Two friends

 

I have two friends who have never met each other that I haven't heard from yet this year. I suspect the reasons are bad ones having nothing to do with me. Both have mothers who are in their late eighties, one of which has been declining markedly for years. One has been having family issues regarding some rocky times between her son and his wife.

Pre-pandemic, I'd have been more struck by not hearing from them than I am. Another person I consider a good friend lives a half-hour-drive away, but we haven't seen each other for two years now. Neither of us are Zoomers or phone people. We email back and forth and I feel like I'm up to date with what's happening in this friend's life.

I'm not like most. I go days at a time without uttering a word to anyone at all, and when I break those silences it's only to say hello to the cashier when I'm buying groceries. As normal as this is to me, I do look forward to sitting in the sun and eating lunch with friends again.

Changes

There will be volumes written over the coming decades about the long-term changes the COVID-19 pandemic has caused. I don't know of any left over from the Spanish Flu of 1918. Some might say laws against spitting were made then, but those existed already because of tuberculosis, and were tightened up then. 

Maybe in twenty years other things will have eclipsed the pandemic to such a degree that it'll be forgotten. World War II is probably much of the reason the 1918 flu faded in memory. In five years someone will see a public bathroom door handle like the one in the picture above and have to turn some memory gears to recall why it was put there and when, and maybe wonder if it wasn't put there before or after unrelated to the pandemic.

Pandemic side effect

My grandmother is in this picture.

Time saps the dead of their relevance. We look back at them with condensation, as dimwitted folks with wrong and odd beliefs in the structure of their own solar system and the causes of natural phenomena now understood by children.
A cousin has traced hers and my earliest known ancestor to a man named Hugh de Luttechwicke. Hugh was born in 1050 and had a daughter named was Mabel. He was French. He probably never saw a structure taller than a church's steeple and would never gone faster than the speed of a good horse, about thirty miles an hour, unless he died from a fall off a cliff. It's likely he was near the top of his society. Most then were farmers and European literacy rates were just around ten percent. Hugh must have done something noteworthy to have his name recorded. Maybe he was a member of the clergy. Maybe he tortured confessions from accused witchws. Maybe both.
My parents died nine years ago. I imagine them coming back, of having dinner with them again on a Sunday evening, and me catching them up on what's happened since they died. Throughout the evening, their mouths are agape, jaws slack with amazement and disbelief. Trump, Brexit, and the current pandemic. They lived through a great depression, a world war, a great recession, the election of the first African American president but events since their deaths have gone backward in time. Building a wall to keep people out? A highly contagious disease with no cure in sight? If I told them a simple procedure that cures all cancers had been discovered, or that proof of intelligent life on a distant planet had been found, they'd be more willing to believe me.
I look a pictures of people my age who died in the Seventies. They were smart, funny, good looking. Now all I can see is the dated clothes and hair styles. I have to remind myself they were people with imagination and many of them would have been far more up on things and involved in them than I am. 

I'll be dead in a few years. (Really, I'm surprised to be alive now, considering my medical history.) Every morning, I write two pages in a journal. I do this for myself but a small part of me thinks one of my niece's or nephew's future children might be curious enough about my life and times to slog through my poor penmanship. (They'd have to go online and look up a tutorial on how to read cursive.) After a few pages of reading me kvetch about slights and my memories of working in a factory when I was in my twenties, they'll get bored, put the journal away intending to look at it later, and forget about it. It and the other ones will end up on the bottom of a box for some years and finally, after a basement flood ruins them or someone gets a decluttering bug, will be tossed.