Questions of a different kind of distance

I helped moved a few things from one room to another room today. And, when we were done with that we all sat down, carefully distanced — because we are conscientious about this sort of thing, except for the one guy, who, look, I happened to have a tape measure on me at the time and I ran out several feet of tape and pointed this out and I know you to be a smart individual, step back — and properly masked and all of the usual things, because we’re almost a year into the routine of it, now. Except the one guy, I guess.

Oh, if he were the only one, right? But there’s always the one person, in any walk of life, in any scenario you might think up. Parties, the game, the store, in a social distancing context, there’s always that one individual. And I chant “patience and grace” to myself, and, these days, I’m grateful the mask covers 64 percent of my facial expression.

Anyway, he left, and there’s no point to his presence in this story, or to the story, really. But he went about his day and we all sat down to chat and I sat on a chair that had this sticker on it.

Because, eventually, we all take turns being that guy.

I remember covering a hurricane once where the pre-landfall story of dubious origin was that the authorities were patrolling the areas under evacuation orders and handing out toe tags to anyone that had stuck around. The point being, that there’s a certain type of personality that doesn’t take a hurricane seriously. So, maybe this comparison won’t stand out the way the expert would have hoped. At some point, you get it or you won’t get it. Eleven months in, I’d argue, we’re well past that point. Nevertheless:

The first thing about this is, Well, that was obvious and apparent as a potential problem. The second part is, the sample size is, obviously, demographically skewed. So this is what you’ve have to work from as an observer.

Take this incredible woman’s story, for example.

The third, and equally important thing is, this won’t get better as we slide down the age scale.

What if we brought in the people from Chick-fil-A, Amazon, the IRS and each community’s most successful delivery start up and start a super group?

Don’t you just love when your brain seizes on a bit of history?

I spent some time looking through the online records. Mr. Hall was a man of some achievement and professional notoriety. As always, you’re getting the thinnest of outline notes in newspaper form. But what I’ve learned leaves a lot of interesting questions that you’d like to have answered these many decades hence.

So if anyone knows their grandchildren or great-grandchildren … send them my way for a quick conversation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 9:47 pm and is filed under photo, Thursday, Twitter. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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