To mask or not to mask?

“The pandemic did you a big favor,” a friend told me.

“It gave you what you always wanted: ending public lines; hiding phony smiles; banning cocktail chitchat; ending travel by train, plane, or ship; ending in-person meetings; banning stadium crowds,” the friend said.

JD Salinger would have been right at home isolating in the pandemic

The famous author of “The Catcher in the Rye” spent much of his life hiding out from reporters and interviewers, although he did frequently attend church suppers 10 miles from my Vermont home in the border town of Cornish, New Hampshire.

Another American author, Thomas Pynchon, “the famously reclusive postmodern novelist” has succeeded in living 85 years without being photographed. The only public exception is a single yearbook snapshot of his face. Otherwise the public has no idea what the author of Gravity’s Rainbow looks like.

But twice he has “made a cheeky cameo on The Simpsons with a paper bag over his head” a comic comment on his famous face-phobia.

Now that vaccines and boosters in 2023 have made people feel they can gather in groups again, people look at a mask as if it was a bag on your head designed to hide your face, not a filter to protect your lungs.

Remember lungs —they make you breathe?

A 40-year-old teacher friend of mine with three daughters under the age of 12, described his family’s decision to unmask this way:

“Life behind a mask seems not for most. We are too social of a species. I’ve met many ‘reasonable’ people who opted to shed the mask much earlier than we did. Apparently ‘live free or die’ is much more than a NH phenomenon. I will admit to enjoying life without face covering, though we watch rates and change behavior accordingly.”

I wrote him back that he is “still young and that looking at faces is part of nature’s procreation strategy for human beings.” But, “I am old (78),” I tell him “and I want to avoid the other part of nature’s plan, the part that puts me underground — permanently.”

Lungs help me stay above ground. Anyone disagree with that?

So I continue to wear a mask indoors in public places: grocery store, pharmacy, dentist’s office, doctors’ offices, even the DMV. And I sit outdoors on a folding yard chair I carry with me when I wait for my car at the auto mechanic.

That doesn’t make me a recluse like Salinger or Pynchon. And it certainly doesn’t make me a misanthrope like the character in Moliere’s play called “The Misanthrope.” That’s a fancy word for someone who hates mankind.

My continuing to wear a mask does not mean I hate mankind. It means I understand what Moliere said in that play: “The world will not alter for all your meddling.” And we must not forget the pandemic has taken the lives of 1,2 million Americans and sickened 99.4 million. Across the world the number of deaths is 6.7 million, according to the World Health Organization. In Vermont there is new data.

I fully accept that the only person whose lungs I can protect is me. In a world with 8 billion people my two lungs look pretty small so I intend to take care of them. Luckily that doesn’t mean wearing a paper bag over my head when I’m indoors with some of those 8 billion, only a cloth filter over my mouth and nose.

I can do.