July 22, 2021: Portuguese salami tastes like friendship

July 22, 2021: Portuguese salami tastes like friendship. It was a day when things changed rapidly. Two days ago my cousin had to be admitted to the hospital. It all worked as expected. Today a business meeting had to be cancelled because another flare up of an illness. This is normal. This is no longer a pandemic-driven life but life with the pandemic. Normal things are happening. Sudden illness. Bottle of wine. Portuguese salami washed down with wine and topped off with home-made egg roll. Late evening phone calls with familiar voices. Advising students working on a master’s degree. Meeting about work. The real comes to a hard stop at 9 pm. Few people venture out. The police may stop and slap a fine. The wine needs to be finished by 8:45 pm. Gatherings moved over to lunch at the club, not the extended evenings because everything must wrap up, and the cars must be parked by 9 pm. I have gone out occasionally after the witching hour and the roads would be deserted. The city shuts down. The public health outcome of the shutdown may be unclear, but the life outcome is palpable. A new discipline, a new way of life, fresh masks every day. This may continue. Those who can, are earning sitting in front of a computer. Those who have to go out are doing so knowing that there are risks but with the correct precautions this can be lived with. No false bravado. No arrogance. No return to a mythical classroom of the yesteryears. Something has been learnt. Here. As the summer draws to an end, and I have to re-turn to a make-believe World of the days before the pandemic it will be an adjustment to fooling myself that nothing has changed. Much has changed for me this year. Much has changed for us this year. New fears. New hopes. New possibilities. New relationships. And re-discovering the old. Nearly a year of pause from the familiar invariably makes us question the familiar. I have a COVID-19 test tomorrow. Before my flight on Saturday. This is fine. During the pandemic I have gone through nearly ten such tests. This is the familiar. I have had more sanitizer sprayed on my hands in the past year than ever in my life. I keep a log of my temperature since it is measured at least once a day. It is a curiosity that when the wand is pointed at the arm, most people don’t even notice it any more, just walk past the metal detector and enter the mall. I have made it a habit of asking what my temperature is. This throws off the security person. They have to look again, and they always tell my temperature. I have seen my temperature rise from the Inox entrance to City Center to the entrance to the Starbucks, all within five minutes, by one Fahrenheit degree. I have wondered how these wands are calibrated and what the danger point is and what would happen if my temperature was above that unknown magic number. A polite refusal of entry or a straight reference for a test? People who visit this place and see my contentment are puzzled. One person asked me, “Do you like it here?” There is no here. There is no place. There are only relationships maintained everywhere. Yes, my resounding answer is, Yes, I like it here. Wherever that here is. Even though Phil Collins might have meant something else, but I feel like that, “I've been waiting for this moment, for all my life.”