The Corners of My Mind

A 7-day average of 23 new cases.
That's the weekly Covid-19 average in the county where I live among a million other people, 65 percent of them vaccinated.

That's the lowest average since this whole thing began in March 2020. *

So . . . is this it? Unlikely, with virus variants on the move. But it's a break for now. What a relief!

I ate breakfast with bink inside a busy, crowded restaurant on Sunday--first time.
I wear my mask around the public at work––still the workplace policy, though not everyone follows it. It's hot in the back work areas, so I take it off.

My friend Denise came over yesterday. I hadn't seen her since we walked around the lake late last fall, stopping on a bench for a while, until we got too cold.

We sat on the patio where I'm house sitting and finished an open bottle of Riesling the home-owner had left in the fridge, ate Skittles I found in the back of a cupboard, and talked about the past year.

Denise said she felt tapped out. Both her pre-teen kids had gotten Covid this spring, luckily mildly (one, almost imperceptibly), but still frighteningly.  Her job in the public schools is tough, and the administration is slip-shod, unsupportive.

But raggediness aside, for both of us the year confirmed and strengthened our core belief in the power of small, personal acts.
In lockdown, we could see the effects of personal acts radiating outward.
Did you bring groceries to someone?
Did someone bring groceries to you?

Denise said the girlette calendar from me cheers her up. I'm glad I made that.

A more dramatic example of the impact of a small, personal act:
Darnella Frazier, the seventeen year old in blue sweatpants (center, below, with her little niece in the LOVE T-shirt), filming on her phone Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd.
She was not a professional, she was not a journalist, she was a kid who thought, This isn't right.

Above image from Mpls police bodycam, via NPR

The man holding the other man back. . . I've heard some of my coworkers who are Black men discuss this––would they have rushed the four cops?

Would I?

Would you?

The thing is, the cops do this sort of thing all the time in this neighborhood, full of poverty and its attending demons. [I live a mile away, am house sitting four blocks away--on the other side, though, of the poverty watershed.]
Just usually the victim doesn't die. How do you judge when it's worth risking your own safety? 'Cause everyone knows, those cops will hurt you.
______________________

It's not just personal acts that impressed Denise and me––we were both impressed by science and public health.
This year proves an entire population can change direction, adopt new behaviors––and pretty quickly too!
Imperfect but impressive.

We both think the recipe for (and doses of) the vaccine should be shared freely with the whole world.
None of us is safe until the world is. This is not a Christmas song, this is bugs we're talking about.

“You know that I know how easy you get the virus.”
––The Honeymooners, Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden to his wife, Alice

So... Have we learned anything?
How are we braver? Kinder? Smarter? More traumatized?
We may want to forget it all, but can we? Will we?

"Memories... light the corners of my mind...
Misty water-colored memories, of the way we were."

I am pondering these things in my heart.
__________________

And...
Are we still washing our hands?

I'm sad to think one of these days I'll get a cold or some other virus. I haven't been sick since December 2019, when a virus wiped me out for a week.

There are always new bugs brewing.

The last line of Camus' The Plague:

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books:
that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good;
that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests;
that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves;
and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

____________

*In December 2020, the county recorded the highest number of new Covid cases in a week: 1,750.

A couple months ago, in April, the weekly average was 337 new cases.