I want to remember…

…the guy who was sitting outside the gas station convenience store with his car door open. He was still masked, meticulously wiping down the interior of his driver’s seat area. It seems silly now, preemptively disinfecting your car after a brief trip inside for snacks and travel incidentals. But it was early 2020. The CDC had just changed course, told us to start masking after they’d been telling us, “Don’t bother masking.”  We didn’t know much yet. The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth thundered in our ears, as if for the first time. There was no way of knowing the rest of the symphony would be far less special

I want to remember…

…me working from home for nine months, but never going out, unaware how unhygienic I was becoming. Yet even as I grew filthier in my filthiness, I meticulously wiped down the mailbox and doorknob, and the inside of the doorframe, probably even the mail I’d brought in. Then I left the mail unopened and untouched near the door for a day or two before daring to open it. I would wipe down the kitchen and bathroom counters intermittently, whenever my anxiety rose up like scattered showers moving over the desert. Wiping down surfaces this way seemed advisable, based on what little we as a society knew. Still, no one but me had been in the apartment for weeks. It seems silly now, but it was early 2020. We were like 2016 Democrats, praying to the grinning gods of polling, in the bright warmth of a spring day.

How little we knew.
How little we know.
How will I ever remember?

…the Starbucks barista who opened the drive-thru window, saw me in my car, and frowned through slack-jawed fear. She knew my face well but had, until this moment, only ever seen me inside the store. I was an in-store regular, like Norm-in-Cheers regular. To see me retreat to the drive-thru must have been a bitter wake-up. Icing on the top of a Fauci press conference cupcake—comforting, until the internalizing begins. It was late in early-2020. Our bustle-and-chuckle preparations died beneath the roar of a Napoleonic cannonade. We looked across the field at an army marching toward us, steady, unavoidable, merciless. We stopped hoping to dodge bullets. We started hoping for superficial wounds.

Lord, let me never stop caring, though now I’ve tasted plague. Let me never banish caution. Let me never drink the cup of devil-may-care. Mostly, never let me suppose we have won a damn thing since 2020. This beat us. Lived or died, it beat each and every one of us. But if nothing else…

let me remember.