Road Trip: Human Again

My province recently announced the inauguration of the long-awaited Phase 3 of its reopening plan, after 16 months of pandemic restrictions that stripped us of so many basic human needs: needs for safety, companionship, and freedom of movement; needs for familiarity and novelty, frivolity and meaning; needs for physical contact and emotional connection.  These unpopular restrictions have been essential to the ongoing eradication of the cause of all this loss, and therefore had my full support.  The threat has not passed; ongoing vigilance is necessary, and will be for some time.  But I and those I care about have recently achieved “fully vaccinated” status, just when the powers that be have opened doors that have long been bolted fast. 

And so it was that after a lonely year of disconnection and discontent, I found my way back to humanity, in the form of a modest road trip to see people and places from my Pre-Pandemic Past.

Captain’s Log: Things I Did this Week that Made me Feel Human Again:

On the Road Again   

• Got in my car and drove several hours northeast (beyond my home, beyond my place of work, all the way to cottage country, to see friends from all my recent Pasts)

Stop #1: My Moroccan Past

• Hugged long-lost friends and colleagues, two years after our return to Canada
• Ate grilled cheese with a family of five around their dining room table
• Hovered over children and their masterpieces, exclaiming over hundreds of drawings that I did not assign and therefore need not grade

Stop #2: My Slightly-More-Distant Moroccan Past

• Drove several more hours northwest, further up and further in
• Hugged another long-lost friend, and met her charming sweetheart
• Learned how to make Yorkshire pudding in a little cottage kitchen
• Cycled to the farmer’s market and giggled (internally) at the woman selling wish-bouquets for $30 each (“simply throw them in the fire and the energy of the universe will make your dreams come true”)
• Gathered our own wish bouquets in the yard for $0 each and threw them in the fire for the energy of the universe to do with as it wishes (giggling externally)
• Went out for a breakfast that turned into lunch: eggs benedict, expertly made in a mere two hours in a busy cafe with a staff of two
• Did tai chi and walked a labyrinth at moonrise

Stop #3: My Lindsay Past

• Splurged on lacy, sequin-y jeans and two scoops of low-sugar chocolate ice cream
• Kayaked against the current with Friend #3, then sat on the dock with the mosquitos and dangled our feet in the lake at dusk
• Binge-watched Netflix on someone else’s screen, in someone else’s house, in someone else’s life

Stop #4: My Peterborough Past

• Sipped a celebratory white wine sangria in an Italian restaurant with Friend #4, noting with pleasure that the music was rather too loud
• Got not-very-lost while hiking in the real, rural outdoors, following rocky, poorly marked paths not designed for urban skateboarders, cyclists, or strollers
• Lay on our backs on a precipice, looking skyward through the trees as a perfect July breeze tickled our arms
• Shot some close-ups of a small Smurf village
• Sat on a patio with Friends #5 and #6, reminiscing about Friend #7, no longer with us
• Had a migraine in an alternate location: not a preferred activity, but a novelty nonetheless

The Home Stretch: My London Present

• Drove too many hours southwest (Toronto traffic being what it was)
• Arrived at home, socially exhausted and relishing a day of solitude in my Post-Moroccan Present (still rather friendless, but contentedly so for the moment, with optimism for a Post-Pandemic Future)

This long-awaited visit to my Pre-London, Pre-Pandemic Pasts was for me a rich return to luxuries that had been stripped away by a microscopic virus with universal power over our individual and collective Present: a seemingly never-ending Present, with a receding Past and Future that have left even the self-confessed hermits among us starving for movement and connection.  This week of Returning was also a week of Facing Forward, a week of hopefulness that restriction and isolation will not always be the defining features of our emotional landscapes.  It was an inner unmasking, a cleansing of that polluted undercurrent of discontentment that has seeped into every psyche on this beleaguered planet.

I urge you, if you can, to go somewhere, do something, with someone, while you can: safely, respectfully, and compliantly, so that “while you can” will be “from now on,” and so that the optimism of this past week can be the roadway to an open-ended future.