For the many months of pandemic isolation last year I felt a camaraderie with strangers that is evaporating now.
On the phone I would wait patiently for 20 or 30 minutes on hold and then, despite the delay, would thank whoever answered my call for their willingness to work at all during the shutdown.
Sometimes I would even inquire what state or country they were in, and I would ask how the shutdown was affecting them.
Most seemed willing, almost grateful, to share their story, and I was eager to hear it and share my own Vermont variation, even if the exchange amounted to only an extra minute or two on the phone.
I would thank every employee I encountered in my grocery store for working under such dangerous conditions, even if I didn’t know their names.
As the electric doors opened to allow me to exit with my overstuffed cart I would always shout “Thanks for working, everybody!”
And I would praise management for requiring masks.
Gradually, as the country became more vaccinated (are we at 70% yet?) the camaraderie diminished.
As we became vaccinated, what had been a universal recognition — perhaps even a fear — that we were all in the same boat together transformed into an understanding that we were in two boats: the still-cautious boat and the let’s-get-back-to-normal boat.
My grocery store even briefly stopped requiring masks, until a worker got infected and the store had to shut down for two days of cleaning.
And this was in Vermont, one of the least populous states in the union whose COVID-19 rate was equally tiny.
The store reinstated mask requirements, and the delta variant increased Vermont’s previously enviable small infection rate to a much less comfortable number.
Nonetheless, vaccinations and boosters seemed to subtly change perceptions of danger. Now, when I thank people for working or say “stay safe and well” as a salute, I get the feeling some people think I’m living in the past. “We’re back to normal, buddy. No need to be so gushy,” was the slightly impatient expression I saw on some stern Yankee faces.
I guess I sounded a bit overdone, like Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield, over-thanking people for any tiny gesture when he was, in fact, not thankful at all.
And yet delta marches on.
Remember the old cowboy saying “circle the wagons” as a way of protecting yourself from outside danger? With COVID-19 it seems like the safest way to protect oneself is the opposite: separate and isolate the wagons from each other.
But now the strategy of isolation is, at least for me, without the pre-vaccination charm of camaraderie.
I’m just a Uriah Heep to some, thanking them for a sacrifice they don’t think is necessary anymore.
It gives me the creeps to monitor and conceal my gratitude out of embarrassment that my gratitude itself might be perceived as flattery.
Am I pandering to pandemic etiquette?
I’ll just row, row, row my boat — the cautious one.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford Village.