3,300 is not just a number
I’ll say one thing for this spring of the plague year, during which more than 3,300 Connecticut people have died from COVID-19related medical catastrophes: it has been so cold that the violets and daffodils stayed in full flower for weeks longer than usual.
It helps when you still have morning frost on car rooftops in mid-May.
The lawn flora reminds me of the thousands of funerals that have not had bouquets of cut flowers for mourning families and friends.
These early spring beauties, with some additional color from the pink bleeding hearts, are my favorite reminders of the seasonal renewal. So, we’ve got violets and daffs going for us. The irises are not far behind now, lurking in their bed with flower buds emerging on their slowly rising stalks like green swan heads.
It’s also been much windier than usual, sending our next-door neighbors’ two 90-gallon garbage and recycling bins flying into ours a couple times a week with the huge, plastic drum crashes.
As the weather heats up, I’m hoping that we’ll now slide into the diminishing coronavirus curve, like the end of a very bad dream, which the fabulist in Washington so thoroughly, monumentally misjudged and is now boldly denying his historic bungling.
Staying more homebound means that if we pay some degree of attention, we get to watch the changing light throughout the day and watch the cats make their deliberate ways to the bureau in the bedroom, the kitchen window, and then the living room floor when the mid-afternoon sun swings around, their secret lives revealed.
I can’t remember the prospect of dinner becoming such a hot topic in the breakfast hour, before the coronavirus pandemic took away talk of restaurants, dinner with friends, drinks with colleagues after work, a movie, a show at Cafe Nine.
The catbirds have taken over the backyard and the half dozen squirrels on our block cross the much-lessbusy street with a shaggytailed impunity now, on their way to strip the buds off the chokecherry tree. All the rain, then a warm day on Friday and it seems that today’s the day the maples burst into full leaf.
I go into the woods on days off and learn all kinds of new natural wonders, like red-bellied woodpeckers have a polygamy thing going on. That explains the four we saw, dancing with each other while leap-frogging, pecking away for bugs in an old birch tree.
It’s the next 3,300 deaths I’m worried about now. It’s not as if I think the worst of people, but the reality is that too many are being jerks about this mask wearing and social distancing.
It’s not like I’m expecting teenagers to get their heads out of the clouds. I remember back when life was long and adulthood was nowhere near the horizon.
But the supermarket employees who don’t wear their masks correctly are asking for complaints not only to management, but to corporate types, when I explain that their inability to keep employees observant and customers properly socially distant, resulted in a loss of my business.
If you don’t care about me, then I don’t want to give you my money. Sounds like a fair deal, people. We can just keep looking for grocers who are committed to customers beyond words in an advertisement.
What can you say about middle-aged people ignoring social distancing and not wearing masks? That they’re making America great in the freedom of their non-conformity? That they’re watching too much Fox News and really want to be carrying a rocket launcher outside the State Capitol, but they’d worry about blowing themselves up?
Something like that, but it’s more like 3,300 COVID-19-related deaths are just a number and have not given them pause to look within.
It’s much easier looking out than in, especially when you can’t control much in your life an maybe you don’t want to assess it.
With the thousands of different stories out there in this sad, scary pandemic, I have to admit that I kind of miss the comparatively mundane variety of issues of the General Assembly, which usually approves 250 or so laws every year. This year exactly one bill has been signed by the governor, assuring towns get their municipal aid. The governor announced it, fittingly, on Friday the 13th.
Two days earlier, on March 11, legislature shut down for a long weekend and still hasn’t come back, leaving the 2020 session frozen in time like the bottle of sanitizer I photographed on a House clerk’s desk that final afternoon. We were still six days away from the first COVID-19 fatality.
If you’re loathe to respect other people and wear a mask in public, why not try counting to 3,300? They’re just numbers. Want to be a number?