You Belong Here

The other day I was looking out the window with my grandson and I pointed out the man across the street wearing a mask. ‘You know people didn’t always wear masks,’ I said to him. He didn’t respond because he doesn’t know how to talk yet, but I think he got my point. Especially as I went on to explain about the pandemic that began one month after his first birthday. Before that, I told him, you only had to wear a mask if you were getting a stem cell transplant or robbing a bank. (He smiled faintly.)

It was a shock for me to realize again that the particular circumstances of the world at our birth are what we call ‘normal.’ I remembering studying World War II in fifth grade – writing my report the night before with my mother taking dictation on the typewriter and me almost in tears with anxiety as I tried to find my own words for what I was cribbing from the encyclopedia. (It wasn’t plagiarism as long as you said it in your own words.)

For me, World War II had ended at some point in the distant past. Little did I know that it was just fifteen years before that men and women around the world had been killing each other in extraordinary numbers—that a mere twenty years before, our country was fully engaged in a convulsive effort to fight militaristic expansive actions of Germany and Japan—and that the outcome was far from certain.

The fear and confusion around the bombing of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is now nearly twenty years past. My grandson will study it in school as something inevitable and unimaginable. And his first experience of pre-school this fall will be in small pods with teachers wearing masks and with all kinds of other regulations about how much contact he can have and with whom. I am incredibly saddened by this. But he is not.

I feel the weight of all the things he will not be able to do, but he, like all of us, only knows what he knows. ‘People wear masks and I can’t play with the kids who live next door.’ He will meet the circumstances of his life fully, and like every human being before him born on this planet, he will try to make the best of what he encounters. I don’t complain (often) about having to wear shirts and pants, and I suspect masks will just be part what a decent and caring person in his world wears.

The other day, a friend pointed me to a wonderful essay on Camus’s The Plague, by Robert Zaretsky. In the essay Zaretsky writes about the character Rambert who is a journalist who had come down from Paris to Algeria to write an article. While writing this article the city was locked down because of an outbreak of the plague. Rambert tries all kinds of ways to get out of the quarantined city so he can return home. At one point, he goes to the local doctor, Rieux, and asks for a medical pass verifying his good health so that he can travel back to Paris. The doctor replies, ‘”Well you know I can’t give that to you.’ And Rambert, frustrated, says, “But I don’t belong here.” And Rieux’s reply is quite simple and utterly true. “From now on, you do belong here.”’

From now on, you do belong here. Or as another friend says, ‘This is the new abnormal.’ Our world will never be the same and we are all trying to figure out how to live in this new world. For most of us, it is still a strange and disquieting world. Are we still in the first wave or is this the beginning of the second? Will I ever want to go out to a restaurant again? Will the Patriots play any football games this fall and if they do, will the decision of three of their key defensive players to ‘sit this season out’ diminish their chances? We all live with these weighty questions.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Mothers and fathers love their children and want to keep them safe. We grandparents are happy to help out as we can – in person or on Zoom or through the occasional phone call.