After almost 19 years working for the same company, my husband, Peter, turned in his badge and left his gun-secured building for the last time. (I say gun-secured because a guard with a real gun sits at the reception desk and answers the phones.)
My husband began working for this company in 2003, during the Bush administration. He is leaving under the Biden administration. What, dare you ask, does the president of the United States have to do with my husband turning in his badge? Quite simply, Pete does not want to get the COVID vaccine, and because of that, the leader of the free world deemed he and people like him should be fired from their jobs, or at least that was the edict on September 9, 2021.
As much as we get tired of hearing or talking about coronavirus, it may be with us for some time. After all, the summer Olympics were postponed and spring has only just begun. That means the big wigs at the top didn’t think bringing people together was such a great idea.
More than that, the coronavirus will forever change this generation’s view of microbes. (By this generation, I mean people who live through this and remember it, including my seven year old daughter.) I remember when the biggest and scariest contagion was HIV. You had to get bloody intimate with people to get this virus, either through unprotected sex or a contaminated blood transfusion. Even so, there was anxiety in the air. The rapidity with which the virus spread was indicative of how intimate people were with each other. Turns out there was more intimacy in the world than I imagined in my naivete. I had no idea there was that much body fluid sharing going on.
Now, the contagion is spread through air. Air. What we took for granted has now fallen into the realm of intimacy. I sat in a chair about four feet away from another woman while waiting for an oil change for my car and the woman stood up and moved to another seat. I was the leper, or the potential leper. I have to live with that. If before I lived in a community that largely ignored me, now I’m in an environment where people move away from me.
