This pandemic will end, and when it does, please take me out to the ballgame
Then, as if to drag me back down into the dismal mood of the past nine months, in which I can count the people I know that I’ve seen in person on my fingers and toes — with toes to spare — I would see the scary new case and death totals from the pandemic, as well as the unemployment figures and food lines.
I just wanted the holiday season to disappear. Nobody comes down my chimney this year. Who knows where Santa has just been? Is Rudolph masked?
Outside my window, not a single leaf. And, for the next 100 days, almost certainly more deaths per day for a longer period than at any time in U.S. history, including the Civil War.
But desk work never sleeps. I realized my wife and I faced a Friday deadline to notify the Washington Nationals of how we wanted to use the 50 percent bonus we got on our unused season tickets from the 2020 season.
“What?” I thought. “Baseball tickets? Sit jammed with 40,000 strangers, face to face, and die? Or maybe lose my sense of taste and smell? Who needs those?”
Like many, my wife and I are part of a group that chops up its season tickets — we go to five games per year. And if you paid $400 for Washington season tickets in 2020, you got those same tickets for the 2021 season, but you also got a $200 Nationals Park credit. Your choices: 1. Get more tickets for free; 2. Get free food, drink and team stuff; or 3. Donate your bonus tickets to charity.
I wondered, “Which choice do I take?”
Then it hit me: For the first time in nine months, I was deciding where to go besides a grocery store or for a walk.
This pandemic will affect millions of people for years, from deaths among family and friends to lost jobs and businesses. But for those of us who end up living through it, the pandemic’s oppressing sense of isolation and social disconnection is, sort of, almost over.
By maybe May or June or July, my family and friends will be back in a pack, cheering without masks, at Nats Park.
When will indoor sports such as the NBA and NHL be back with fans? When will they again allow 100 percent capacity? No idea. But I would bet my non-pitching arm that baseball will be back this summer. And, since those in attendance will be those who no longer fear crowds — but rather, like me, can’t wait to get back among ‘em — we’ll probably be going crazy for “strike two” or a leadoff walk.
It’s almost a necessary human defense mechanism to deny how much we miss the things, or people, we are forced to do without. Picking the free liquid refreshment option at a game isn’t hitting the lottery. But I grinned.
What struck me was, finally, the certainty of a familiar future with an approximate date attached — baseball, next summer. For everybody, it will be something different. But it is time to start picking those things, enjoying the prospect of them. Maybe a year of our lives will end up shrunken till it fits in a thimble. But we will live by gallon measures again.
Between now and then, this winter is going to be hellish, both with abstract worry and real danger, especially to those in my demographic. I don’t have a helicopter on call to whisk me to Walter Reed. This week, one of my oldest friends, then his wife, tested positive.
But just as it is destructive to refuse to face reality, like the maskless morons still among us, we also hurt ourselves if we go down a wormhole of negativity, loneliness and when-will-it-ever-end blues. Especially when, by almost every indication, this is about to end.
When science has already given us two vaccines with over 90 percent efficacy, with more drug companies close to similar breakthroughs, it’s covid-19 that’s in the ICU.
The grass outside is brown. But my computer screen has a photo of the public golf course down the road that was closed for renovations in 2020 but reopens May 1. It’s so green. Guess who’ll be there — preferably vaccinated.
There are signs — just as winter, snow, the shortest days and the highest number of infections hit us — that everything is about to return to an altered but profoundly appreciated new normal, just not quite yet. This week, I drove into what, recently, was a ghost town — downtown Washington. I couldn’t find a parking spot near The Post, and I even saw pedestrians — in quantity! “How great is that!?” I thought.
The correct news angle is, usually, “What’s new?” So, we will be inundated, as we should be, with analysis of how much the pandemic has changed, and will further change, our lives. Just in sports, there is no owner, executive, player, agent or union boss who has any idea what the economics — just the core revenue base — of any sport will be in this decade.
But I have conducted a study group of one — Mr. Pent-Up Demand. I don’t know how much or how soon I want to spend time in crowds indoors. Science aside, there will be memories, scars, from this pandemic. Some places, even if they are back to normal, may not feel quite right.
But one of the big post-pandemic stories will be not what is new. It will be the enormous demand for familiar and beloved places, events and surroundings that do not come with a covid-19 cloud. To each his own.
A sports event, outside, with a packed house roaring: That’s as old as it gets. But just wait. In a few months, it’s going to feel so wonderful you’ll swear it is brand new.
