At the last minute I decided to pack my thermal coffee cup.
It was the end of the work day on March 11, and I was preparing to leave my desk at the Tribune where I usually keep a Contigo stainless steel insulated travel mug. On a whim I tossed it in my bag, thinking I might not be back to the office for a few weeks.
Bad news was breaking all around us. Even though no one in Illinois had yet died of COVID-19 and only about two dozen people had been diagnosed here, Gov. J.B. Pritzker had just issued a statewide disaster proclamation two days earlier, and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle had signed a similar proclamation for the county the following day.
At a morning news conference that day, a Wednesday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the cancellation of the coming weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parades. The same morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, that the worst was yet to come.
Seemingly on cue, just before noon, the World Health Organization declared in a tweet that COVID-19 was a pandemic. A few hours later, the NCAA announced that its March Madness basketball tournaments would be played without fans.
Our newsroom had received two all-staff memos from our editor that day discussing work-from-home options. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1,465 points since morning, nearly 6%, on all the unsettling news.
It was the Day Everything Changed, just 100 days ago Friday.
And it wasn’t done yet. That evening, after I’d neatly placed my work mug next to my home mugs, President Donald Trump delivered a stilted speech from the Oval Office in which he announced a temporary ban on travel and imports from Europe, though his reference to “cargo” turned out to be a slip of the brain. The NBA abruptly suspended all games when Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the infection caused by the coronavirus, and the famed acting couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced on Instagram that they’d been diagnosed with COVID-19.
Exhilaration can accompany fear at times of crisis, at least at first when the horror is still relatively abstract — the U.S. had seen only roughly 30 deaths up until then. The changes in routine and priorities feel dramatic and monopolize every conversation.
Remember scouring the store shelves for toilet paper, hand sanitizer and yeast? Obsessing over how often you touched your face, trying out that new term “social distancing,” using the word “quarantine” to describe the aggregated privations and discovering new uses for such videoconference applications as Zoom?
But the drama of March 11, 2020, has long since given way to weariness and dread, even among those of us who have not (yet) lost jobs, dreams or loved one to this health crisis.
What seemed at first like it might be a brief inconvenience — who can forget Trump fantasizing about packed church pews on Easter Sunday, April 12? — turned into an interminable slog as the novelty wore off and the spring wore on.
I missed visiting my elderly parents, singing with my friends and popping out for errands. I feared not so much for my future as the future of my two youngest children, twins who were about to graduate from college into a bleak job market.
I’m having to take three unpaid furlough weeks this summer like all my other unionized colleagues, but I’m not complaining. My wife’s still working and we can easily absorb the minor hit. The twins are back home for now because of all this, and we have dinner together every night along with my son’s law school-bound girlfriend, who is also living with us. The extended family has a standing TV date at 9 p.m. and we’ve binged through a number of great shows including “Schitt’s Creek,” “Unorthodox” and “Dead to Me.”
Just about every night my son gets out his fiddle and we record a “quarantune” for YouTube, creating an archive I’m sure I’ll watch again and again after he moves out.
My days begin ritually as well, with coffee (kept hot in my work mug!), a bowl of cereal and an hour or two of reading newspapers and magazines in the living room before anyone else is up. In those quiet hours I reflect on how lucky I am to be able to savor the compensatory benefits of the world grinding to a near halt, though the static in my head warns me that time will erode most of those benefits, even for those who remain healthy and employed.
Seventy-five days into this new era, on May 25, we experienced a different kind of Day Everything Changed — the day a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest, killing him. The subsequent nationwide protests have led to re-examinations of police tactics and the broader issue of systemic racism. These not only gave us topics other than the threat of disease to discuss at our family dinners, but they stand to bring meaningful change. Milestone observances of that date will, hopefully, allow us to look back on more progress than we do as we look back at March 11.
It sometimes feels like years since I last rode the packed Blue Line home thinking this little hiatus from normalcy would be over before we knew it. I was imagining that some all-clear signal would soon sound, we’d herald The Day Everything Changed Back and I’d toss the mug in my bag to return it to work.
Now I don’t know. No one seems to know. There’s talk of grand reopenings and ghastly second waves. Stubborn people are refusing to wear facial coverings, reportedly an excellent way to keep contagion to a minimum, and defiantly clustering as though this virus is weakened by bravado.
History may record that on June 19 we were still in the early stages of a transformative disaster. And 100 days? Ha! That was nothing.
Twitter @EricZorn
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