Yesterday when I was returning home after doing a few errands, I realized I missed the very things I used to hate. This remarkable experience is happening to others, as well.
When I talk to my family members and friends I hear variations on this theme.
My niece has told me many times about her boss. He’d call her into his office and, after giving her a new project with an impossible deadline, he’d keep her stranded there, with any chance of meeting that deadline slipping away, he’d veer off topic to the weather, not just the conditions in Colorado where the company is located, but a detailed state-by-state report. However these days, after months of working alone, she doesn’t get upset when the phone rings, her boss on the line, and she hears him rattle on about the weather. She’s happy just to hear another voice.
Another example: A friend of mine tells me that she hated using her apartment building’s communal laundry room. She’d go down at the crack of dawn or very late at night to avoid being forced to talk (or at least listen) to fellow residents. Now, after spending day after day alone in her apartment, she welcomes company in the laundry.
Then there is my friend, Jane, who volunteered to be a poll watcher because it would give her a legitimate reason to get out of her apartment. It was cold and windy the morning of November third. When she reported to her polling station at 5:00 a.m. (in order to receive instructions for the emergency hours which began at 6:00) there was already a block-long line of people waiting to cast their ballots. At the roll call she volunteered to be a greeter. Her duties included making sure the voters were at the proper polling station, and that each person or couple maintained a 6-foot distance. As my friend took up her position rain began to fall. It was slow going: voters had to be pointed toward the right stand or, if they’d received the ballot by mail, both external and internal envelopes had to be opened and their current signature digitally verified. The line wrapped around the block, and extended across the intersection and around the next block.
As the line crawled forward, people chatted with those next in line. The light rain suddenly became a downpour. Umbrellas were unfurled. Some had come doubly prepared, and offered the spare to those who hadn’t planned ahead. It became dark and a high wind picked up, but Jane continued to stand there because she was enjoying talking to the voters. Jane, who usually shuns chit-chat and only wants to hear educational discourse and well-reasoned arguments, says it was her happiest day since the pandemic restrictions began.
Others whose work keeps them grounded at a computer for most of the day used to resent when they were interrupted, tell me they now miss that hand on the shoulder and a warm greeting. Small talk has become big.
When I first moved to my apartment, the block was a small neighborhood. Most of its residents knew each other, if not by name, by appearance. People greeted each other with a smile and nod of the head, often stopping for an extended catch-up-on-things chat.
In the fifty-plus years I’ve lived here, the area has changed with the ups and downs of the city. Attempts to complete a subway line with a major stop on the end of my block was a terrible disruption. The first attempt stalled due to lack of sufficient funding. The second, after twelve long years, was successful, but it was a painful process physically and psychologically.
Hundreds of workers (strangers all) poured in, and with them, incessant ear-splitting noise--from drilling and dynamite blasting that damaged hearing—and continual blocked streets which resulted in incessant nonstop honking and sirens. Relatively clean air became heavily polluted. Talking to acquaintances was impossible because one couldn’t hear over the din. Smiles substituted in a small way.
Upon completion of the project the sidewalks became so busy with hordes of employees hurrying to one of the four major hospitals a short distance away that often I’d had to wait several minutes to venture to the far side of the sidewalk. So much so that more than once I had to ask my doorman to help me. And the neighbors who I recognized, caught up in the midst of the jam, dared not stop to talk at risk of being bowled over. The new rushing pedestrians certainly had no time for a smile, a nod of the head, or even a glance. My neighborhood as I’d known it was gone.
Now another momentous shift is underway. After the first early days of the pandemic, when the streets in my neighborhood were eerily empty, people are now venturing out again, though in much smaller numbers. Mask-wearing discourages conversations between couples walking together. They, and it seems everyone else, are plugged into a listening device. It’s very quiet out there. Is this the way it’s always going to be? One small thing that has gotten better during this dreadful time, I thought. I no longer had to worry about getting knocked down.
But the other afternoon, when I walked toward the corner of a major intersection that once had been especially busy and therefore dangerous for me, and then, with the pandemic, been transformed into a quiet mini plaza, once again I found myself having to stop, skirt around, and dodge pedestrians. There was a fast-moving couple with a young distracted child on a scooter trying to keep up with his equally distracted parents, and a couple looking down into bags, checking to see if they’d received what they’d stood in line to order, and two young women engrossed in conversation unaware of anyone around them.
Then the light changed to green and a crowd of pedestrians moved as one toward me--forcing me to stop before I could turn the corner. When I started to move forward again, I jerked to a stop, as a young man staring down at his iPhone, broke into a run, assuming everyone else would yield to him.
Get used to this. I smiled. This is New York as it was before the pandemic--busy, noisy, chaotic. In due course, crowds, which I used to hate, but now miss, will return.