My favorite icebreaker these days is to ask people what they’re planning for their second-dose debut. What’s on the menu for their dream dinner party? Where will they go for their next international vacation? I’ve gotten wonderful images from this: Of convertibles hugging the curves of Cinque Terre, an Italian vacation wardrobe of black and white. Shared cheese plates with honey and figs, on a vintage quilt for a tablecloth. Pulled-pork sliders with homemade moon pies for dessert.
What I’m really asking is: How will we know it’s over?
The writer Colin Dickey recently posted his disappointment that there won’t be a public Independence Day-style declaration of victory post COVID, where the survivors all hug and weep.
“Never have so many millions of people all embarked on separate, private journeys all at the same time as we have in the past year,” he wrote.
Or as my friend Katrina, a therapist and believer in the importance of rituals, puts it:
“Everyone’s been so in their head. We’ve all become a bunch of house cats who are now being let out in the world.”
That’s how I feel in downtown Savannah these days, amid the bustling spring break scene: Skittish, nervous, like it’s all a little too soon. But is it? Am I just out of practice? Or is everyone a bigger freak than before?
Last spring is completely wiped from my memory. I don’t remember the azaleas. I don’t remember how the season of rebirth was just beginning when the world shut down.
But time had been skipping around for me much earlier than March 2020. In the final stages of my pregnancy several months before, I felt increasingly compelled to withdraw from society to nest. I no longer wanted to make small talk or carry on with normal activities.
In the early days with a newborn, I downshifted even further into a biological state. We met our basic needs and did little else. We slept in bursts and were awake at all hours. Days trickled by and gushed until somehow three months of maternity leave were up, as quick as a blink, as long as a lifetime.
Then when lockdown started, everyone joined me in suspended animation as life stubbornly marched on.
For me, the joke about not knowing what day it is during COVID is forever twinned with the cliché about how time with babies goes by so fast. (The first time someone said that to me, I was still pregnant. “Mine are 22 and 24,” she said wistfully. “Hold on to every precious moment!” I grimaced a half-smile, unable to see my feet over my belly.)
Maybe time won’t ever really resume the way it did before I had a baby. Maybe I’ll always be in this liminal space, where everything goes too fast and too slow, where the insistence that I adhere to a chronological framework is an affront to the way my life actually wants to unfold.
Can this walking, talking toddler really be the helpless bundle I brought home from the birth center, shell-shocked? There are so few moments in life where time cleaves into a “before” and “after”, when you pass through the portal to a new land.
In the meantime, my re-entry plans are solidly tame: A pedicure. A Savannah Bananas baseball game, where I had dreamed about my baby getting “banaptized” last spring. Mom shit, rather than a Miami Beach bacchanal. And perhaps that’s the biggest sign that times have changed.