How will our lives change?

The food truck from Heim Barbecue ended up parked across the street from our house tonight. Expecting to have two teenage boys this weekend instead of one (my oldest daughter and her youngest son will be here), Jordan went out to stock up on meat and found herself seeing lots of neighbors, all staying respectfully six feet apart. But it sparked a thought in me about our changing society.

I can’t remember the name of the prophet who in the seventies or eighties predicted the end of print and books. The academic world was in an indignant uproar. Then with the advent of cell technology, predictions came about the isolation of society. We would all be locked into our technological worlds, with little if any human contact.  Now with the pandemic and quarantine, we’re beginning to see some of it.

Will we ever feel really comfortable eating in restaurants again? I have a daughter-in-law who swears she will never eat in a buffet again. Of course, I also have a daughter who wouldn’t eat in them anyway unless she was the first to go through the line. But is take-out, like food trucks, going to be the coming way of life? Get your food and retreat into your house. No  shared lunches or dinners. Are we going to get so used to the isolation of quarantine that it becomes a way of life? Predictions are that there will be continuing waves of the virus—more illness, more deaths. I remain convinced we are social animals and will emerge from this perhaps more cautious, having figured out safe ways to gather. But it may be the end of gigantic crowds, not all a bad thing in my mind.

In some ways the changes to our lives may be good—or they may be quickly erased once the restrictions are loosened. For a while there, the air cleared, the world restored itself, nature and wildlife flourished. I welcomed that, and I will hate to see our highways clogged again, our skies crisscrossed with planes. I hope we learn a lesson from this about how destructive mankind has been to the world.

Meantime, I’m going to enjoy that barbecue.

The only other excitement of the day was the arrival of the a/c repairman. He’s worked on this house for twenty years and is a trusted person, but you never know who can be a silent carrier. So the minute the poor man went out the front door, Jordan came in the side door, Lysol spray in hand. But tonight, the a/c in my bedroom is once again quiet and smooth. So now it’s a nice  cool evening, and I don’t need the a/c.

Tomorrow will be a more exciting day. My older daughter and her youngest son (one of Jacob’s best buddies) will arrive for the weekend. Like us, they have been strictly quarantining, and she has promised no potty stops between here and Austin, Jordan has  been laying out a set of semi-quarantine rules for them, and together we have been planning menus. I’m very much looking forward to the visit.

My quandry: how can you see one of your children and grandchildren for the first time in months and not hug them?