Hang a mask on Christmas tree so you never forget
In our throwaway, 21st-century world, there are fewer and fewer family heirlooms.
I have a gold pocket watch that belonged to my maternal grandfather who operated a country store in Middle Tennessee. I also have the American flag that draped my Army sergeant father’s coffin.
Our house has several pieces of furniture made by my wife’s father — a dining room table, a desk and a rocking chair, among them — that will no doubt be cherished by our two sons one day.
But that’s about
it for keepsakes.
If you don’t mind a gentle suggestion, why don’t we all resolve — today — to hang a COVID-19 mask on our Christmas tree, and then pack it away with the other ornaments when the holidays are over. (If you don’t celebrate Christmas, improvise.)
If your household is like mine, we have a big basket of masks, even a red one or two. Pick any mask you like, and write 2020 on it with a bold marker.
Then hang it from your tree, take a step back and think back across the last year. We should never allow ourselves to forget a pandemic that has already taken more American lives than World War II.
I still remember a great-aunt and great-uncle who talked about the deadly 1918 flu epidemic back in the 1970s and ’80s. They didn’t forget. Their heirloom was a family Bible with “flu” written beside several death dates coinciding with the World War I period.
Years from now, these masks-turned-ornaments might be our only memory triggers of 2020, a year that certainly demands to be remembered.
All of us have memories of 2020. Here are some of mine.
› Smiling nervously last winter when a student at UTC told his teacher (me) and his classmates that he had just returned from a holiday-break trip to China.
› Reading the empathy in the eyes of my masked students at UTC nine months later, when I arrived at class one day and told them, with a heavy sigh, that I had just gotten a text informing me that a close family friend had just died of COVID-19.
› Packing my bags to move in with my sister for 10 days when my 18-year-old son returned from being a dishwasher at a summer Christian camp and then tested positive for the virus. (He had a mild case and fully recovered.)
› Watching our then-13-year-old son turn our two-car garage into a quarantine woodworking shop where he built tables and chairs over the summer that people actually paid for. ›
Seeing schoolteachers, such
as my wife, stretched to the breaking point while trying to teach two sets of students — one group online and another group in person. There were nights when I would wake up at 3 a.m. and my wife would still be toiling quietly on schoolwork at the dining room table.
› Watching the newsroom at the Times Free Press empty for months on end as reporters learned to work remotely. Also, missing face-to-face interviews with sources, the most satisfying part of my job as a human-interest columnist.
› Talking to a young nurse from Chattanooga who went to help in New York during the worst of the spring COVID surge. She remembered tossing a football with a friend on a usually busy — but then virtually empty — street in Manhattan, an apocalyptic image.
› Interviewing a lady with agoraphobia about what it’s like to avoid crowds — indefinitely. In her case, for more than a decade.
› Taking daily walks in our neighborhood while sequestering at home and noticing the subtle change in seasons: the way the grass stays green longer than you expect once the days get shorter and the weather turns cold.
› Watching streaming TV series — such as “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit” — for the first time in my adult life. Oh, and also watching almost every documentary available on video streaming services.
› Scrolling through three newspaper apps and countless magazines every evening and consuming much more than the daily recommended allowance of political news. After all the year has wrought, it may actually be the ads for Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoffs that push me over the edge.
› Reading reports of the first COVID-19 vaccines reaching Tennessee last week and realizing that the end of the pandemic may be in sight, but that it will never, ever be forgotten.