3/30/20. Our angry, colicky, only-way-to-soothe-her-was-aggressively-rocking her baby. I had mornings where I would "wake up" with 5,000 steps on my watch from walking around the house in circles in the middle of the night waving her wildly to keep her quiet as the other kids slept. 6am walks seeing the sun rise with her just wailing because all she did was cry. I look back at Covid and sometimes all I think about is just how difficult she was. Candidly, she's still 100 times harder to parent than the other two.
And at the same time......I taught the other two kids how to ride bikes during that time. I taught my son how to read. We had some real adventures. I had 12 weeks off for parental leave and truly made some great memories with the big kids. I had also just made partner at my law firm and had zero job security. There were some legitimately great moments.
But overall it feels incredibly memory-holed. Except every once in a while I'll read something like this, really feel what it was like, and get deeply emotional. I'll never know how much of me is changed because of the pandemic vs. the little hellion of a baby, but I know I'm not the same as I was before that time.
Well done, Will. Thanks for linking to DWW's piece, too.
I think a lot about the early days of the pandemic. Good and bad memories.
Fear. In the early stages, I wore plastic gloves to pump gas and showered after going to the grocery store. I left Amazon packages outside for 24 hours after they arrived. I masked up, everywhere. I bought a deep freezer and put it in my basement, stocking it with food. I hoarded canned goods, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies.
We missed seeing my wife's parents who live nearby. I'm not sure her father ever totally recovered from a year + in relatively isolation. Her parents missed a year of watching my boys' play baseball, soccer, and basketball. They will never get that year back.
There was good, too. As so many have said, though, life seemed to slow down that spring, summer, and fall of 2020. My boys were home from school, of course. We played basketball across the street every day for "gym class." My wife and I competed against my boys in a variety of events (H-O-R-S-E, Connect Four, Hearts, etc.) in the "Parent-Children Olympics" (scores kept on a white board and WWE style championship belts awarded). I played John Coltrane for my younger son, then 8 years old, and we discussed him for "music class."
My older son, then 12, began running with me. At 16 +, he's one of the best cross country runners in the state now. He and I read the His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman), separately, a chapter or two at time, and discussed what we had read during and after our daily runs. I'll remember those discussion forever, as while we're avid readers, we don't read much fantasy or science fiction.
That August, we spent a week in a cabin in Monteagle, TN, one of our favorite places in the world. Just us. Everything slowed down. We had more time together as a family. We weren't as rushed. Neighbors were outside in our Nashville neighborhood, walking or biking.
Bill Raftery's tariff comment...That would come off so much differently if it was a college football announcer saying it, but they probably wouldn't say it in the first place. I spent basically all of halftime thinking about that for some reason.
I remember the circumstances. I had just got a cheque for my trip to Slovenia for the Paralympic table tennis trials and Open tournament (I sent it back) I had to cancel payments and reservations (I don't think I got all my money back). I remember watching the SheBelives Cup that night, which was the last sporting event until July. A Big 10 basketball coach threw up on the court that night, the next morning 15 minutes before the noon game, they canceled the tournament. By that weekend, everything was canceled. I didn't leave my house for anything until July. I still remember the daily newscasts that were done from reporters homes. A friend lost her parents within 36 hours of each other. A friend's parents cottage - in Ontario - alarm went off and the power company finally turned off the noise - and sent the bill to the parents. I haven't been to Windsor since November 2019. My dad died four years ago.
After work on March 11, 2020, I drove from my office in Hartford to my friend's apartment in Stamford to attend the Big East Tournament the next day with another of our college roommates who lived in NJ and would meet us there. The Big East was among the last conferences to cancel, and announced that night that they would not be allowing fans in, but already being in Stamford, we decided to meet our friend from NJ anyways to go out drinking in NYC and watch the games from a bar.
The morning Metro North train and the bar that we went to were very noticeably not crowded. The tournament was cancelled at halftime of the first game.
For a few days in late February or early March, the NY Times pages were filled with breathless coverage of a man who lived in New Rochelle and commuted to Manhattan who was one of the first covid patients. He was never identified by name, there was speculation on where he might have been and where others may have been infected. A few week later, the NYT articles were about how refrigerated trucks were being brought in because the hospitals did not have enough room for the dead bodies.
I have so many weird memories from that year. The weekly parade of assholes protesting against lockdowns (I lived a half mile way from the governor's residence at the time.) Driving to breweries an hour away to pick up beer to go because i had nothing better to do. Running more often and longer until I had to dial it back because of a sore achilles. The zoom happy hours. The news at our Thanksgiving dinner outdoors that my sister (an APRN) expected to get the vaccine within a month.
Ultimately things turned out well for me. I only have to commute into the office twice a week (instead of all five, every week.) I met my wife, got married, and moved two 3 new places much better than the outdated apartment where i was living alone in 2020.
2020 was a horrible year. The worst thing about it was that it happened during the re-election year of a totally self-centered incompetent president. He was afraid that the virus would affect his re-election chances so he down played it the best he could. His voters responded by blaming the public health experts for lying about it. I live in a town in rural Georgia. A significant percentage of the shoppers in Lowe's and Kroger and Wal-Mart were wearing "Let's Go Brandon" hats and shirts but no masks and mocking those of us that did wear masks.
The irony is that if Trump had realized that the public that weren't part of his MAGA cult would not blame him for the virus but would instead reward him for smart, science based leadership in controlling its effect. He may have won those swing voters if he showed competent leadership in the face of a crises.
Thank you, Will. You are a wise and perceptive observer of the world, and this COVID reflection was so true. Watching people absolutely and happily “memory hole” it, and worse, totally distort and demagogue and minimize it, is a symbol of our country’s shallow and selfish and tribal mindset today. I am not bullish on the USA, Trump or no Trump. He has to be gone sometime, right? We are not a serious, sober or moral or thoughtful or kind people, and we have asked for our own demise I am afraid. This is spoken as a 71 year white, straight married male, evangelical Christian, vaccinated 6(or is it 7?) times for COVID, who never voted for the vile one, who lives in Texas of all places. I seriously feel like an engendered species, and like I do not know my fellow citizens especially in my personal world. The cognitive dissonance I see and hear every day from people is disorienting at best and dissociated at worst. Thanks for this today.
It almost seems like I can physically feel the weight of this date coming on the horizon each year. Maybe it's the weather starting to shift into spring mode that does it? Some vague sense of "Nice, warmer weather! Baseball! And what else happened in March?....."
Living through it all in New York City felt, at times, like the closest thing to an apocalypse I ever want to experience. We live on an ambulance route near a massive hospital complex in central Brooklyn. On an average week we'll get ambulance sirens screaming past our house a few times a week. You get used to it, eventually. Just more background city noise. But during the height of the pandemic we had 8-10 ambulances a day. And the dramatic lack of other traffic noise on the streets meant that you could hear them coming and going from much farther away.
The massive memory-holing around the pandemic that's been happening in popular discourse is maybe the least upsetting thing going on these days, but it still sucks.
I managed the anxiety and stress of the post Covid springs by becoming the head coach for my son's little league rec baseball team. It was a fantastic way to stay busy all spring doing something positive and productive, and the group of kids and parents involved were all fairly wonderful.
And on another good note, that same son has decided to get into sportswriting. He's 16, and after listening to the Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur podcast with me for the last few years, he's gone ahead and published his first Substack post. I think it came pretty well for a first-timer, I even managed to learn a few things about Zack Wheeler and arm angles that I didn't know before.
Check it out, if that seems interesting to you.
https://open.substack.com/pub/augustholdenrichardson/p/what-to-expect-this-year-and-way?r=103zl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false'
Subscribed!
My daughter's 3rd birthday party was the last time I saw any of my friends for months, because it was the weekend before March 11, 2020, so by the following weekend, my school had already had students stay home on Friday while we teachers planned for how the hell we were going to make school work from home on Monday. At her party, there was some chatter about Covid, speculation about what might come, but it still felt very academic, abstract.
Last night we had my daughter's 8th birthday party. Half a dozen of her friends came over, and they had a blast together, and none of them spent a moment thinking about five years earlier, something that can't be more than a fuzzy memory for any of them. I barely thought about it either, but there was a moment, while I listened to a group of 2nd graders screaming Harry Potter curses at one another, when suddenly I felt myself in March of 2020, just before everything changed.
My last normal day was February 29th. I had traveled from Ohio to Glendale, California to attend a benefit concert for autism (Check out the Wild Honey Foundation). One of my friends, Iain Matthews, was performing in this tribute show to the Lovin’ Spoonful, whose three living members would be performing together for the first time in over 20 years.
It was an exciting weekend hanging around during rehearsals and backstage before the show with all of these musicians whose music I loved.
Word had been spreading about an illness in China that was a bit worrisome, but that weekend was all celebration!
Even so, as a physician, I starting paying a bit more attention to the news, and the more I learned, the more alarmed I became.
Heading home on March 2, I started seeing a few masks in the airport and wished I had a few in my bag.
I recall talking to my wife and adult kids and expressing my growing alarm at the news. They laughed at me a called me a worrywart. I admit, that I am usually the worrier in our family, but still…
When I returned to work, I rounded up a half dozen N95 masks that I had saved through the years at work. Our hospital mandated fit testing for these for years and gave us a new one each year. I sent them out to my kids and grandkids and asked them just to keep them handy.
It seemed to accelerate rapidly from there. My oldest grandson was turning 4 on March 15 and a party at a local bounce house was planned. It never happened. I remember how broken hearted I was when I heard him say his party had been cancelled because of “my germs”. Try to explain a pandemic to a 4 year old!!!
I tried to get my wife to leave and go live with one of my sons. I was terrified I’d bring something home from work and make her ill. Thank God she refused to go. I wouldn’t have survived it without her.
She didn’t leave the house for 3 months. Since I had to be out in it, I did all of the shopping etc. I remember early on taking off my scrubs before coming inside and taking them straight down to the washer so she didn’t have to touch them in case it could be transmitted by touch.
The hardest part was not seeing my children and grandchildren. It was weeks before a day arrived when I heard some rustling around in my back yard and looked to see my son, daughter in law and two grandsons standing in our back yard. Although we didn’t hug, just seeing their faces reduced me to tears.
We ultimately agreed to shrink our circles as much as possible and begin seeing each other and having physical contact again. I was still terrified I’d make someone sick because of my exposures at the hospital but I was exceedingly vigilant in taking all of the precautions needed to prevent that. Being able to hold those little boys in my arms and kiss them again was perhaps the greatest joy I’ve ever experienced.
I was actually one of the lucky ones. None of my close family or friends died of the disease, but still the toll was high. I couldn’t follow my breast cancer patients like I used to and I worried what might be missed without my usual vigilance. The sheer numbers of ill and dying patients in the hospital was unprecedented In my 30+ years as a physician I’d never seen anything remotely like it. And, although as a breast surgeon I had little responsibility in their direct care, the cost to my fellow physicians and nursing colleagues who did so selflessly care for them was enormous.
I’ll never forget seeing my critical care nurse friend Emily in the interventional radiology suite helping care for a patient with life threatening bleeding. Emily was amongst the happiest, most positive young woman I’ve known. Despite working in an ICU, she always found the positive in even the most dire circumstances. But that day she looked awful. There was no smile and the stress on her face was devastating. When I asked if she was okay, she just said no and walked away. It was one of the worst moments I had experienced at work to see her so defeated.
And I won’t even talk about the toll the public and political discourse took on these wonderful caregivers who risked their own lives each day to take care of people, many of whom had denied the illness that had hospitalized them and flaunted the precautions they were asked to take.
The costs linger to this day.
And then I will always remember December 23rd, 2020, the day the first vaccines finally arrived. Our VP of nursing at the hospital knew how much the pandemic had affected my life and the emotional toll it had taken. To prepare for the mass vaccinations they planned, there would be a trial run of a few people to be sure their process would be efficient. She asked if I’d like to be one of the trial patients.
I walked into the auditorium from where the vaccines would be distributed and rolled up my sleeve and became the first person at our facility to get the vaccine. It was another of many times that I cried during the pandemic. It felt like finally there might be some light. It was an answer to many, many prayers.
It’s easy to forget those times, but we can not afford to forget what it cost us.
Let’s never forget the many families, our friends and neighbors, whose dinner tables are smaller because of those that were lost.
We can not allow our public health services to be dismantled and our trust and faith in science and medicine to be weakened.
If we do, this will happen again.
So let’s celebrate the fact that vaccines finally helped us to get to a point where this disease is manageable. Let’s celebrate the brave and selfless caregivers (my colleagues) who stood in the front lines and fought to help others even in face of significant personal risks.
We owe it to them and ourselves to do all we can to prevent this from happening again.
Your post brought back memories I’d hidden away. One, surprised and saddened me. My family is full of healthcare workers. They were all on the west coast when the pandemic broke out. We had moved to Georgia and, after 15 years, had decided to go home. We missed our family and travel was not as easy or much fun as it had been. I was terrified for my granddaughter and daughter who were both involved with direct patient care. We texted daily. Things just got worse and worse. One morning the news station I was watching posted a picture of the hospital where my daughter worked. Hanging from the entrance was a banner stating simply “Heroes work here”. It made me cry to see their sacrifice honored. I sent the picture to my daughter. Her response was “oh no. That’s like putting a target on our backs”. I asked her what she meant and she told me she and other healthcare workers had been spit at, pushed around and followed to their cars as they left the hospital by people screaming that the healthcare workers spread the disease. Now I was really frightened and so disappointed in people. How could they not appreciate that hospital and the people who gave their all to help them?
And then that wonderful vaccine arrived. That was the turning point.
My loved ones survived, though they all got Covid. We lost lots of close friends. Our move was delayed until July 2022. My husband has leukemia so we couldn’t travel until his doctor gave the all clear.
We’ve been back in California for three years. My family still work in healthcare. My granddaughter is an ICU nurse. She is amazing. I’m so proud of her. She’s been honored several times by the hospital and patients she’s taken care of. My daughter has transitioned out of direct patient care but still works at the hospital. Their dedication to helping others never diminished even when it was not appreciated.
Unfortunately we have a group in power of our destiny who are incompetent and ignorant. This is truly frightening.
I will say that I have truly loved reading many of the stories below, and in emails sent to me, of memories from this time five years ago, and lessons learned (and not learned) in the years since. Thank you all for them.
As always, thank you, Mr Leitch. March 11, 2020 happened to be my 50th birthday.
I have been divorced, helped care for my stepfather and mother as they died slowly one year apart, seen my oldest son struggle with college (leaving it at that) and lost more friendships than would have seemed possible on 3/10/20.
There's more. Not much of it's better than the above. It's a sunny day today, though.
And sunny days still, and always will, count.
Yeah, I finally gave up on the squirrels.
My daughter was working at CNN in NYC as an AP and loving it when Covid hit. They had big layoffs as a consequence, and five years later she and many of her colleagues still have trouble finding work as the entire media industry was similarly affected. Plus we ended up with Trump and his dementors.
Man all this stuff hits close to home. Our third kid was born 3/30/20. Our angry, colicky, only-way-to-soothe-her-was-aggressively-rocking her baby. I had mornings where I would "wake up" with 5,000 steps on my watch from walking around the house in circles in the middle of the night waving her wildly to keep her quiet as the other kids slept. 6am walks seeing the sun rise with her just wailing because all she did was cry. I look back at Covid and sometimes all I think about is just how difficult she was. Candidly, she's still 100 times harder to parent than the other two.
And at the same time......I taught the other two kids how to ride bikes during that time. I taught my son how to read. We had some real adventures. I had 12 weeks off for parental leave and truly made some great memories with the big kids. I had also just made partner at my law firm and had zero job security. There were some legitimately great moments.
But overall it feels incredibly memory-holed. Except every once in a while I'll read something like this, really feel what it was like, and get deeply emotional. I'll never know how much of me is changed because of the pandemic vs. the little hellion of a baby, but I know I'm not the same as I was before that time.
Well done, Will. Thanks for linking to DWW's piece, too.
I think a lot about the early days of the pandemic. Good and bad memories.
Fear. In the early stages, I wore plastic gloves to pump gas and showered after going to the grocery store. I left Amazon packages outside for 24 hours after they arrived. I masked up, everywhere. I bought a deep freezer and put it in my basement, stocking it with food. I hoarded canned goods, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies.
We missed seeing my wife's parents who live nearby. I'm not sure her father ever totally recovered from a year + in relatively isolation. Her parents missed a year of watching my boys' play baseball, soccer, and basketball. They will never get that year back.
There was good, too. As so many have said, though, life seemed to slow down that spring, summer, and fall of 2020. My boys were home from school, of course. We played basketball across the street every day for "gym class." My wife and I competed against my boys in a variety of events (H-O-R-S-E, Connect Four, Hearts, etc.) in the "Parent-Children Olympics" (scores kept on a white board and WWE style championship belts awarded). I played John Coltrane for my younger son, then 8 years old, and we discussed him for "music class."
My older son, then 12, began running with me. At 16 +, he's one of the best cross country runners in the state now. He and I read the His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman), separately, a chapter or two at time, and discussed what we had read during and after our daily runs. I'll remember those discussion forever, as while we're avid readers, we don't read much fantasy or science fiction.
That August, we spent a week in a cabin in Monteagle, TN, one of our favorite places in the world. Just us. Everything slowed down. We had more time together as a family. We weren't as rushed. Neighbors were outside in our Nashville neighborhood, walking or biking.
Five years. It's hard to believe.
Loved this. I think about the time we all had that we wouldn't have had otherwise a lot.
Bill Raftery's tariff comment...That would come off so much differently if it was a college football announcer saying it, but they probably wouldn't say it in the first place. I spent basically all of halftime thinking about that for some reason.
I prefer to focus on Benetti's Lumon joke ...
I remember the circumstances. I had just got a cheque for my trip to Slovenia for the Paralympic table tennis trials and Open tournament (I sent it back) I had to cancel payments and reservations (I don't think I got all my money back). I remember watching the SheBelives Cup that night, which was the last sporting event until July. A Big 10 basketball coach threw up on the court that night, the next morning 15 minutes before the noon game, they canceled the tournament. By that weekend, everything was canceled. I didn't leave my house for anything until July. I still remember the daily newscasts that were done from reporters homes. A friend lost her parents within 36 hours of each other. A friend's parents cottage - in Ontario - alarm went off and the power company finally turned off the noise - and sent the bill to the parents. I haven't been to Windsor since November 2019. My dad died four years ago.
Counterpoint:
https://archive.ph/GFxWf
After work on March 11, 2020, I drove from my office in Hartford to my friend's apartment in Stamford to attend the Big East Tournament the next day with another of our college roommates who lived in NJ and would meet us there. The Big East was among the last conferences to cancel, and announced that night that they would not be allowing fans in, but already being in Stamford, we decided to meet our friend from NJ anyways to go out drinking in NYC and watch the games from a bar.
The morning Metro North train and the bar that we went to were very noticeably not crowded. The tournament was cancelled at halftime of the first game.
For a few days in late February or early March, the NY Times pages were filled with breathless coverage of a man who lived in New Rochelle and commuted to Manhattan who was one of the first covid patients. He was never identified by name, there was speculation on where he might have been and where others may have been infected. A few week later, the NYT articles were about how refrigerated trucks were being brought in because the hospitals did not have enough room for the dead bodies.
I have so many weird memories from that year. The weekly parade of assholes protesting against lockdowns (I lived a half mile way from the governor's residence at the time.) Driving to breweries an hour away to pick up beer to go because i had nothing better to do. Running more often and longer until I had to dial it back because of a sore achilles. The zoom happy hours. The news at our Thanksgiving dinner outdoors that my sister (an APRN) expected to get the vaccine within a month.
Ultimately things turned out well for me. I only have to commute into the office twice a week (instead of all five, every week.) I met my wife, got married, and moved two 3 new places much better than the outdated apartment where i was living alone in 2020.
2020 was a horrible year. The worst thing about it was that it happened during the re-election year of a totally self-centered incompetent president. He was afraid that the virus would affect his re-election chances so he down played it the best he could. His voters responded by blaming the public health experts for lying about it. I live in a town in rural Georgia. A significant percentage of the shoppers in Lowe's and Kroger and Wal-Mart were wearing "Let's Go Brandon" hats and shirts but no masks and mocking those of us that did wear masks.
The irony is that if Trump had realized that the public that weren't part of his MAGA cult would not blame him for the virus but would instead reward him for smart, science based leadership in controlling its effect. He may have won those swing voters if he showed competent leadership in the face of a crises.
Good stuff, as always. And excellent piece re US as global sports villain.