We were crossing the Peace Bridge from Canada to Buffalo when the world was days from shutting down.
“Do you think they’ll let us back in?” my wife asked me with a look in her eyes that was equal parts sarcasm and genuine concern.
We’d heard the stories about the mystery virus sweeping the country. And we wondered if the border guard at the crossing on a windy day in early 2020 might keep us from going home.
My mother-in-law was watching our daughter and our cats. We had jobs and bills and a mortgage. The worries were more than academic.
We did cross — only after sheepishly telling the guard our trunk was filled with Tim Hortons coffee and Toronto Maple Leafs swag from the game we’d been to the night before. The guard, bless him, decided we weren’t a security risk and let us through.
Days later, the world closed down for real, the doors slamming shut loudly and resoundingly.
In-person gatherings, gone. Masks. Remote work. Remote school in the most trying of circumstances. Joggers. Pandemic sourdough. Panic dashes through the supermarket. No toilet paper. All drive-up everything. Long walks. The “Folklore” LP.
As our lives contracted, that became the new normal. And some felt the burden more than others.
Five years after the world changed; five years after more than 1 million Americans died from a virus that scientists raced to understand and defeat; five years after the advent of a life-saving vaccine; five years after we put up walls between us that still haven’t entirely come down, it’s the little memories — and the big questions that seem no closer to being answered — that stick with me.
In April of that pandemic year, I wrote a column musing on the possibilities that great quiet offered us: The chance to become kinder, to become more understanding, to put aside our differences, to close the gaps of opportunity that have denied too many a seat at the table, and to finally become that platonic ideal of a nation we teach our kids about in history class.
They were the same hopes I harbored in the great quiet after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, when the world rallied to our side, and Americans were knit together in a moment of depthless tragedy.
We largely squandered that chance at renewal in 2001, just as we would squander it two decades later.
In retrospect, those aspirations seem idealistic. But I am reminded that history is replete with inflection points. And it is in those liminal spaces that even the most naive of dreams can become reality.
I bring all this up now because, well, this grim, non-celebratory fifth anniversary is upon us. And also because there has been no shortage of think pieces about what the pandemic has done to our sense of time and the memory hole it has created.
I’ll admit that my sense of time remains distorted. And that, by Friday, it seems entirely possible to have lived many lives since the Monday that started the week.
And it’s also true that the five years that stretch between the start of the pandemic and where we are now seems a geological age long.
But to memory hole the pandemic? That’s another matter entirely.
That feels like a dishonor to the front-line workers who sacrificed so much and a slight to the community groups and volunteers who tried to ease the burden of our shared duress. It’s an offense to the memory of the dead and a slap in the face to those families setting an empty place at dinner forever.
If anything, this anniversary invites reflection, to remember that time of extreme upheaval and uncertainty should have taught us that there is more that brings us together than drives us apart.
There are some inklings of that even now, with more than 8 in 10 Americans saying they want a government that works together to solve the big problems. And there’s a longing for civility despite the magnitude of the challenges we’re now facing.
As I have written before, history might be linear, but it is not inevitable. It’s also filled with fits and starts, progress, and then regression.
But the light at the end of that road always has been hope. It’s the beacon that guided us out of the darkness of Sept. 11th and showed us the way out of the pandemic.
Five years later, with all that we’ve lost and learned, it’s that we can’t let that light go out.
