Lonely No More

Pondering how we collectively will remember 2020 and all things COVID has me thinking about one of my most vivid memories of the early days. I can't find evidence that I wrote it down, so maybe better now than never? It'll be interesting to see if I remember it the same way 10 years from now.

So ... early days. Early in COVID there were a lot of things that were just plain impossible or difficult. I ran into one of them when I decided to build Mila a playhouse for her birthday instead of throwing a party. I initially ordered all of the lumber for said playhouse online and paid for it to be delivered to our house. That cost me a few weeks in the whole project schedule, but it was worth it because remember how we all tried to stay home at first? I was trying to stay home.

But then Lowe's screwed up and the lumber was delivered to a store instead of our house and blah, blah, blah ... it was going to take them WEEKS to fix the whole thing. Or I could just go pick up the lumber that day. Considering that would make it a curb pickup situation, I decided to do that. The only problem was that it wouldn't possibly fit in my SUV, so I needed to rent a truck. Back then, you couldn't rent a truck for an hour from Home Depot because COVID and I couldn't find an hourly rental from U-Haul or any of the alternatives either. Thus, I had to rent one from a traditional car rental place, which led me to having to go to the airport in the middle of a pandemic.

For those who have forgotten how the Pittsburgh airport is arranged, you -have- to go inside to get to the car rental counters. Long story short, I found myself nervously walking through an airport in the middle of a pandemic but I'm not sure why I was nervous because THERE WAS NOBODY THERE. Seriously, there were more people standing outside naked in Antarctica that day than there were in the airport. It was ... weird. So weird. I've been to that airport thousands of times and it isn't that empty at 2:00 am. It was stunningly clean and vacant, much like I suppose it would be in some sort of freaky horror film right as the super scary guy is about to pop out of a restroom to murder you.

ANYWAY. I rented a truck, picked up the wood, dropped it off at home, and it all worked out. But one thing led me to the other thing and I found myself driving through the Robinson shopping area. As in, I drove through the IKEA parking lot and the plaza across from it and YOU GUYS EVERYTHING WAS CLOSED THEN.

It was a ghost town. It was probably 5:00 in the evening on a Saturday when this all went down. At any other time in all of life, those parking lots would have been packed with hustle and bustle. Instead, they were abandoned like some sort of scene out of The Walking Dead. Except that there weren't even zombies groaning in the corner to make things a little less creepy.

It was so quiet.

And so empty.

And the thing I kept thinking was that I wondered what would still be there on the other side. Which stores would survive the closures? Glancing through the windows of TJ Maxx, I wondered how long it would be frozen in time. They had an impressive Easter display at the front of the store, even though Easter was most definitely over at that point. Shopping carts blocked the doors so that looters wouldn't get any bright ideas and just bust in to take the 2' tall tacky Easter Bunny that stood guard over all of the odds and ends candy. Inside the store it was mid March, but outside it was early May and it was so very disconcerting.

And lonely. I think that's the feeling that will endure. Loneliness. Even as we were gathered at home with our loved ones, the world felt lonely because it was so empty.

Now you probably can't drive through those same parking lots in less than 20 minutes because they're probably packed. So much can change in a year. THANKS, SCIENCE.