Minecraft. That is what I remember from the earliest days of quarantine. My son set up a server and he and his sister played for hours with their friends. Every night we would hear them upstairs. It started with the energy of a vacation. They even gave me a copy of the game for my birthday in May. March 12, 2020, was a Thursday. It was the last full day of in-person school for my daughter and my wife in Waltham, and my son at Framingham State. Every day leading up to the 12th seemed to be trying to out-shitshow the previous one. Things were spiraling rapidly downward in a way we had never experienced before. I had first become aware of the coronavirus while reading a story on the Drudge Report website right before New Year’s. I remember a feeling of dread upon reading it and thinking “we will have to keep an eye on this story”. Then on January 23rd a new customer came into my shop and over the course of his visit, after shaking my hand, he told me how he had been on the flight that came from Hong Kong the night before -the one nine people were taken off suspected of being sick with a new virus. The virus was in the news constantly from that point on, but I still had multiple people coming into my tiny shop at the same time. Like everyplace else out there it was still business as usual. Though I had bought gloves, was using the sanitizer we had on hand like never before, and trying to avoid touching their laptops until I could wipe them with glass cleaner as it was all I had on hand. I remember a moment in the final week of normalcy when there were three people in front of the counter and one started sneezing. The burst of panic that erupted on the other’s faces as they tried to back away from each other in a four-foot by four-foot space I will never forget.
The next day, Friday the 13th( of course) I had a previously scheduled eye appointment to check out some weirdness that was going on. When I made the appointment I remember thinking that date was a bad omen. I had no idea! It was unlike any visit I had ever had. There was a table outside the office with hand sanitizer and instructions. Inside the waiting room, there were several people waiting. Michelle came with me. The receptionist was frantic, wiping pens and clipboards non-stop between clients. The doctor’s assistant came out to take me back fully covered in scrubs and wearing a mask and face shield. While I waited for the doc a man in a mask came in and haphazardly sprayed down the computer keyboard, When the doctor came in he was not wearing a mask when he examined me, so I held my breath the entire time he checked out my eye. “You have a posterior vitreous detachment” he announced, not quickly enough given how close he was to my unmasked face. “It will resolve over time”, and it was not to be confused with a retinal detachment which is a much more serious issue. “Like covid-19?” I thought as I exhaled. But not on the doctor.
Remember being told this was “two weeks to stop the spread’? The crazy run on toilet paper? I remember being in my basement on the 14th counting rolls and calculating approximate usage, panicking that we did not have enough, despite our efforts to toss an extra pack in the cart every week for the previous month. It was hard to believe that everything was going to shut down for two whole weeks. We were told to assume everyone already has the virus, and it was highly contagious. Every day they trumpeted a new way it could spread. Surfaces, coughing, then the aerosols and asymptomatic. Just breathing could spread it. It could hang in the air for hours. It could order an Uber and show up at your house. We assumed we had to have been exposed due to our own ignorance. So for the first two weeks, we waited for the symptoms to show up in our house. Fortunately, they didn’t. The only thing that showed up at our house other than Peapod was the D’Amato family delivering Hershey Kisses to their friends. We had no idea what we were in for at that point. Instead, we marked the time, like a family simultaneously in the witness protection program and under house arrest. No idea that two weeks would become six, then eight, then so many that every day you had no idea what day of the week it was and now it is a year later. It is fitting that my wife got her first of the Moderna shots today, a year to the date.
It’s all downhill from here.
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