Requiem for the Pandemic: Stella Blue

My memories of the early pandemic are fading quickly now. This is what I have been able to hang onto.

March 22, 2020 - Wading River, New York

My memories of living through the pandemic are sliding into emotional amnesia. Those early days are fading into thin wisps of recollection and chance nostalgia. 2020 has joined the forgettable procession of years. It's become a 2014 or a 1996 or a 1988 or a 2007 or all the rest of the years I can't find on an emotional map.

I'm thinking of the lost early days here in New York City, long before the promise of vaccines, before that first season of sidewalk shelters and December heat lamps, before the white collar exodus from the city, and plummeting rents in Manhattan, before the NFL stadium seat cutouts, and the motorcycle rally in the Dakotas, and the doctors in front of Walter Reed, and the feverish President on the balcony. Before the pointless inertia of hand sanitizing and fruitless contact tracing, before the lumbering, bureaucratic WHO, the slumbering CDC, before the parade of forgotten Greek letters, the second-guessing, the bad blood, the …