Flashback Friday

This too Shall Pass

Second Quarter of 2020 started off with a low. Calls for healthcare workers and refrigerator trucks piling up. Big city life is a bit hard when everyone are struggling around you. Life is put on hold. We were lucky enough to stay healthy, and be able to work remotely and still get paid. Many others in our neighborhood were probably not as lucky. The second quarter was the time when we started donating to various organizations. Mostly black owned but also to the public radio. If there was ever a time when public radio was important, 2020 was the year. 2020 when a virus, a pandemic entered the world, something that had been predicted to happen sooner rather than later. The most frustrating part is that the Obama administration had practiced for this, monthly, during several years. They handed over the pandemic response playbook (the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents) to the Trump administration when the transition happened. No one knows what happened to it, but we all sure as hell know it wasn’t opened, EVER.

April

April came with a slap in the face. The emergency call for health care workers because too many people came to the hospitals at once. There wasn’t enough capacity, not enough capacity of healthcare workers, space, and space for the dead. The realization of that horrible thought came when we took a walk to Randall’s Island and saw all the refrigerator trucks on stand by to be sent to various hospitals around the city. A morgue on wheels, how bizarre that we in this day and age can face such a travesty from a tiny little virus. We continued to stay inside and did the best of the situation. We ordered nice beers, and food and I started (like many others) my own little sourdough adventure. We took weekly walks to various parks, mostly Central Park and Riverside Park. It was a bit eerie to meet the spring in this way. The parks were mostly empty, now that so few tourist are around. Most people did their best to keep 6 feet apart, and in reality it was mostly around the reservoir in Central Park that this became hard. We also got to spend some time on our friends/neighbors roof terrace. But even with all this I think the end of April and early May was a low point for both of us.

May

    End of April early May, the lowest point of this pandemic for us. It was the empty city, the troubled neighborhood, the sadness of all lives lost, the graduation celebration that never happened for so many students. The death numbers we were fed with day in and day out, the radio had started to play a relaxation/meditation minute every day around noon by now. It was needed, for everyone, to take a deep breath. But May was also the month it started to get hot, hot enough to enjoy long bike rides through a mostly empty NYC. We biked to the cloisters, and past the little red lighthouse that I’ve wanted to see for so long. And all that time at home meant more baking, and cleaning and a lot of good quality beers from local breweries that delivered for free.

June

   George Floyd was murdered on May 25th, and this was like the final straw to get people riled up. I don’t know if it would have gotten as much attention had the pandemic not been a fact, but the pandemic was real and this was just another brick in the wall of black lives being taken from this earth by us white people. We, like many other New Yorker’s debated weather or not to participate in the protests, and eventually decided that we should, with masks of course. We were not seeing anyone else anyway, and hardly left our apartment as it was. It felt good, good to be participating in something so large. In the midst of all this we got access to a garden plot, and that was one of our best moments during June. Red Rooster is owned by Marcus Samuelsson who grew up in Sweden, and so we ordered a midsummer basket on Juneteenth and celebrated both holidays in Central Park. There were more protest all around the US, and the world, for Black Lives. We went for another bike ride, this time a very long one that took us south on Manhattan to the very point where life in NYC as we see it today started. Then we headed over to Brooklyn and finally came home 25 miles later. June was an intense month, and it was also the month we finalized our move to Millbrook. A move that would happen already in August. We definitely took advantage of that excitement all of June and July, before the move was a reality.