so long 2020

 

I remember the day that COVID hit home.  I don’t remember the date, exactly.  It was March 11 or March 12.  I was texting back and forth with my progeny about the Big Twelve postseason tournament and it was the day of the play-in games.  Our team was the number one team in the nation so they weren’t playing for another day or two, but it had just been announced that two of the major teams in the nation—one of which was ours—were not going to play in the post season.  We figured that our team was going to be the favorite in the NCAA tournament so that was a bummer.

 

So the subject of our texts changed from basketball to the announcement that the urban counties, for which we are ex-burbs, were planning to lock down.  I texted my son that we were lucky we were not going to be locked down and his reply was, no, we were going to be locked down, too.

 

It was the first inkling of a lifestyle change, the extent of which we were only vaguely aware.  Life changed that day and it has stayed changed for the rest of the year and it will stay changed until sometime in the new year.

 

However, I don’t think there will be a day next year that we will be able to say, today is the day; the virus is behind us.  I think it will be one of those gradual things like lost love or lost friends where we carry the grief until one day we smile or chuckle about something and we realize that life will go on.  We will get vaccinated at soon as we can but we will still wear masks and social distance and wash our hands.  Maybe someday we will meet someone and shake their hand, or maybe we will never shake hands again.

 

We will bid adieu to this plague, I hope, but it will not be gone on the fifth hour of the fifth day of the fifth month, at an exact moment that we can pinpoint.  It will hang around for a while.  I think that we can be certain when the clock strikes twelve tonight and this year ends, the virus will still be with us. 

 

We just hope that it goes away sometime soon.

 

Until then, our wish is a happy new year.

 

And in Jimbo’s world, we mean it.