The Facebook posts and text messages from vaccinated friends arrive daily, reading like verbiage from brave explorers in Gulliver’s Travels. Some friends are elated; others groused: the food had to be pre-ordered before we entered Angel Stadium and neither it nor beer was cold when it arrived in our above the dugout seats, which weren’t our seats, but several rows back. 

Others wept when they encountered street buskers, cadging for cash – and dropped more tip money than they’d done pre-quarantine. Such performers were no longer invisible because of what we had mutually endured.

None of us has emerged from COVID-19 unscathed:

  • Even if we didn’t get sick, someone we knew did.
  • Even if none of our loved ones died, we knew dear people that did.
  • Even one death was a tragedy for that person and their family. More than 1/2 million dead is an apocalypse in America, where supplies of ventilators and nurses and doctors and hospital beds were tested to the max.
  • Even if we were able to work from home, thus not losing the job, some people’s livelihoods were obliterated, never to return. Unemployment numbers were as high as the Great Depression of the ’30s.
And, then there was the depression of mind, body, and soul that shrouded the nation… no one escaped, not even bubbly me.

The virus took all our plans and assumptions about the world and tossed them in a blender, making confetti. Perhaps we’ll get to toss it into the air at our vibrant 4th of July party. Then the reality of vaxx-fostered freedom may sink in…

Because the most life-shattering of all for those of us who survived was that COVID separated us from our people:

  • Huggers couldn’t hug
  • business people couldn’t seal deals with a handshake and we all had to communicate from behind masks which garbled our speech.
  • Grandchildren and grandparents were separated for over a year, while the children’s parents had no reprieve. The requirement to home-school these precious, as well as the endless laundry piles and Cloroxing surfaces left parents harried and in much need of excellent adventures outside the home!
  • meanwhile, though everyone tried their best, the children not formally educated may have forever been set back…

Still waiting for yours, Bunky? Is that what’s bothering you? Spill IT in the comments, please and thanks. Though I can’t heal, I can listen, and then you’ll be closer to normal.

I promise. Then, we can re-hug the world – together!