Post-Pandemic Post
It’s been years. Nobody seems to be thinking about COVID anymore. I’m sitting in the Puerto Vallarta airport traveling home from a lovely escape to my little beach hideaway. Everyone else here is also bringing home their own version of stoke, acquired through variable amounts of tacos, tequila, and tranquilo. There are no masks. No distancing. No collective dread.
Growing up, the word pandemic felt exotic. A global health crisis was as foreign as medieval ramparts and drawbridges. I could imagine it in some archaic form but couldn’t fathom a modern variety. Moreover, why would I? We were raised with the constant fear of mutually assured destruction in my Cold War childhood. AIDS was quietly picking people off – though we never really considered it a pandemic; rather, naively, we thought of it as an incurable, selective disease.
In late February of 2020, I was settling at home from a back-to-back Todos Santos beach break, and our annual ski retreat in Banff, Alberta. Judah was midway through his freshman year of high school. He barely had his bearings when he was struck by a wicked flu. For at least a week he rocked a 103º fever, bedridden and miserable. The hospital oddly diagnosed it as "not influenza." We were baffled by the negative result—this was clearly a flu.
A week later, I took ill. We battled this thing together, miserable, but—as we do—with video games, TV, and classic dad-son downtime. Judah returned to school for only a few days before talk of COVID began in earnest. Overly cautious, and concerned we might be carriers, we kept him home. He would never return to Raoul Wallenberg School.
Just another week, and San Francisco followed our cautious lead, becoming one of the first cities to issue a shelter-in-place order. By then, we had already been home nearly a month. I'm convinced we had some very early cases of undiagnosed COVID. It's likely why neither of us caught it again—our bodies fortified by some accidental early-adopter immunity.
Looking back on those months-that-became-years under the oppressive cloud of COVID-19, I sigh relief that we survived. Millions did not, yet we've rapidly cleansed them from our collective conscience. I'm angered by the bumbling response of our government—and governments worldwide. Sure, we faced something new and unfamiliar, but the arrogance, incompetence, misinformation, and nefarious deflection remain eternally inexcusable. FDT.
Still, I remember the positives. I started hosting Zoom cooking classes, infecting my friends across the globe with my culinary passion. We came together to catch up, laugh, cook beautiful food, and forget the world for a moment. I reconnected with people I hadn’t seen in decades, since suddenly we had no excuses left. Life slowed to a pace that allowed meaningful interactions. We finally used the internet for something genuinely good. I spent more quality time with Judah, and more time with myself.
I also remember my heightened sensitivity in public. I've always been a bit of a germaphobe (don’t get me started on public nose-blowing). Diagrams and slow-motion videos illustrating the range of human sneezing, coughing, and breathing made me a devout disciple of DoorDash, Instacart, and voluntary isolation. Long after normal life resumed, I secretly avoided all questionable exposures.
As the world began emerging, I launched a business that allowed me to create a reality entirely within 100 yards of my home. I finally had an excuse to hole up, interacting exclusively outdoors, on open water, or on my own terms inside my shop. I had found my groove—a new life that suited my quirks perfectly. I’m still living this life for the most part. I don’t go out much in San Francisco these days.
But, inevitably, travel forced me from my cave. Wanderlust is my permanent affliction, making it impossible to stay pinned down. At first, I double-masked, moved swiftly to rental cars, booked Airbnbs, and avoided groups. Slowly, I rediscovered my rhythm, balancing caution with my enduring passion for exploration. If I'm honest, some sensitivities remain. Right now, as I write this, I see all these people oblivious to risks that could materialize again in a flash.
Across the terminal, a woman wearing a mask catches my eye. I wonder about her journey. Is she the only one besides me who remembers? She appears pregnant (and apologies if she's not), so perhaps it's an extra precaution. Nearby, another woman just sneezed shamelessly into her hand, and for a brief moment, I consider relocating. If I dwell too long, I’ll spiral out. Back to writing.
It makes me wonder—what exactly did we learn from the pandemic? The word no longer conjures distant visions of the bubonic plague—ghostly figures sweeping through muddy medieval villages, cartoonishly sinister. No, we know pandemics intimately. We’ve lived through one squarely, undeniably. Pandemic now has a face. We should be wiser now, battle-hardened, prepared.
Yet looking around in this moment, I suspect we’ve learned little beyond the comforting power of collective forgetfulness. Maybe humans are designed to forget trauma quickly, to shrug off memories of darkness and death with selective amnesia. I suppose this explains why pandemics have occurred repeatedly throughout history. Aren’t we supposed to learn from the past? There’s so many reasons why I know we’re just not there yet as a civilization (my discourse on the infancy of Homo sapiens is coming soon).
Either way, as I watch travelers happily settle back into oblivious normalcy, I can’t help but feel we're tempting fate. And fate, as we’ve learned, has a dark sense of humor. A kid behind me just barked out a phlegmy cough, that tickled my Spidey-senses. That's my cue—time to wrap this up and skedaddle to another seat. Old habits die hard.