I would venture that many of us know how this mask feels: broken, beat down, worn, torn and ragged. Roughed up and scuffed up and tossed away like so much discardable waste. After a year of occupying this new reality, a new fatigue has set in, and if spring doesn’t hurry up and unlock us from our winter imprisonment, I’m fearful for what this inmate might perpetrate. Thinking back to one year ago is an exercise in astonishment – both for what actually transpired over this past year, and in the way that we used to live just 365 days ago.
At the start of last March I was in the office sitting across from Sherri at her desk, almost teasingly floating the impossible idea of things closing, and I distinctly remember saying that there was no way they would cancel the show we were about to see, and if they did I said they would have to close all of Broadway which would never happen. We all know that that’s exactly how it all happened in the following weeks, and it’s now been one full year since the last time our whole office was at work together.
In that time, a new reality and way of life has emerged. It was a rocky path at first. Work-wise I think a lot of us struggled to find our footing in those early days – personally it felt like I was working in the dark, unsure and unaware of where all my usual shortcuts and files were, but eventually, and rather quickly, we found our way again, and in many ways working remotely has improved both the quality and quantity of my work output. More importantly, a new way of life in the way of caring for others and being more careful with people emerged as all of us worked to protect ourselves and our loved ones in the face of a world-wide pandemic. It seems not even that was able to fully impress itself upon the immensity of our population – and some not-so-smart people still don’t seem to get it. This is one of those history-making moments that changes the trajectory of the world. I’m not sure why people can’t see it. To that end, my family and friends have shifted our lives accordingly, and in the end it will be for the better.
Where once I lamented on the loss of a Plaza weekend in New York, or a Mother’s Day weekend with Mom, or our almost-annual BroSox Adventure with Skip, I now mourn for over 536,000 lost American lives (and counting), for an increasingly racist society emboldened by white supremacy that can seemingly go unchecked even when breaking into our very Capitol building, and for so many ill-informed and hate-filled people who readily gobble up blatant and easily refutable lies. While President Biden is doing an amazing job of cleaning up the mess left by the former guy, so much hatred and indivisibility has been unleashed it is an impossible task to fix it all – but I have not quite given up. If anything, I’m becoming more vocal about what will and will not stand. Justice and truth and equality are the tenets upon which America was founded. Now is not the time to give up. And so we go into this second year of our new reality, with a resurgence of inspiration, a jolt of doing what is just and right, and the knowledge that the direction of our country’s moral compass depends on all of us.
