A New Ritual for 2020:Accept, Adapt Keep Going
A reflection on living during the Covid-19 pandemic, social justice uprisings, and infertility
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When my neighbor waved at me from the other side of the street, I imagined his lips moving on the other side of his mask as he asked, “How’re you doing?” I must have taken too long to answer because he squinted his eyes and added, “How’re you coping?”
His words pinned me. I felt like a specimen on an insect display: I wanted to be seen, but this inquiry was more than I had bargained for. I said the words I could find, the expected ones, “I’m fine.” By the time I shut my front door, I wished I had said to him, “I got a package.”
The package came on a Monday. Inside the brown box, twin aluminum cylinders nestled together in the cardboard. They were filled with carbon dioxide. With the help of a carbonator, they could infuse bottles of water with gas and make it sparkle.
Before the pandemic, I drank liters of carbonated water every day. Whenever I felt like it, and sometimes when I didn’t, I would pad to the kitchen, palm a cold bottle of flat water from the fridge, link the bottle into the black plastic carbonation mechanism, and suck down the crisp effervescence. When the silver canister emptied, I would unthread it, tuck it inside my cloth shopping bag, and drive to Target to trade it for a new one. I didn’t know it at the time, but I made my last trip like this in February.
The trip was so unexceptional that I have no memory of anything about that day. I couldn’t tell you if it was early February or late February. I couldn’t tell you if the sky was blotted white with snow or blue with bracing cold. But I can tell you that, by the time that canister ran out in March, Target had stopped its exchange program, and the world had stopped most everything else.
Everything else in the world was more consequential than a canister whose sole purpose was to make flat water effervesce. So those things got my attention, mostly. I stuffed our cupboard with canned beans. I tracked which businesses were closed until it became simpler to track which were not. I set up a Zoom account. Fifteen days to slow the spread stretched into April, then May.
