Back Off There, Partner!

This morning, I pulled aside the bedroom curtain and peered outside, like a nosy old biddy or hapless resident of some longterm care facility, suffering acute withdrawal symptoms at being separated from the fascinating world-at-large.

What I saw first struck me as amusing, and then sad.

People keeping their physical distance, like young couples sitting on the couch of a Victorian-era parlor, yearning for intimacy but precluded from society from having anything of the sort.

Down below, just in front of the duck pond, sits a bench where residents linger to shoot the breeze, pet each other’s dogs and enjoy the weather, (the little old ladies ignoring the rules and feeding the ducks).

These days, bench visitors are rare, but there they were this morning, four of them. One woman stood apart from the others, by a dozen feet or so. The shy girl at the dance. The others maintained a smaller, but still-sizable buffer zone. 

One older man, you could tell, wanted to reach out and pet his neighbor’s cocker spaniel but he knew that doing so would breach the “No Go” zone.

And so he didn’t, but stood gazing and smiling, forced by the worldwide viral scare not to act, to keep his hands — and his distance — to himself.

This universal “No Go” zone has to me become a queer unnatural thing, considering the lengths people will go to observe it.

Walking the condominium grounds the other day, I spotted my friend Don approaching. Don is 77, a lifetime bachelor with a New Englander's way of speaking.

He didn’t see me at first, his head down, perhaps lost in thought.

“Hi Don,” I said.

He froze in his tracks.

We talked, gossiped, but he came no closer than those six-feet that now signify preserving one’s health rather than the depth at which a body is buried.

As a safety valve against any cabin fever, my wife I take walks each night into the leafy suburban streets near our condo. We have taken to traversing the very center of any lane, like flippant preteen kids bouncing a basketball, because cars are few and this way we can avoid awkward run-ins with — gasp!! — other human beings.

Just the other night, we encountered a man on the sidewalk, not seeing him at first. Suddenly, there he was, standing silently on the grass of a lawn, like a cat, or a Peeping Tom or a stalker.

But he was none of those.

He was merely waiting out the imminent danger at hand.

Us.

That same night, a man and his young son bolted unknowingly into our path, dashing between two parked cars.

“Hi,” I said, knowing they’d been startled.

There was no response.

The father reached out for his son’s hand.

I smelled fear.

in the eyes of our neighbors, alas, we’re all walking Chernobyls.

We now relate to one another as if we're all magnets with a positive charge, rejecting one another, making it impossible to come too close.

This knee-jerk suspicion that passing strangers -- and even acquaintances -- now instinctively hold for one another — is part of our freaky and disconnected new viral world.

I’ve noticed that passersby no longer say hello or even make eye-contact, as though those once-common gestures might pierce the health barrier, the bubble, they aim to keep intact.

There's no way to reach out and say, “Hey fellow human, I’m OK! I’m not sick. And you don’t look sick either, (not that I could ever really tell, mind you). Let's pretend it's the old days!"

But these are not the old days.

No, we now presume that every other person we encounter has the virus. This, I know, is the safest way to walk our planet these days.

Still, my nature is to trust people.

Now, suspicion rules the day.

Officials in the San Francisco Bay area have declared it a misdemeanor to disregard public health orders that have been issued in light of the COVID-19 threat.

And these folks mean business.

A tennis instructor was fined $500 for standing too close to his student during a lesson on the court. Two men were cited on a hiking trail for failing to remain six feet apart.

It reminds me of the days, years ago, when I hitchhiked cross-country during summers away from college. I had a long, shoulder-length explosion of red hair and what my friends called a cow-catcher beard.

I’d stand on the highway entrance ramp, holding a piece of cardboard bearing the scrawled name of my destination city, trying to present the friendliest, most innocent face possible.

The cars would pass, some slowing enough for their inhabitants to make eye-contact before moving on.

Sometimes it would take hours for someone to stop.

Especially those with children in the back seat.

I knew those parents would never risk picking me up.

As happens when you stand clown-like on the roach shoulder for hours on end, you start to talk to yourself.

“Ah, gimme a chance,” I’d say out loud being passed over for the millionth time. “I’m a nice guy. I’ll tell a few jokes, chip in for gas, make the miles melt away.”

They’re the things I almost want to say today to my fellow passersby.

But alas, along with everyone out there in viral-land, I present a clear and present danger.

The other night, as my wife and I walked along some sidewalk at dusk, we noticed another couple crossing the street to avoid us.

“Look at that,” my wife commented. “Has it come to this?

It made her feel bad.

Well, my role in our marriage, one I gladly shoulder, is to make her laugh.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “People crossing the street to avoid you? I’ve been dealing with that for the last forty years.”

“So, motoring public, don’t bother stopping,” says the old hitchhiker.

I’ll walk, thanks.