Delta Dawn
(“Delta Variant Blues” was already taken…)
Starting in early June. ago, I developed a singular obsession with making this Summer as “Summery” as possible. We were vaccinated. I would work part-time helping out a friend at her place and still collect unemployment, and we would do everything we couldn’t do last year during the Summer.
I got up early to get to The Green City Market on its opening day, and that was supposed to be just the beginning of “operation carpe diem.”
I kept harking back to a perfect Summer day in 2019, when we’d gone to the Zoo Farm together, (where I got to brush a very large goat) and then gotten Small Cheval cheeseburgers and gone to visit Judy Maxwell’s in Old Town.
One perfect Summer day satisfied in 2019, but this time around, I was pent-up and hungry for everything this Summer might hold.
What I neglected to imagine was the Delta Variant (although the handwriting was on the wall if you were paying attention) and my working full-time again.
Last Summer, watching the lifeguards literally guarding the shore line from swimmers at Montrose Beach, while folks swam unguarded off the nearby jagged rocks was super-depressing, but seeing full lakefront beaches with no hint of caution in play post-Delta spikes was almost equally depressing. Two snapshots of a pandemic not yet over, and evidence that we as people have a great ability to delude ourselves around risk mitigation when we want something badly.
When I visited my Dad in June, for the first time since Covid started, we got to order in fried clams and scallops, and I got to swim in his complex’s charming little pool. Already, I felt like the boxes were being ticked.
if you live in Chicago, taking full advantage of Summer is a collective vibe to begin with, to compensate for the low single digits in January and a Winter that can stretch in either direction to last up to six months, but this year, I, like many Chicagoans, felt the need to overcompensate for our long containment.
I started a list of Summer Bucket List items already accomplished. I’d plunged into the lake. I’d visited the MCA with a friend. We’d eaten plenty of sweet corn and heirloom tomatoes, and we’d attended a beachfront cookout.
Nonetheless, the lazy and carefree vibes got harder to sustain after the Provincetown outbreak, which led to even some vaccinated vacationers being hospitalized.
The Summer I’d dreamed of had an egalitarian vibe, but never underestimate what Chef Ted used to call “The Great American Public.” Not enough folks stepped up to get us to herd immunity, but you’d never guess it looking at the throngs of maskless twinks and twunks heading to Market Days, or the throngs of baseball fans heading to Wrigley Field a block away this weekend.
There’s always been a certain fecklessness in the American DNA, a head strongness, a “Wild West” aesthetic, but in this case, a toxic cocktail of misinformation, political expediency and general ignorance curtailed any chance of a “carefree” National Summer. Collectively, we just couldn’t get it together and pull it off.
Which means that people like Shawn and I, who have followed the rules all along, are back to having to wear a mask and having to approach public spaces warily. Which certainly doesn’t feel very carefree at all…
Bonus Poem!
Closing In
I started
a to-do
list last
night at work,
And at the
end of it,
I wrote,
“Are we
going
to die?”
2.
Projection
is a funny
thing.
And when,
I nearly
lost my
mind,
over leaving
the thyme
garnish
out over night
on Saturday,
I’m maybe
evolved enough,
to acknowledge,
it wasn’t
about the thyme.
3.
I nearly always
take a picture
of the bread
warmer, and
the heat lamps,
and the deep fryer
to reassure
myself on
the CTA home,
that they
are off.
And in fact,
last Sunday,
the heat lamps
weren’t,
when
I checked,
but last night,
I photographed
the long clean
white marble
bar, and the
colorful batched
cocktails in
the fridge,
and the juices
and sodas,
stacked
and faced
on their clean cloth,
on top
of the ice bin.
It felt elegiac,
like “Our Town,”
literal snapshots
of a return
that feels
fleeting.
4.
I did
the closing
math, again
and again,
“Kid A”
blaring from
my phone,
and it would
not add up,
and stuffing
blue cheese olives,
in an empty
restaurant,
I felt
on the verge
of tears, and
again, it was
and wasn’t
about the
paperwork,
or the banal
loneliness
of stuffing
olives in
an empty
restaurant on
a Sunday night.
5.
I reason
that if
I get it now,
I will probably
get some money,
for my birthday,
and could just
afford to quarantine.
I tell
myself
that “breakthrough
cases” don’t
usually lead
to hospitalization,
but read yesterday,
that they can.
I think,
that wasn’t
what we were
told though,
when we
got our shots,
and while
it was
a nice illusion,
on the brink
of my 44th
birthday,
I may have
finally become
“cynical enough,
to keep up…”