I don't know whether to celebrate summer or prepare for the worst
This week, New York City recorded no coronavirusrelated deaths for the first time since the outbreak arrived in the city. Yet elsewhere, daily deaths hit new highs in Florida, parts of California went back under lockdown, and schools in LA and San Diego announced they won’t be opening for the start of the school year in August.
To be in a former hotspot where the virus is, for now, under control, is to occupy a strange twilight world. Looking at the rest of the US, the assumption in New York is that things will definitely get worse. Now – for a hot second – is the time to break cover.
It has been strange, glancing at the UK, to see the focus of reopening fall on garden centres and pubs. The preoccupations are different, over here. New York is a neurotic town and for those lucky enough to have adequate insurance, the reflex response to phase three reopening has been a rush towards healthcare practitioners. After months of missed screenings, wellness checks, and that peculiarly American obsession, orthodontics, the imperative in the last 10 days among certain stripes of New Yorker has been to jam in as many visits to doctors as can be realistically managed. This week, I booked in for overdue mammograms, dermatologist screenings, ob-gyn check-ups, as well as my kids’ routine medicals and all the dentistry we can lay our hands on.
It’s a psychological as much as a physical reflex. One effect of the pandemic has been to change how we process the passage of time, so that for months now, many of us have been forced to inhabit the unbearable yogainspired maxim of living entirely in the present. All future plans cancelled, or at least suspended until further notice; no knowledge of how things will turn out, how deep the economic impact will go, or when we’ll be able to fly to see our loved ones again. If making plans is a way to convince ourselves we have more control than we do, that illusion has been truly shattered.
The great divide of the pandemic, of course, is between those for whom the impact of this – be it in lost income or lives – has been immediate, and those for whom the slow motion domino effect of the tanking economy will be felt further down the line. For some, to be relieved of the ability to make plans for the future has been an experiment in living that has, to date, had occasional upsides: less pressure to do anything, including shower and get dressed; a break from frog-marching the kids to their endless extracurricular activities. A chance, for a second, to exhale.
Those days of relief are almost certainly numbered and it raises a question. For anyone with even small amounts of disposable income, what is the sensible course of action this summer? Is it wanton, now, to spend any money at all, given the certainty that more bad times are coming? Or, given that certainty, is now the time to have a last hurrah and sneak in a few weeks of vacation in August – if you can drive far enough out of New York to escape the price-gouging of local holiday rentals – so that, if lockdown reoccurs, you are not still burnt-out and shouting?
This is a luxurious dilemma for sure. But for those with wriggle room, it does force a reassessment around what in our lives qualifies as “essential”. So many things we considered non-negotiable have fallen by the wayside in the last four months that our old lives look bloated and absurd. This goes all the way down to latterly unthinkable things, like full-time education. Overlooking the dire impact on childcare, when a friend with three kids said to me this week, “I have a theory that you can miss a whole year of school and nothing happens”, I found myself inclined to agree. There will come a point, however, when this rationalisation exhausts itself and we will have to figure out what we can and can’t do without.
Perhaps I’m being too apocalyptic. Perhaps we’ll have a new president in November, there will be a vaccine in January, and much of this will be moot. But it doesn’t feel that way now, and I keep thinking of the biblical line popularised by Jeanette Winterson: “The summer is ended and we are not yet saved”. In which case, for those still able to, perhaps it is prudent to invest in small joys while we can.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist