Rediscovering the pleasure of old friends and family

Icover breaking news for The Denver Post, but I’m not breaking a ton of news when I say the new coronavirus has upended our lives in nearly all negative ways. We can’t hang out with friends at our favorite bars and restaurants; we can’t go bowling, take improv classes or ski in Colorado’s beautiful mountains.

Hospitals are preparing for a surge in patients. People have died. More will be hurt before this is all over.

But there’s been one unexpected benefit that I can’t help but notice, and it’s one that’s carried me through these strange, scary times.

While my normally buzzing social life has been completely changed by the global pandemic, I’ve never been in better touch with my friends and family. Ever.

As businesses were closed and stay-at-home orders went into effect from California to New York to Colorado, a strange and uplifting thing happened: People started reaching out. Friends from high school who I hadn’t spoken with in months — sometimes years. Teammates from college, cousins, aunts and uncles, and old pals from my study abroad program.

The coronavirus stops for no one. But in a sense, that’s what has helped spawn this bizarrely connected new social landscape. And as texting has become the defacto mode of communication over the past decade, the return to actually talking — imagine that! — over the phone or on video has been a refreshing change.

Instead of going out or getting dinner with friends on a Friday night, I now have a weekly Zoom call (shout out to Zoom) with a huge, unruly group of friends from my childhood. I’ve stayed in touch with some more than others over the years, but it’s mostly through text or when I can get back home to Boston.

Now, once a week, promptly at 6 p.m., we all converge in a video chat. We’ve got people in Denver, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, Mich., talking about anything but the coronavirus. We’re singing James Blunt songs from the mid-2000s that drove one friend to nearly stop hanging out with us. We’re reliving the glory days of the 2008 Boston Celtics, who won the championship the night we graduated high school. And we’re sharing awful old pictures of our prepubescent days, cackling like we’re in our friend Bob’s basement once again.

The chats go on for hours as people filter in and out, bringing in significant others, pets and roommates to join the uproar. You can barely hear anything or have an intelligible conversation with someone one-on-one. And it’s perfect.

These new routines have taken some getting used to, but I find myself looking forward to them all the same.

Instead of playing in my normal pickup basketball game on Sunday mornings, I’m setting my alarm, brewing a pot of coffee and playing video chat “Settlers of Catan” with my old roommates from my time in Washington, D.C.

We catch up a bit, put on stupid virtual backgrounds behind us and banter like we once did. Some things never change — even if we can’t be within 6 feet of another human being.

The coronavirus outbreak has been overwhelmingly terrible. But if there’s one small thing that continues after this is all over, I hope we keep some of the connections we’ve built during these rough times.