My knees have been threatening to boycott me unless I take them for more walks so yesterday, I donned the old mask and took a long hike. It included a breeze-through of Farmers Market, the local tourist attraction that is most famous as the scene of the Mel Tormé story I reposted here recently.
The events of that story occurred around 1991 and yesterday, I received a puzzling e-mail from someone asking me if I thought it could happen today. Well, not without its most important element (Mel Tormé) it couldn't. I wrote the article upon his passing in 1999 and as much as some of us might like it, I don't think he's coming back.
My correspondent must have known that so, putting that little detail aside, I wondered what could have changed that would make the incident impossible? And when I got to Farmers Market, I got my answer: They've taken all the tables and chairs away. You can buy prepared food there — which people were doing so in such volume that I'm pretty sure all those vendors are doing as well as they ever do, financially. But a new Mel Tormé could not have just been sitting there as per my tale.
And even if he could, he'd be wearing a mask that would probably have made him unrecognizable. Also, there were no young carolers in Victorian garb strolling around to sing songs of the season, masked or otherwise. So I guess it couldn't happen today.
Almost everyone I saw was masked, though about 5% seemed to not grasp the necessity of covering both nose and mouth. And one man seemed to think you're allowed to have it completely off your face, dangling around your neck, when you're walking around eating a slice of pizza.
I didn't engage with him. Later on a street corner, I found myself standing next to an older woman who had no mask on at all. I wasn't aware I was looking oddly at her but she asked me, "Why are you staring at me like that?" and I muttered something about how I wanted to remember her as she was before she caught COVID-19. She winced and started ranting loudly that it's all a hoax.
Coherence was not this among this lady's skill set so I wasn't sure just what was, in her mind, a hoax. Is it that the coronavirus is a hoax? Or if it's real, is the hoax the claim that wearing masks helps protect you and/or those around you? Or that it's a hoax that we can survive the thing so we might as well stop wearing masks? Or something else?
The movie The Night They Raided Minsky's provided me with a surprising number of lines that have crept into my own speech. One comes from when the Orthodox Jewish Father complains that his son never obeys him. He says, "You see that chair? Tell it to dance. See if it listens." Sometimes, you're in the mood to waste your breath with these people and sometimes you aren't.
When I decided I wasn't and moved on, I noticed something else that spoke loudly of the time in which we live. I'll tell you about it here tomorrow.