random truths – Day 1,085 (Tuesday) – reality hit

The view from the smock room,
March 7, 2020.

On March 7, 2020, COVID-19 started to become real. The news for that day included a story about federal officials trying to figure out where to dock a cruise ship off the coast of San Francisco that had COVID cases. 

According to the entry on the website The Week for March 7, 2020, “Overall, the number of global cases of COVID-19 crossed the 100,000 threshold Friday and it has reportedly killed nearly 3,500 people. The U.S. death toll rose to 17 after Florida reported two fatalities, the first that weren't on the West Coast.” In Austin, the South by Southwest Festival, due to start on March 13, was cancelled for the first time in 34 years. 

On March 7, 2020, as I drove back to Lowell from a hair appointment in Worcester, my phone rang. It was a message from the Bank to all employees, telling us that the annual Bank-wide Celebration of Success, scheduled for the following Tuesday, was cancelled. Having 500 team members in one place was too risky. The event had been postponed by one day in the past due to snowstorms, but this was something else.

That evening, I met friends at Christina’s Restaurant in Leominster for dinner, followed by a dance party at the Elks club with the band Neurotic Gumbo. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my last time eating dinner in a restaurant with friends for a year, maybe two. Possibly three, if we’re talking about a sit down restaurant dinner with drinks, at night.

March 7, 2020.

Had we known what was coming, we would probably have taken photos to mark the event. Instead, the photos from that date are of the glass block window in the smock room at the hair salon and its warped view of the outside, and my hair after it had been blown out straight and smooth. 

Since that day three years ago, nothing has been quite the same. Schedules, relationships, routines, work, all shaken up and not always put back together the way they were. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just different.