A few days ago, the unpleasant anniversary of San Francisco’s shelter in place order ominously came and went like a slow drifting summer fog across the bay. I’d forgotten the exact date, March 16th, if you’ll forgive me. I would have been perfectly fine to keep on with my life without that unneeded bit knowledge, if it weren’t for NPR declaring it over and over again on my way into work. So I got to thinking, drifting in and out of my thoughts as I crossed the bay bridge and into the glowing lights of the city, of how long ago that day felt. Much longer than a year, certainly, a hazy decade is what it feels like. Yet, it could have been yesterday as well, this year, no, the year that never happened.

In March of 2020 I was probably the most burnt out I’d ever been in my career. My 40 story high rise and it’s accompanying 12 story mid rise were in the final stages of finishing up. This meant 7 day work weeks, hours that ran on and on into the grimy San Francisco nights. I’d been told I was getting my own job after that behemoth tower. A very favorable bonus from December held the delicate strings of more to come, if I could just hold on and finish on time…everything would work out like it was supposed to.

I was at a peak in my life. Peak stress. Peak performance. Peak spending. Peak earning.

And like any peak, there must come some reckoning beyond its highest point. A come down. A crash. A downturn. I thought my comedown would be my vacation, followed by a nice, slower paced, small job for me to run on my own. That was supposed to be my 2020.

Before the shelter in place order, I chose to close my eyes and pretend the virus would go away. Like how SARS went away during my time in the Navy. Or the swine flu during the recession. Or the blip that the MERS virus was. Maybe it would go the way of the Zika virus and vanish from the media coverage.

But alas, it did not.

3.16.20

The call came in the late morning of March 16th. We’d heard the order was coming for a few days, but chalked it up to rumor. Someone knew someone in the Mayor’s office, blah, blah, blah. Still, when the call came all of us watched glued to the press conference from our work computers as if we hadn’t a clue this might happen. It was a surreal feeling. Similar to watching the twin towers collapse on live television, but without the anger, only the shock.

Could an entire city shut down? In America? Yeah, I’d seen the news footage of Italy. Singing from the windows. Empty wet streets. Sanitation trucks blowing smoke over cobbled roads. Body bags stacked like some staged horror movie scene. Could all that happen here? In my city?

It did.

The noisy streets of the once bustling city became swallowed up by an unbearable apocalyptic silence. A silence that screamed that something wasn’t right. Screamed that we shouldn’t keep going about our business like things were normal. Normality was in fact long gone. Never to return to the world. Though I bottled up my normalcy and tucked it away in my mind, hopefully waiting for the day it would return.

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave“

No traffic on the freeways. The grocery stores ransacked. Muni buses hurdling empty down Van Ness like manic ghost ships. All in a matter of days San Francisco became a place I’d only read about in my sci-fi novels. There’s a quote that captures that time in San Francisco. A Cormac McCarthy character, Ely (the only character with a name in the book), says it best in the apocalyptic novel The Road: “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” That’s how we all felt in the following weeks after the initial order took place. When the hopes were this lock down would only last a month or two at best.

It must be some wired human condition that we trick ourselves into thinking things will be over sooner than the reality before us would say so. In the first world war, the widespread belief was that troops would be home before Christmas 1914. Germany declared after invading Russia in 1941: “Before three months have passed we shall witness a collapse of Russia…” We all know how that played out. And we’re all old enough to remember Bush on an aircraft carrier speaking in front of that “mission accomplished” banner in 2003. I know I’m using military operations as an example, but that’s probably the closest thing to a nation wide effort that would have been needed to squash this thing early on.

The year that never happened

What should have happened in 2020 didn’t. The stock markets should have dropped and remained low. It didn’t. The United States should have been leading the world as an example of how to properly manage the worst global catastrophe we’ve seen since…I don’t know, World War 2? That sure as fuck didn’t happen. The Forty-Niners should have been a playoff team last year. That didn’t happen either.

And now, nearly a year after those events of March 2020, things are opening up again. I’ve been given my first dose of Moderna. So has my wife, and my father, and in laws, and a third of my co-workers. It feels like things are taking a turn for the better, finally; despite the warnings of opening too quickly, or mutant variants that will compromise the vaccines. It feels like the world is coming back to a shadow of its former self. Like a word caught on the tip of my tongue, normalcy is right around the corner. If I look hard enough I’ll see it, I’ll remember its name.

The feeling is reminiscent of coming back to the United States after spending ten months aboard a ship of war. There’s an image in your mind of the world you left behind that becomes frozen in time. It’s an image of the world you used to know. A reality that died the day you left. Yet you live in this dead world while you’re away. You spend your alone time there in that world captured in your mind, reliving memories, imagining futures of a place that is forever changed by time and events. It’s like trying to capture a river. The minute you pull a bucket full of water from the river, that bucket of water is no longer the river, and the river is not the same river you pulled the water from.

Anyone who’s spent some prolonged time away from home might know the feeling I’m describing. It’s like space travel. While away, time somehow slows. You’ve changed so much, seen so much, lived so much, that when you return home, you realize everyone has been living out the same day over and over. You’ve somehow lived years, while the people in your hometown have miraculously only lived days, maybe weeks. And nobody sees this but you. They don’t want to hear your stories. They don’t care what you’ve seen or eaten. They only want to talk about the same thing they were talking about a year ago. It’s not their fault. They can’t see it. They can’t possibly know that you’re much older than time would benefit you.

That’s how I feel about this whole return to normalcy thing. Except this time I haven’t gone anywhere. Neither has anyone else. We’ve all changed more in a shorter amount of time than seems rational. We’re all Van Winkle, our nap has lasted years, and for me, that means realizing that while the surroundings are the same, the times sure as hell aren’t. I bet we all have images of what normal is supposed to be now. Packed bars. No masks. Crowded restaurants and parties filled with humans laughing and shaking hands. Maybe its travel. Or commuter traffic and in person meetings. Or the simple act of opening a door in public and not immediately thinking about where your hand sanitizer is.

Normalcy

I have the feeling that I’m waiting for something. Some solid cue. A switch to flip, a light to turn, before things are normal again. But it’s just the image in my mind that I took with me the day the shelter in place order took effect. The lock down started with a few words and proclamation, a switch if you will, but it will not be turned back in the same manner. There’s no stuffing this genie back into the lamp. 9/11 was the same way, there was no “normal” after that, just an acclimatization to a new world.

For us, we took the local ordinances pretty seriously. I stopped hanging out with my friends. We severely cut the time we saw our family. Eating out became something I’ve only done twice since last March. My life became a monotonous march of working or hanging out at home–for the most part. We’ve taken a few domestic vacations here and there, but the social aspect of what my life used to be is still missing. I also wonder how much of that has to do with my sobriety. Anyway, California opening up restrictions is a big deal for me. Since I’m doing the right thing by getting vaccinated, I plan on following along and getting out more. That probably means spending more too. Somehow my kids have convinced me to take them to Disneyland this summer, if things feel right (and the damn prices aren’t insane) we’ll take that trip back to “normalcy”.

I ate out in a cafe for the first time in months today in the nearby town of Walnut Creek. The cafe was crowded with people. We wore masks and were spaced apart 6′ from other tables. And I glimpsed it. Glimpsed my new normal world. I felt comfortable being in the crowded restaurant because I’d taken my first Moderna shot. I didn’t have some paranoid monkey dangling around my neck worrying about the virus; I know the vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting infected, it helps you fight it off before symptoms appear, but it still felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders none the less. I also didn’t feel as though I were doing something wrong by gathering in a crowded place. That peace of mind was indescribable and I can only compare it to the precious moments after meditating.

My daughter starts real school in a week. Her and her sister are both signed up for recreational soccer after a missed season. And it’s damn time I buy the return leg for my Portugal trip and book accommodations.

Normal isn’t going to come back to me. I have to go to it. Wherever that is. I’m done waiting for it to show up on my doorstep to tell me its okay to get back out there. And yes, I’ll probably be wearing a mask when I find it.

What about you? Have you found your new normal yet?