tuesday, thirteen december: irresponsible or unfashionable.
So on Sunday I had lunch with an old friend visiting from out of town–we met up at a restaurant in Manhattan, and the whole walk from the subway to the restaurant I kept remembering this band that used to play outside of our apartment in Williamsburg. The last summer in that apartment, this band was out playing on the corner on weekends, sometimes all day. I didn’t mind them, except that they had such a limited set. For the people strolling down Bedford Ave, hearing these guys for five minutes and then moving on, it was pretty pleasant. For the people with the open windows four stories above them, it was rough going with them only having three or four songs. The best song, and the longest, had very long stretches where the lead singer just kept repeating, over and over, “and it’s cold and wet… and it’s cold and wet… AND IT’S COLD AND WET.”
This is obviously a digression.
Anyway, we met up at the restaurant, a quick hug and oh my god how has it been so long, etc. As we sat down I started babbling out some awkwardness–the plan had originally been for Matt and Declan to be with me for lunch, the location chosen because we were triangulating with two of our family holiday traditions (the angel tree at the Met in the morning, Tuba Christmas at Rockefeller Center in the afternoon). I’d emailed that morning, hey change of plans, it’s just going to be me, Declan’s home sick and Matt’s going to stay with him. Hey by the way, I have no symptoms whatsoever and Declan’s tested negative for Covid twice now, but I would totally understand if you wanted to cancel lunch, as they say, an abundance of caution and I’ve got a sick kid in the house. He said no, it’s fine, and so there we were, eating Sichuan on the Upper East Side.
I made a half-hearted joke, as we settled in, about being well past the days where you could give your kid Tylenol and go about your normal day. I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face, so I kept going–we used to do that, you know, and it wasn’t just us, it’s like a running joke with the parents I know, like, can you believe we used to do that. But we did. There were a lot of days when Dec was in daycare where he’d have a fever and we’d just give him some baby Tylenol and pack him up for the day, fingers crossed that he made it through enough of the day that I didn’t have to call out of work again. I never did it if I thought he was, like, sick sick, just when he had some dumb little-kid fever like little kids get. (He ran fevers every time a tooth came in, for instance.) (Also, hi Erica, I’m so sorry.)
Explaining all of this now, in 2022, to a friend who doesn’t have kids, I suddenly worried that I sounded like a sociopath, so I started backtracking a little, like, I know, I know, it was irresponsible to do it then, and now that we’ve been through this Covid reality, I’d never do something like that again. And he kindly interrupts my babble to say, well, was it irresponsible or just unfashionable?
It’s an interesting question.
Do you remember back in the spring of 2020, when medical historians were suddenly very popular and every news outlet had all of these stories about parallels to 1918? And we all kept going, wait, wow, what? Gangs of young men roved the streets of major cities policing “mask slackers,” and the BBC did school by radio for a year, or whatever? And I think we also all kept saying, god, but why have I never heard of this before? Why did this all disappear?
In March and April 2020, it was utterly inconceivable that the trauma of a pandemic would drop out of the public consciousness. In December 2022, it seems vastly more plausible. It already feels a little bit like something that happened to someone else, the refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals, the extremely heated arguments on the neighborhood facebook about whether people who ran in the park were being irresponsible about their exhaled droplets, the constant sirens, clapping at seven pm, waking up at four in the morning wrapped in desperate fear.