Walk reveals welcome harbinger of ‘normal’

If you didn’t know the hell that we’ve all lived through over the last 14 months or so, my half-hour walk on my cul-de-sac in North Attleboro, MA, on a sun-splashed Saturday afternoon wouldn’t have seemed like anything out of the ordinary.
After all, on May 1, seeing some activity on the street would have been expected.
But on this day, just as we’re desperately hoping that the return to normalcy being promised by Gov. Charlie Baker really happens --- and that the health scolds don’t snatch it away from us similar to the way that Lucy always pulled the football away from Charlie Brown --- it was a rare day to feel optimistic, for a few reasons.
Not one but two families with young children were having birthday parties ---  celebrations that those kids were denied last year due to the COVID limits that turned us all into depressed, isolated recluses.
Balloons were tied to one family’s mailbox as guests parked their cars  to celebrate together for a few short hours, while another family welcomed guests outside for a party that included a Jump-a-roo for kids.
Neither party included an excessive number of guests and seemed well within reasonable proportions, though no doubt those officials who have enjoyed keeping us locked away and depressed for the last year might have found fault with them.
But so be it.
Elsewhere on the street, another family with young kids was enjoying what had become until recently an all-too rare play date for their kids, while another neighbor was out working on his front yard.
As I stopped to compliment him on his garden, and to chat about our mutual love of baseball and the Red Sox, I thought that before last March, our conversation would have been no big deal, but as we talked, from more than 6 feet to be sure, it was obviously a very big deal on May 1, 2021.
We’re all tired of not only the pandemic, but the onslaught of the many confusing, capricious and illogical rules that governments have created to scare us away from acting like the social human beings we are.
Yes, many of the rules were necessary, but it’s hard to justify the state doing one thing --- like easing the outdoor mask mandate --- and then other towns doing otherwise. And that sort of thing has been going on since the start of the pandemic --- Walmart and the Big Box stores got to open up all the time, and yet so many small businesses that could have been safely accessed were closed, with scores of those businesses gone forever!
And the pitting of state against state in the same region, as Maine did last year against the rest of the New England with respect to visitors, was nothing short of reprehensible.
I’m fully vaccinated (as of April 17, two weeks after my second Pfizer shot on April 3), but I’m still wearing my mask on my daily morning runs-jogs. And, I’d also be willing to wear a mask if any local races take Baker up on his new guidance that, starting May 10, road races can come back with some limits. (I plan on doing one final virtual race later this month, but have vowed not to do any more …… a virtual race is NOT a race; it’s just another name for running alone, and to be further depressed!)
But I wonder how many race organizers will want to do so, because I fear that too many groups, businesses, doctors' offices and governments are getting way too comfortable with the virtual purgatory that we’ve all been living, and will be reluctant to go back to normal. The preponderance of government meetings that are still on Zoom is a prime example of how far too many aspects of officialdom have sadly fallen in love with the convenience and impersonality of the virtual world --- which I totally and unequivocally detest!
Yet, regardless of those health scolds, our pandemic is eventually going to go away thanks to vaccines, masks and other measures.
So, get the vaccine – please – so days like Saturday will no longer seem like a rare escape from our hellacious and depressing lives that the last 14 months have been for far too many of us --- and so we can halt all those deaths: 3.2 million worldwide and more than 590,000 in the United States.