This is not really a book-related post.
If you’re a regular reader of Stacked (and if you are, thank you! At times I am not sure anyone reads book blogs anymore), you may have noticed that I haven’t written much here lately. This past twelve months my posts have often defaulted to book lists and short snippets of books I’m currently trying to read (books I usually don’t end up finishing). And in the past month or so, I’ve hardly blogged at all.
We’ve reached such a grim milestone with the pandemic – the United States has hit 500,000 deaths and we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of my city largely shutting down. I know a lot of us will be taking stock of the ways our lives have changed in the past year. I remember a friend speculating in March 2020, when the focus was on “flattening the curve,” if the restaurants would be open and it would be safe enough for us to celebrate her birthday in May. There was some talk of taking bets on the question. Looking back on it now, that conversation seems laughable.
In the past year, I have taken no vacations and have traveled only once outside my immediate area, hopping a plane with an N-95 and a huge amount of trepidation in the fall to help take care of my grandmother for four days. Her 90th birthday celebration with her nearly 100-person family had been cancelled earlier in the year due to the pandemic. The year before the pandemic, I traveled to Michigan, Ireland, and Curacao, plus lots of trips across the huge and beautiful state of Texas. Since March 2020, I have been in to my work office a handful of times. I haven’t set foot inside a restaurant, something I used to do at least once a week. I have yet to meet my niece, who lives far away and will turn one year old soon. Sometimes these realities remind me of the joke I’ve seen across the internet – what are the people whose whole personality is to travel and go to restaurants going to do now that they can’t? Of course that’s not really my whole personality, but I’ve also found that I’m struggling to enjoy the other things I normally do that are pandemic-safe: reading, writing, running, playing video games. I worry how much the pandemic has affected me permanently.
And then there was last week. Texans often get some flak for our inability to withstand cold temperatures, but last week was beyond my imagination, both in terms of the weather and the failure of our infrastructure. It reached one degree Fahrenheit here (that’s -17 Celsius), and we received ice, topped with six inches of snow, topped with some more ice, over several days. As a result of a statewide failure to prioritize the health and safety of Texans by winterizing our power production and distribution systems, 4.5 million people in our state were without power and heat in their homes for up to five days. Many of those then lost water; all of us lost safe water and had to boil for days. People died.
Community members stepped up to help one another, including several of our stellar city councilmembers, and I’d like to say it was inspiring to witness, but it wasn’t really. It was just exhausting. And I’m one of the lucky ones – all my household endured was extreme conservation of energy, a boil water notice, and the constant, unending worry about everyone I know and love in Texas for a week straight. This last is something I have become accustomed to.
Recently, I found myself thinking about what a lie disaster movies are. I’ve had first-hand experience with two very different kinds of disasters recently, and the primary feeling during both is simply: boredom. There are no exciting action sequences featuring daring rescues or fiery showdowns with arch-villains responsible for the disasters. Instead, we just sit at home, many of us without even a job to occupy our time now, watching tv, scrolling twitter, worrying and waiting for the chance to see our loved ones again, to be safe again. Last week, lots of us didn’t even have the tv. For those with kids, the childcare routine has become all-consuming and stagnant at the same time, as this widely-read New York Times piece showed. The richness of life has faded.
What I miss most, at this moment, are the crowds. The appeal of a crowd is something I had only recently begun to appreciate before March 2020. A shy kid, I avoided them as a matter of course for much of my life. But a series of events a few years ago led me to venture out more; I met more people and tried more things and became more comfortable. And now a crowd is a shot of life: it’s the press of bodies at a concert, moving to the same music and mouthing the same words; it’s being with friends in a popular restaurant, picking up bits of interesting conversations at other tables in the midst of focusing on your own; it’s a standing room only comedy show where every time the person behind you laughs, you can feel a bit of their breath; it’s the glut of innertubes on an overcrowded river full of laughing people getting sunburned and a bit too drunk. It’s being able to see and hear and feel and belong with others. It’s knowing you’re part of the big human world and that you have a place in it, connected to everyone else.
The last time I felt that way was at Austin City Limits in October 2019. Lizzo was performing on a mid-sized stage, the planners having apparently missed the memo that she was huge now. I was lucky to get a pretty good spot to watch her perform, and she was fantastic. At times the crowd was so dense that it felt like my feet weren’t even on the ground. Everyone was dancing and screaming and jockeying for position. Everyone was in love. Moving through this crowd after the show ended to meet up with friends was almost impossible. In the midst of it, my phone was stolen, and it pretty much killed the rest of the night for me. But now, this moment feels like a privilege. I wonder how much longer it will be before an experience like this is safe again – but even more, I wonder how much longer before it will feel safe again.
I don’t have a whole lot of wisdom to share about a year of our lives gone to this. I just know that with each day we live like this, with each new disaster that piles on top of it, it feels less like a blip we must simply get through and more like something that is changing us. I think about how I’ll talk about this time to the next generation who didn’t live through it, whether they’ll be able to fully comprehend what it was like. That it was sameness, every day, with nothing new to distract us from the constant worry for our loved ones’ lives. I don’t know how quickly – or even if – I’ll feel like I’ve returned to normal at some point. I do know that I’ll be anticipating the next pandemic for the rest of my life, and that makes me feel old and sad. Perhaps these thoughts resonate with you too.
Above all, if you are reading this, I hope you are well, and safe, and warm. I hope you get to talk to the people you love. I hope you have maintained some connections or forged new ones. And I hope through this blog, you feel a connection with me.