One Year Into The Pandemic
In my email “Sent” folder, I see evidence of my last restaurant meal. It was March 12, 2020 and the beginning of spring break at Syracuse; my husband and I were driving north to meet our son Paul who was making the 1400-mile drive to Houston, to warm weather, and—as we half understood—into the time of COVID. Paul had wisely packed all his possessions into his car; he would bring with him the freight of the interrupted semester, all the books for later in the year, all the clothes for all the seasons. As we crossed one southern state after another, I realized we could spend the night in Knoxville, where, only a few months or so before I had given what would be my second-to-last academic talk before a year of lifetimes. I wrote to my friend and colleague who had hosted that prior visit to be reminded of the name of the hotel in which University of Tennessee had put me up and to see if she wanted to have dinner. The email exchange required a new and tentative etiquette: “If you are up and about we would love to see you,” I wrote. “But we know you may be distancing.” I asked if she knew of a restaurant with a dog-friendly patio. My friend replied immediately with the hotel name and a list of restaurants. She was less certain about meeting up: “I’m not sure whether I am distancing yet or not. I’m supposed to have spin class tonight.” We did end up having dinner, a delicious meal on a patio overlooking Knoxville’s Market Square. The dogs behaved extremely well, even in the presence of another canine diner. There was shrimp and there was eggplant, and someone served us. I chose between desserts. Had I known what I know now I would have ordered both. I hugged my friend goodbye.
This March—for some, this April—was, of course, the first anniversary of the pandemic, a fact of life and death faithfully recorded by pundits, tv anchors, journalists, and by ordinary people. Anniversaries require memory, of which there are different kinds. Lockdown pronouncements have dates, as do death certificates, and epistemological tables. In my academic work, I write about what I call the “fetish of the year.” It is easy to calculate a year from a particular event, especially if you are not too picky about days of the week. Of course, anniversaries are another origin story : there are many days when the epidemic can be said to have begun: the first case in Wuhan; the likely first unrecognized case before then; the first infection in the U.S; the naming of “the novel coronavirus”, the day a particular city or state moved towards lockdown, the appearance of the word “pandemic.” At some point the year becomes crowed with days that serve as the point from which an anniversary can be calibrated.
Years work well as anniversary dates because we record their passage in our bodies. Perhaps it is the play of light, or the temperature, or both: one March feels like another. Without knowing it, we anniversalize. I feel a growing dread different from other dreads in the week extending from Christmas to the end of the first week in January: these are the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths, almost exactly fifteen years apart. I am convinced my younger son felt the departure of his nanny to China for years during the month of June. Nothing goes deeper than seasons and the feelings they are able to carry with them.
Nonetheless we sometimes need help remembering—exactly. Even today, I cannot remember whether my mother died the 3rd or 4th of January, 1993. If I were to read this sentence in a novel, I would say that the uncertainty of a protagonist about this crucial date would be a sign of uncaring, or repression. I remember laughing at just such a sentence in Albert Camus’s The Stranger; “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday . . .” Our whole IB French class laughed, perhaps because we were relieved to have understood the sentence in French, in a book probably picked for the simplicity of its tenses. How, I wonder now, did the protagonist mark the anniversary of his mother’s death? He had a telegram; I have the death certificate and the tombstone, but I forget every year. In other words, every January I mark an anniversary of forgetting.
I have the email to my friend to help me remember the beginning of the pandemic, perhaps the anniversary of my written use of the term “distancing.” My self-archive reminds me that this was the first word people around me used—not lock down, staying at home, or quarantining. The email’s entanglement in the problem (and pleasures) of dogs also reminds me of how lucky I felt later on, perhaps later in March or in April, that we had sat outside the restaurant even though it was a little chilly. This, however, could be a false memory, because we may not have known yet about even the rudiments of airborne transmission. And “yet” is a key word here; my friend used it (I don’t know if I am distancing yet”) because she knew some day, perhaps the next day, perhaps as early as March 13, she would in fact be distancing.
As the confusion over my mother’s death suggests, many anniversaries are tentative, misrecognized, misremembered, or just plain false. The dinner with my friend, my husband, and my dogs, was not, technically, my last restaurant meal before our withdrawal from public spaces. On the way back from Tennessee, now with Paul in tow, we stopped at a Cajun restaurant (it was after all crawfish season). I think it was a chain, with none of the funky atmosphere of a place Scott and I had stopped on the way up. It specialized in giant seafood boils covered in butter and sauces, for the consumption of which we were given bibs (very common in these places) and thin, transparent, plastic gloves. I remember thinking that the gloves, through which one could feel the heat and almost the spice of the shellfish, might offer some protection against COVID. If I had known the word “fomite” then I might have used it.
If the “real” anniversary of my public eating was on March 13, why, even in the face of corrective memory, insist on universalizing that Last Supper (don’t get me started) in Knoxville? Was it because that meal included, for the last time, someone outside my household-- the household that formed somewhere in Tennessee and got carried south and west to Houston to expand over time a very little as the pandemic progressed? Or was it because—not to put too fine a point on it—that meal, that designated last meal was delicious? I remember the feeling of looking at the menu and seeing all my favorite things arrayed there. I can still remember the taste and the chill of the glass of wine, poured somewhere I did not see and brought to me in a big, delicate glass. Perhaps the second restaurant doesn’t count because of those quite horrible gloves that came between me and my crustaceans; although they had nothing to do with pandemic, they feel even today as if they were the beginning of the masking, the gloving, the germaphobia of pandemic times.
Anniversaries are, of course, always tangled both in memory and forgetting. While my self-archive allows me to calculate somethings, some events, quite precisely, I sometimes find myself unable to use the simple plus-one-calculus that an anniversary requires. Take, for example, Easter. The holiday is of course famous for its temporal slipperiness, its eschewal of easy dating. Even more confusing to me, however, is that none of my family can remember what we did last Easter, which the calendar informs me was on April 12, 2020. “We must have done something,” I say weakly, not even knowing who the “we” in our household was at this point. Yes, my younger son must have been there, but was it before or after my older son school went online and he started teaching remotely from our house? There are, of course, no pictures of Easter guests, but there are also, oddly, no pictures of dyed eggs or food. Did we give up on our annual making of eggs, our uneven experimentation with different techniques? Did we not eat lamb or ham, pull out as we have done for the last ten years or so, the recipe for rhubarb strawberry vacherin that tastes like spring and must be made, ritually, in stages? I am greeted by blankness as I scroll through my iPad photo album. My mind is also blank. How can we have an annual holiday when we do not remember the event of which it is an anniversary? My mind tells me we did “nothing” to mark Easter in 2020, but my body tells me differently. As I dyed my eggs last Saturday, making familiar motions with my hands, I knew somehow that those motions were part of an unbroken chain of similar gestures: that every year, without a break my hands had turned pink and red and blue. I have no proof that we made eggs, or lamb, or ham last year—that I took the Easter bunny decorations from their place in the closet. I feel that anniversary, though, not so much in my bones, but in my hands and on my pulse.
As I mark, along with the rest of the world, the first year of the pandemic, that anniversary comes into conflict with those written yet deeper into my body and psyche. While I love all changes of season, it is spring I feel most fully. The seasonality persists even as my location changes: inside of me are the sudden springs of Italy, the extended flowerings of the mid-Atlantic, the reluctant and chilly springs witnessed from behind glass in New England. For thirty years now, the rhythm of my springs has been shaped by the Gulf Coast—from the flowering of bulbs in January to the last heavy scent of Jasmine in May that vanishes with the onrush of heat. One of my sources of joy in spring is that it does not deal in exact numbers: I feel the things I feel without regard to the calendar. Almost all the stories I read about this first anniversary of the pandemic depend on its being the last—and perhaps then, not an anniversary in the way we tend to think of them. Perhaps we will return to a more cyclical notion of time, to a blurring of dates and the resonant approximations of bodily memory.