My Life After the Pandemic

 My Life after the Pandemic

This morning, I was sitting around watching the news shows, and all the news about the pandemic was bad, really bad. The scientists — who I trust although I know many don’t — were talking about how this COVID pandemic was just going to get worse in the next couple of months. They also said that probably the pandemic was going to be around with us for at least another year, maybe two.

It got me thinking about all the things I miss and all the things I would love to be doing if I didn’t have to stay quarantined in my house and practicing social distancing, and I suddenly had a dream, a vision you might call it, of what my first day of non-pandemic life would be like.

And here’s what that vision looked like.

After living with the pandemic since March of 2020, I woke up on the first post-pandemic morning and started singing and dancing and visiting the people I loved and the people I hated.

And then I ate enormous meals at three of my favorite restaurants and paid all the waiters and waitresses in kisses and paid the chefs in gold, and I hugged all the folks who were eating and asked them all to dance the bossa nova with me.

And then I went back home just for a minute and ate and drank and smoked and laughed and kept holy the Lord’s Day all in the same breath even though it wasn’t Sunday, and then I hopped on a subway and whistled at every single stop for no reason whatsoever.

And then I found some kid’s blue angelic tricycle right there in the street, and I rode it like I was riding to glory because I was, and I even stopped at one point to pick up a newspaper lying there in the street telling me the pandemic was over at last, and I tore it up and threw its little-bitty pieces into the street and into the wind.

And then I went to a Super Walmart and pretended to sell magic sparrows to all the people walking and dancing through the store that they had been dreaming about like me for so so long.

And then I put on my best strawberry-colored hat and wandered through midday downtown Chicago humming “the St. Louis blues” and passing out bouquets of flowers to everyone wandering the street with me.

And finally, I turned to the big old sun smiling down at me and everyone else and said, “Honey I’m yours.”

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This piece originally appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/moje-zycie-po-pandemii/