What Will I Remember?

My normal routine has now been interrupted for a week. Last Thursday was the last day I was teaching at my school. Since then, I've been teaching from home. All the activities that constituted our fairly packed family schedule (music, dance, church) were cancelled as of last Thursday. I'm finding myself at the end of the eeriest week of my life, more eerie than that first week after the 9/11 attacks. More eerie than the first week after I lost a loved one.

So when I sharing stories in the future about this confrontation with the Coronavirus, what will I remember most?

I'll remember the feeling I got when the dam broke. It was Wednesday, March 11. I saw a notification on my phone that the NBA had suspended the rest of the season. I don't even care about professional basketball that much. The idea of a whole league, hundreds of players, millions of fans, billions of dollars, suspending the totality of their activities was the thunderclap that made me realize we had suddenly lurched into a strange new land.

I'll also remember that next day of school, a day that had an ethereal sense to it. There was a great challenge keeping the kids focused at that day as everyone wondered what would be cancelled next. Teachers struggled with being focused that day, too.

And I'll remember a small shopping trip I did late Saturday morning, driving around retail locations that were quiet in a way typical of a sleepy Tuesday morning, not a Saturday.

There was another shopping trip in which there were no frozen vegetables to be found at Giant, nor any whole chickens at Costco. It's when I started to realize that the stores still open had most things, they just didn't have everything.

I'll remember seeing yellow caution tape surrounding closed children's playgrounds. 

But I'll probably most remember that sound when the dam burst, when a sports league I didn't really care about simply shut it all down. And knowing then that the world was about to change dramatically.