Welcome to your COVID parole
Congratulations fellow prisoners: we’re getting out on probation!
Starting Monday, we Montrealers will be released from our COVID cells and granted day parole, as stores, car dealers, physiotherapists and other services open — and we return to a semblance of life Before COVID.
If we remain on good behaviour and six feet apart, we might soon get more freedoms, like haircuts and even restaurants (places where they bring food to your table and wash the dishes, which seems like a dream).
So as the sun shines gloriously and you step cautiously out from home confinement into our new living-with-covid world, here’s what’s been changing in recent days.
Gatherings: Parks are quickly becoming the new festival grounds of spring 2020, without the festivals.
Since gatherings of 10 were recently announced, Jeanne-mance Park has been filled with groups of people in swimsuits, lounging and yakking while safely spaced.
It’s amazing how many people we’ve learned to squeeze into a park, all six feet apart. Many are sprawled in the latest social distance formation: a large circle with people’s faces six feet apart, but their feet just three.
It looks safe and police are permitting it, so let’s hope some Bulgarian study from the Universityof-i-never-heard-of-it doesn’t make news by declaring: “FEET TRANSMIT THE VIRUS TOO!”
There was even a mild version of the Tam-tams last Sunday with dreadlocked drummers spread well apart. That’s partly because cops on bikes were watching, too, ready to hand out more $1,000 tickets as they’ve done for weeks.
So be a good COVID citizen for everyone’s sake.
Quebec travel: Police checkpoints blocking traffic to the regions have largely come down. So many Montrealers are heading for their cottages hoping to get there before the black flies do.
But just because we want to go to “the country” doesn’t mean it wants to host us. Much of rural Quebec views Montreal as a Sodom and Gomorrah at the best of times, teeming with haughty urbanites and hordes of immigrants who bravely staff much of Quebec’s health-support system.
There’s the same urban/rural tension in much of the world, but now with COVID -19, many Quebec villages also view Montreal like a giant festering infection.
A recent Léger poll found 80 per cent of people outside Montreal want to isolate and quarantine our city. A La Presse columnist recently visited Sherbrooke and said some shopkeepers backed away from him like he had, well … the plague.
But Montrealers are fighting back — with humour. A popular satirical French-language tweet was headlined: “MONTREALERS PREPARE TO VISIT THE REGIONS” — accompanied by a picture of rampaging Frankensteins.
Responsible urban travellers should bring their own food and toilet paper and drive to the cottage after midnight, then hide out on the porch. But is that enough?
Another talked-about francophone satirical post reads: “Car-sharing company Communauto is now offering old, bashedup pickup trucks, for Montrealers who want to visit the regions incognito.”
Alternatively, you could just put moose antlers on your SUV’S hood, then plaster it in Journal de Joliette stickers.
Stores and services: Most of these will reopen in Montreal on Monday. But will Montrealers go?
Many shops won’t be as inviting as before in our new sanitation-spooked world. They’ll be halving their customer capacity to social distance, so we may face lineups at everything from sports stores to sex shops.
There will be Plexiglas barriers everywhere, masked clerks and eerily masked customers — like you — all worrying about each other’s germs.
The natural impulse will be to simply buy everything online, from clothespins to couches. Yes, it’s easier to order stuff from Amazon or Walmart — an online trend COVID-19 has massively boosted.
If I was forced to have a conspiracy theory about who started this virus, I wouldn’t blame the Chinese. I’d say “who benefits?” as Amazon and other big online sites are practically wiping out their street-corner competition.
In a way, COVID -19 is a bullying, capitalist virus that picks on vulnerable small stores, as it does on the elderly and the poor in crowded city neighbourhoods.
But let’s all fight our fears. Our neighbourhood clothing shops, opticians, tailors and toy stores are clinging to life and desperately need us to stay alive.
If we lose our shops, we’ll also lose our liveliest downtown and district main drags — which will sure look depressing if their windows are shuttered. So shop locally and help save your neighbourhood stores and streets.
You’ll miss them if they disappear.
Uber also faces challenging times in these germ-sensitive times, but it’s hardly a neighbourhood business. In fact, I see big possibilities for someone to start a motorcycle rickshaw business, like the open-air tuk-tuk taxis that fill India’s streets.
Anyway, enjoy your newfound freedom, fellow prisoners.
But remember: If we misbehave and break the law by mixing too closely, we could quickly re-inflame this murderous virus.
Then we’ll all be back in the slammer for the summer, with no one to blame but ourselves for violating our parole.