Brave New World
For the past 18 months, I’ve been home a lot more than usual.
And by usual, I mean in the before times, when there wasn’t a pandemic.
I used to go on vacations, sometimes involving an airplane. I used to travel for work, negotiate the sameness of conference hotels in a variety of cities, meet with clients at their offices.
I used to go to concerts. Restaurants. Stores.
And then … well, you know.
Having had some serious health issues in the past, and being an all-round cautious sort of person, I went to ground. Pulled up the drawbridge, arranged to have the groceries delivered, and stopped coloring my hair. Signed up for several new streaming services to entertain myself, and transferred all my work meetings to Zoom.
Roll forward almost two years, and now I’m blessed — that is, twice vaccinated. Which means my hairdresser is back in business, and I’ve even booked a couple of work meetings that involve face to face encounters. With elbow bumps of course, not handshakes. But baby steps.
And what I’ve noticed, out there in the real world, is that things have changed.
They’ve knocked familiar buildings down, and replaced them with new ones.
Built so many more bike lanes, and started building an extension to the subway.
Somebody finally filled in the pothole that was on that street … forever?
Several of my favorite restaurants have closed, while others have opened up garden patios to provide customers with great food and good ventilation.
Stores that were neighbourhood fixtures are now boarded up.
Other businesses have polite signs up, about masks, vaccine passport checks, hand sanitizer availability and occupancy limits. The new normal is oddly welcoming: lots of comfortable references to the shared challenge and the shared solutions. And yet.
Over by the art gallery, on the public square, there are a rag-tag bunch of unmasked demonstrators harassing passers-by with passionate assertions of their “rights” and need for “freedom”. Not much mention of responsibilities to others or gratitude to essential workers. Has isolation nurtured selfishness?
It’s a whole new city out there. Time to put my mask on and learn the new lay of the land.
