Tales From the Pandemic Shut-Down — It’s Been Three Years

Remember 202o? It’s been three years now since we were instructed to stay away from people and wash our hands like mad. So much fear. So many lives lost. So many hospitals crowded with covid victims struggling to breathe.

And, for those of us who escaped contagion — so much disruption, so little contact with the people we loved.

Tales From the Pandemic Shut-Down

There wasn’t a lot to do during the long months of 2020. Our gym was closed. We got our food delivered. Work on our remodel-in-progress came to a halt. So I began a weekly diary — the Sheltering at Home Chronicles.

And it’s a good thing I did, because those strange and frightening months — so vivid in the living of them — are beginning to fade from memory. To help me recall those days, I looked up some of my tales from the pandemic shut-down.

Here’s one of them:

My Coronavirus Nightmare:

I’m in a Crowd of People and I Forgot My Mask

The Sheltering at Home Chronicles. May 13, 2020. Week 9

My psyche is no slouch. It’s keeping up with current events, and it’s invented a coronavirus nightmare to match the times.

To wit: I’m out in a crowd, I forgot my mask, coronaviruses are lurking everywhere, and I can’t find my way home to solitude and safety.

Friends report having the same brand new nightmare, with variations on the theme. A neighbor tells me she frets in her sleep that her adult son has wandered off into a crowd of people. Nobody is wearing a mask, and she can’t call him back.

I had no idea the human unconscious was so smart. But apparently, our underbrains are tuning into the news along with our waking brains, and right now they seem to be doing a quick and timely update on that anxiety dream classic — “I’m at the Office and I’m Stark Naked.”

No matter how much we deep breathe, meditate or pray. No matter how much we unload our troubles into the kindly ears of generous friends and therapists. No matter how evolved we strive to be, it seems we can’t outsmart those unconsciouses of ours. Our anxieties find ever new ways to track us down and arrange for us do the — necessary? — middle-of-the-night worrying.

Terrible Toothy Fox

My anxiety dreams have morphed over the years. At age 8, it was “There’s a Terrible Toothy Fox Under My Bed and He’s Going to Get Me.” A few years later it was, “A Bad Guy Is Chasing Me and My Feet Are Stuck in the Mud.”

In college it was “It’s the Second Week of My Renaissance Poetry Class and I Can’t Find the Syllabus.”

Later in the semester it might have been, “I’ve Got a Midterm at 8 a.m. and I Can’t Find the Classroom.”

Either that or, “It’s 8 a.m., I’ve Found the Classroom, and I’m Stark Naked.”

As my dad, who assembled his armory of idioms early in the 20th century, would say, “You can’t win for losing.”

Our Ever-Vigilant Psyches

Human beings are kind creatures. We’re also greedy, creative, xenophobic and off-the-charts smart.

But, when all is said and done, we are creatures. We are creatures forever on the look-out for the bad things that can happen. No matter how safe and sound we think we are in our tidy 21st-century modernity bubble, there are indeed Toothy Foxes out there. There are Bad Guys. There are Coronaviruses.

(There aren’t that many naked people, however. We might be working from home these days, but most of us remember to get dressed before heading to the home office.)

But — thanks to our ever-vigilant psyches — we are ready for the day. We’ve done all our worrying during the night. We’ve got our masks at the ready, and we won’t be caught with our pants down. Not today.

More about that remodel at “Too Many Walls — and Not Enough Bathrooms — at Our House.”  To see the finished product, go to “Hey, HGTV Fans. Take a Look at Our Remodel.”