Here is a time capsule from the Covid-19 plague year for future readers who might be interested in what it was like around these times.
The cold rain has come back, comfort to those who worry about drought, but making it difficult to go outside to take in a little bit of exercise.
Spring has been as slow to come as it has been every year, and since it doesn’t snow here we don’t have the receeding line of old drifts to tell us how much progress we’ve made since the beginning of January.
It’s been the strangest kind of Palm Sunday, switching between three different Masses online this morning, the palm branches blessed to be distributed at some later unspecified time, the story of the Passion oddly resonant with this backdrop of so much suffering and death.
The usual refuge of taking refuge in a book or something on television no longer holds as much appeal as before, with so many shows and so much reading matter piling up and still somehow unsatisfying.
We find a kind of solace in meeting over the internet as millions of other people have discovered, but it’s a nearly uncharted kind of social interaction place still especially with people we have known for decades but only in the face to face fashion or by email.
On the way home today, my train was delayed because of a fatality on the tracks
happening about forty-five minutes before I got on. It was on the other side of
the tracks, someone crossing over the tracks where they should not have been,
possibly a suicide. I was already on a later train than the one I usually took,
because of a late meeting at work, so the delays took me well past twilight into
night. This kind of event is not uncommon on this commuter train line,
occurring once every few months or so, and happening often around relatively
affluent suburbs. Sometimes as on this occasion it’s a pedestrian, sometimes a
car that drives around the gates or somehow gets stuck across the tracks with
an oncoming train.
Almost never does it seem to make sense for me to get off the train when they
open the doors and try to take alternative transportation such as a taxi or ride
sharing, given the kind of congestion in this area around rush hour, and I’m
almost always fortunate enough to have a seat on the trains I take (which was
not the case when I used to commute into San Francisco instead of the other
direction) so the only thing to do is to sit tight and wait until the tie-up
has sorted itself out. This time, the delay was about an hour, about average.
We were mostly standing
still waiting for trains ahead of us to pass through the area of the incident,
where medical first responders and law enforcement and transit officials are
busy following the procedures they each have in place in such cases.
Apocalypse When?
Some people I know are convinced we all have only months to live,
certain that the kind of rhetoric being
hurled around means that nuclear annihilation or maybe biological catastrophe
will take most of us by surprise.
The rules of society in the US have changed so completely we can no
longer count upon collective good will to get us through tough times
and that we’re due for either anarchy or brutal repression. That it’s
self-delusion to fail to recognize the warnings on our screens. As in a big
budget film, survivors of the shock will be thrown into a world where every
choice might decide whether more will live or die, where any shred of
the old social order will be lost.
