Pandemic

Pandemic Retreat

            This pandemic is a déjà vu for me.

            The other night I was walking around my neighborhood, keeping socially distant from my fellow walkers, and I found myself anxiously looking at everyone I passed, hoping to catch an eye and say hello.  The older boomers often looked up and exchanged greetings, but most of the younger folks with ear buds kept looking straight ahead, very serious.

            Suddenly, I was transported back 60 years, to my days at St. Joseph’s seminary in Mountain View, CA.  Every evening we were required to walk around in silence, saying our rosaries.   Being a pious youth, I always tried to keep my mind focused on Jesus during the rosary, but that didn’t prevent me from noticing that several of my peers were exchanging frivolous glances with anyone they passed, behavior hardly indicative of a deep spiritual commitment.  Meanwhile, the rest of us floated zombie-like around the courtyard, fingering our beads in saintly trances. 

            How strange that now, 60 years later, I am the one trying to catch the others’ eyes, desperately anxious to disrupt this pandemic pall, while the millennials float righteously past, devoutly focused on their ear buds.  Are they offended by my flippant behavior?

             Though “pandemic” has ominous overtones for us today, I remember when “epidemic” had a much more joyful connotation.  An epidemic was that rare event in the seminary that, if serious enough, might mean we’d be sent home for a week or two, liberated from our prison-like regulations and routines.  As the number of flu cases started to mount, rumors would start to circulate about the likelihood of a shutdown; guys would swill multiple cups of tea and then run up the four flights of stairs to the infirmary, hoping to show a fever and escalate the sick count.  Overworked infirmarians would have to deputize assistants to cross the forbidden thresholds and deliver meals to the sick in their rooms. One of our classmates began circulating a pool, taking bets on how soon we’d be sent home.  And our bumbling, but loveable, seminary rector would try to stem the viral tide by exhorting us not to use each other’s spoons. 

            We loved it, the chaos and uncertainty of it all.  Very different from this pandemic, which, at the beginning, might have had some elements of excitement and novelty about it, but now looks like a long slog into dystopia.  In a way it reminds me of the yearly retreat we had in the seminary - a full week of silence and solitude during which we were expected to reflect on the meaning of life.  I once got so antsy by day six that I pulled out a coat hanger and drilled a hole through my neighbor’s wall.  You can only reflect for so long.

            I think I’ve become more patient - and probably less pious - over the past sixty years.  I’m now in Week Five of this pandemic retreat, and I haven’t damaged the house at all.