When you look back at the last nine months, we have all had any number of things that we wish we didn't have to endure. Of course, at the center of it all is the very real human toll. Even if you have been lucky enough to escape any health effects on you or your immediate family, the virus has gotten so pervasive that it's increasingly rare not to know someone who has been directly affected.
Beyond that, consider the changes to dining out, entertainment, work arrangements, education, travel, relationships: it's all just the beginning of a laundry list that only writers of dystopian fiction had even thought about. And yet today even the most outlandish constructs of some formerly unimaginable future seem not to have been prescient enough. C'mon: a world where we have to stay 6 feet apart, where we can only visit with others when we have a pane of glass between us, where sports teams play in an isolation bubble in stadiums devoid of fans with the world watching from the outside? Must be the latest Stephen King novel.
But in spite of where we were and are, sometime later this year things will start to settle down, if not return exactly to the way they were. If the past is any guide, odds are that almost immediately our recollections of this time will start to fade, and we may eventually look at it no differently than we do any other period in a randomly opened history textbook. So while we'll still in the midst of it all with its effects fresh in our lives it's instructive to look back on the last nine months and be amazed at what we can do, what we can't do and what we truly miss.
What can we do? Well, at the most basic level we were able to adapt and function. That meant taking the fringe novelty technology of video calls and making it the basis of every type of work and play. From the time it was introduced to the masses at the 1964 World's Fair it has been a means of communication that was as much promise as practical. For sure Skype was making some headway with college students talking to mom and dad, but most folks just picked up a phone. Then almost overnight the world discovered Zoom, and never looked back. Had this hit even 5 years ago, odds are we would have been much more isolated at every level.
Likewise, online shopping went from a growing game to the only one in town. Food, clothing, hardware, home furnishings, toys: no matter the items, you can click your way to them and have them delivered within days. The same for remote learning. Imperfect to be sure, and much work to be done to make access easier, more universal and more effective. But when the alternative is nothing, it's amazing that learners of all ages could be connected to their teachers to continue their education.
But there is also much we can't do. We can't wander. We can't travel. We can't get together to dine, to watch, to simply visit. How many times before this all went down did you say, "I wish we hadn't said 'yes' to going out with the Fitzpatricks to dinner and a movie, I'd rather just stay home tonight." Now you would give you right arm to have that opportunity. Or to stroll through a farmer's market and linger over a display until you found the perfect eggplant. Or to jostle with crowds to get the best angle on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Or to simply give a hug or get one.
We miss all that and more. I think as much as anything I miss the random encounters and discoveries I used to have. I don't go anywhere so I don't chance upon new things. The little food stall I would discover on a side street. The chat with an Uber driver and the chance to learn his hidden talent. The wandering into a little boutique to find some small gift that you never knew existed, and you know the recipient never knew she wanted... until she got it.
Whether you date our current predicament from the first cases at the end of 2019 or when it blew out the blocks on these shores in March, the rollouts of the various vaccines means that there is an ending in sight. And so while the exact timeline is still to be written, we are somewhere in the middle. And when it ends we'll surely say we'll take the lessons of this experience and reconstruct our futures from a more enlightened perspective. But as we turn the page into a new year, it will be interesting to see in one week or one year or one decade whether this all becomes a call to action, a memory, or merely history.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford wonders what the future will hold. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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