On Day 25 of California’s shelter-in-place orders, I sat on the backyard deck of my parent’s house in San Francisco, reading a novel and drinking green tea. Birds chirped; the thick, wet stillness of the morning fog felt especially quiet. But every few minutes, little shrieks of excitement pierced the damp stillness. The three kids next door have played outside nearly every day recently — something my parents say rarely happened before.
Their high-pitched voices pulled me out from my book, again and again, until finally I had left the world of my novel entirely and was pulled into theirs instead.
“Molly!” the boy, Leo, yelled. “I found one!”
“Again?!” his older sister called back. “Not fair. You have four. I only have two — oh, I see one in this bush! It’s blue!”
What are they looking for? What’s blue?
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Then I remembered: It’s Easter. They’re doing an Easter egg hunt. What a perfectly happy and appropriate thing to do.
What will these kids remember about this time? Will they remember their parents’ fear and wearing masks and not seeing friends — or will their minds go to happy events like this Easter egg hunt and lots of time with family?
I was five years old when some bad guys crashed a plane into two tall towers in New York City, which is how 9/11 was explained to me at the time. I have a few memories: arriving that morning for kindergarten in San Francisco, our parents hovering nervously in the back of the classroom, getting sent home 10 minutes later, my aunt crying, the endless news playing on the TV in the background, footage of buildings in flames and eventually crumbling.
I wonder how the neighbor kids’ parents have explained the pandemic and their new tiny world: their nuclear family, the walls of their house, no school, no friends, but an Easter egg hunt. These kids are living through it, figuring it all out, at the same time we are. Just as kids did in the fall of 2001. Their parents have no neat and tidy story to tell them. There isn’t a beginning and middle and end. There is just now — this quick-moving unknown mess.
But when I have kids one day, there will be that neat and tidy story. There will be a beginning, middle, and end. I will tell them the story of 9/11, and I will tell them the story of the coronavirus pandemic. There will be befores and afters. There will be the actual event, and there will be the ways in which the world changed.
“Where were you when it happened?” they might ask me, after first hearing about the 2020 pandemic, maybe from a friend or a teacher.
I will tell them I was a year out of college. That I had recently moved into a little apartment in Russian Hill with big bay windows and a long hallway and a new friend. We had furniture but hadn’t yet put up any posters; a stack of them sat in the hallway. We had found a third roommate, who was set to take over the living room — yes, that’s how expensive rent was (still is?) in San Francisco — but she wanted to wait until the pandemic was over to move in.
I will tell them I was sitting in the lunchroom at work one day in early January of 2020 when I first heard the word “coronavirus.” A manager mentioned it to me, as some wild yet irrelevant thing happening far away. “Crazy,” I said, and then went back to my laptop.
I will tell them how the conversations around the virus got louder and louder, how on a walk to brunch I overheard two girls my age contemplating if San Francisco would be shut down.
“If it is, I’ll fly home to my parents in Chicago,” one said. “No way am I sticking around for that.” It was a beautiful morning, and I looked out over Nob Hill and tried to imagine my city under a lockdown. It seemed utterly implausible.
Soon everyone was bringing it up in casual conversation. “It’s just a bad cold,” several friends said.
I will tell them that it hit me all at once — the severity of it — on the last Friday evening in February, on my commute home. I was listening to a news podcast in which a scientist, with a great tone of urgency, compared the “novel coronavirus” to the Spanish flu. I looked around at my bus, at all the people near me, the woman sniffling a few feet away. For the first time, I was a little bit scared.
I will tell them how quiet it was. That the birds seemed so loud without the Muni trains screeching by every 15 minutes.
I will tell them how my company indefinitely shut down each U.S. office and transitioned all employees to work from home. I will tell them how the restaurants and bars closed, all at once, on March 17.
I will tell them about the closed stores, the heartbreaking signs that hung in restaurant windows. At the beginning of the quarantine, I had wanted to photograph them with a sense of urgency, before I realized they would remain there for months.
I will tell them how quiet it was. That the birds seemed so loud without the Muni trains screeching by every 15 minutes, without the cars on the road, without planes roaring above. That coyotes moved back into my parent’s green neighborhood, unthreatened, and the flock of Telegraph Hill parrots took over the financial district.
I will tell them about the packed Trader Joe’s and the emptied frozen food cases; how my roommate and I scoured the shelves for any remaining frozen pizza or risotto; how a woman with two toddlers turned to me, wide-eyed, and asked earnestly, “What do we do?”
I will tell them that at the beginning, the word “pandemic” felt silly and uncomfortable in our mouths. It was a word we only knew from apocalyptic action movies.
I will tell them about my first friend who got it, in Tel Aviv. She posted on her Instagram story with a virus emoji, and we could hardly believe it had happened to someone we knew. Within a week, a friend in New York was sick, and soon, her whole family was.
I will tell them about the mass migration of many people in their twenties going back to their parents’ houses. How it felt silly to go home after living away for so long, but that the alternative — staying put, alone in an apartment — seemed equally ridiculous. That my mom double-parked her SUV outside of my apartment to pick me up on the evening of March 19, after the governor officially shut down the whole state. “I feel like I’m rescuing you,” she joked.
But what will I tell them about the before?
Will I tell them about how vivaciously and joyfully and fearlessly we traveled? How just a few months before, a friend and I had flown to Lima, hiked Machu Picchu, and wandered through Barranco art galleries? On one of our last days, we dreamed up travel plans for next year, as if it were a guarantee.
Will I tell them about the crowds of a young adult’s life in the United States: crossing a city street in the rain, strangers’ umbrellas bumping into each other, reaching through a crowd to show a bartender my ID, accepting a lift onto a stranger’s shoulders at a music festival on a sticky August night?
Or will all of that be too painful? Both for me and for them.
Will I mourn what was lost — the carelessness, the adventure, the connections formed between strangers? Will they long for those mystic things?
As our state government begins to reopen in pursuit of that ever-out-of-reach “normalcy,” it’s becoming apparent things won’t go back to normal for a long time, if ever.
I think we will always hesitate before shaking someone’s hand or touching a railing on public transit. I think we will always take the extra step to wipe down a tray table or grocery cart handle.
Maybe my kids will sit on planes and feel the heat of crowds, but they will also see, subconsciously or not, the mark this left on everyone who lived through it.
The biggest question of all, the one we can’t answer, is how will the world change? What will we say when we explain to the next generation the ways in which we’re now different because of the virus?
Will I tell them we were once so busy that we rarely took time to simply be?
Will I tell them how health care changed for the better, their eyes widening when I explain how many Americans were once uninsured and had to pay for their medical expenses out of pocket?
Will I admit to them that while I was able to work from my family’s comfortable home, where groceries and Amazon packages appeared on our doorstep, warehouse workers and delivery people worked overtime without the safety I had from my childhood room?
Will I tell them about the income disparity, the housing crisis, the people who had to sleep on the streets because society did not take care of them—problems I had seen worsen during my childhood in San Francisco, suddenly explode? Will this be history to them — that level of greed and apathy?
Will I tell them we were once so busy that we rarely took time to simply be? That my family found ourselves under the same roof again for the first time in years? That we cooked and played games and read a few of the books we had been meaning to read, tried our hand at learning new languages, and curled up on the couch at night to watch our favorite shows?
Will I tell them how much we began to appreciate the breeze coming through our open windows, the pink and orange glow of the sunsets, the startling deep blue of the sky, more than we ever had before? That we looked at those clear skies and the newly brazen animals and finally understood their importance? Will I be able to tell them this was the turning point in how we, as a country, as the world, responded to climate change?
Will we tell the next generation that this marked the beginning of change for the better — that we as a society came to realize the importance of providing universal health care, tackling climate change, and taking a break from the hustle to appreciate the little things? Or will it instead mark the acceleration of change for the worse?
I hope we can tell them that, once upon a time, a pandemic illuminated all the ways we needed to change the world, and we followed through on them once it was over.
