Maybe I always knew, deep down, that jeans and bras and wrinkle cream are unnecessary. And lip gloss. And hugs. And leaving the house.
For a loner and a comfort hound, the perks are alluring, and I'm not sure I'm all that prepared to give them up. It's been more than a year. Upwards of 525,600 minutes. A half-million deaths. I've been one of the lucky ones. I work from home anyway. I have a dog so I have to go out at least three times a day. I lost my father long before simply being elderly was dangerous. My mother, who just turned 90, survived the worst days in New York and has received her second vaccine. She has learned to Zoom. Pretty much everybody in my orbit is fine. Even though we can't hug.
Some years are more ordinary than others, and my Covid year was as ordinary as they get -- no school-aged children, no missed graduations, no lost college years, no weddings to plan and then re-plan, no new grandchildren not to hold. No Zoom calls with dying parents. No lost employment. A solid and loving bubble to help keep me sane. Ish. I turned 61. As nondescript an age as there can be. I had eked in a 60th birthday blow-out months before it all started. I had gone to New York to celebrate my mom's 89th, celebrated at one of the last "real" weddings, even squeezed in a vacation with a week to spare.
My friend's mom, in her nineties, told her that when she got her second vaccine, she felt as if it was the first day of the rest of her life. Yes. For her, and for my own mom, the rest seems particularly precious. Theoretically, they don't have the luxury of enough time to make this year, this 525,600 plus minutes, become nothing more than a blip. Theoretically. My mom wants to put on her elegant clothes and have her hair done and put on make-up and go out. She has worked hard, all these years, to be healthy and active and always beautiful, and she has earned the right to enjoy what she enjoys. She has earned the right to be in a room with her daughter so they can breathe the same air. To be three-dimensional. To be within reach.
I cannot wait for that, even though I'll have to wear a bra and put on make-up and wrinkle cream and leave the house. And zip up jeans. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. We all have much to look forward to, but for the people who have suffered the most during this extraordinary time, I hope the recovery is equally extraordinary.
But for us more ordinary folks, for whom this has been more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, it is time lost, time that cannot be recovered. I would gladly trade my sweats to take those precious minutes back, time to do whatever it is I liked to do, before.
