June 11, 2021, Commentary from in front of Zoom

 June 11, 2021, Commentary from in front of Zoom: A strange thing happened today. It was preceded by an event on Wednesday, and I wrote about it. On Wednesday I resurrected the afternoon cocktail on the porch. People came. We saw each other. Unmasked. As if we were back in 2019. The June of 2019, when there were celebrations on the porch before going away to the mountain desert. Leh. And this Wednesday, two year later, seemed to erase the lost year in our collective lives. We shared a drink, we laughed. Laughed. When this was cruelly snatched from us in 2020, I invited people to the screen. How could there be a summer without the gatherings. The wine. The pretzels. Before the verandah. The time on the verandah seemed impossible without the time on the porch. In 2020 there was no verandah. Locked down and locked out. So, I invited all to meet in the virtual porch. And people came. On some days. the screen was full of the tiny rectangles. We spoke in excited voices, we picked up our private glasses of wines, on our porches, basements and living rooms. We had our collective beverage. We communed. Because there was no other way, and we kept coming back. Every Friday when it was the 4oclock hour in Winston we gathered on the screen. This continued. There were the regulars. There were those who occasionally dropped in. Every Friday morning in Winston Salem an email fell into the mailboxes inviting people to the gathering. Some seemed to await it, and this became the moment of community on the screen. We learnt about Covid, we chatted our way through an election, we lamented the loss of one of the regulars who left us. Forever. This Wednesday things changed. I started the real porch. Will anyone come to the virtual porch? Today. I waited with bated breath. Is the virtual porch over? Has it outlived its utility, has the vaccine killed my virtual porch? Perhaps it has. There were only three of us there today. The regulars have gone back to living IRL. Covid is over. I must say. As the three of us conversed and communed, perhaps there was a slight sense of redundancy. We can now come to your porch. What can we bring? Did something disappear as the Zoom screens will go dark? Will we ever remember how we survived in our Zoom bunkers. How we communed. How we lived in an imaginary World, where the unthinkable was possible – meeting at 1:30 at night to find the fraternity. Takes me back to an imaginary place with people who were conjured up on the tiny screen offering the comfort many children have found in a dinosaur of their imagination. Zoom is now that dinosaur.