I was in our laundry room the other day, lost in a trance of boredom as I cycled another load, when a bright patch of yellow caught my eye. It was the tip of an old face mask that had fallen into the corner, apparently hidden for years beneath a spare clothes hamper.
Like the contents of a time machine, this little artifact of domestic life circa 2020 quickly took me back.
Along with many other Louisiana residents navigating the lockdown days of the pandemic, our family used a lot of fabric masks as we ventured out for necessities, and keeping them clean became a somber ritual. A dozen would hang from drying racks in the laundry room, their varied colors creating a macabre mobile that underscored the weirdness of the times.
Memories of other grim oddities from those days came rushing back as I fed a bundle of bed sheets into the dryer. I remembered the bizarre minuet as the deliveryman brought our groceries each week, both of us dancing around each other in a shared gesture of social distancing.
I thought about our national obsession with hand sanitizer, along with the supply chain woes that left once proud Americans scrambling for bathroom tissue. To support our neighborhood restaurants as their dining rooms closed and they relied on takeout orders to stay afloat, I’d pull into the parking lot of nearby eateries and nod to the wait staff as they quickly passed packaged entrées through the car window.
The whole exchange seemed glancing and vaguely illicit, like buying diamonds on the black market.
That dark human comedy also came with devastating loss. Millions died from an unpredictable virus, and the economic hardship from the lockdowns was wide and deep. Students languished at home, and families and friends endured separations too painful to quantify. We’re still debating the best course if another pandemic comes our way.
Another vivid memory floated back to me as our dryer tumbled and rumbled through its hour of work. It occurred to me that amid the lockdowns, I’d struck one of those silly cosmic bargains so common among souls in distress.
“Make the pandemic go away,” I’d promised back then, “and I won’t complain about anything again.”
Recently, I attended six public gatherings in a week. Last month, my wife and I danced at a friend’s wedding, savoring the joy of the crowd. Meanwhile, my long-ago promise to stop my griping in exchange for better days has, as you might expect, been a bit of a bust.
I continue to quibble about little things — the twinge in my shoulder, the squirrels in our flower bed, the lawnmower that has, once again, failed to start.
Even so, I’m trying to tell myself that this anxious spring in the life of the country, whatever its challenges, has been the kind of season my pandemic self could only have hoped for.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.