Yesterday, as we were sitting at the dinner table, my wife Linda looked up from her plate of pasta and said to me, “You know we haven’t taken a vacation in more than a year.”
I nodded. I know how much she loves vacations and planning vacations. She loves the work of finding great prices on cruises and resorts and wonderful weekends in places I never thought I’d visit. Since she retired from being a university administrator 15 years ago, vacations and planning them has been her greatest passion, outside of loving me, of course.
Her statement about vacations got me thinking. I started wondering about the other changes in my life since the pandemic started. Of course, there are the big changes, the obvious ones. I don’t go to all the places I loved going to before. I don’t go to libraries or movie theaters or museums or coffee shops anymore. In fact, I don’t go much anywhere, except to buy gasoline at the station down the street. I don’t see my friends either. I haven’t sat across a table from Doug Thom or Mike Friedman or Bob Milewski in over a year and talked about whatever it was we used to talk about. .
But there have also been little changes that I hadn’t thought about until my wife said what she said about vacations.
For instance, you may not believe this, but I’ve stopped using deodorant. I wasn’t even aware that I had stopped using it until one day my wife told me she was going shopping and asked me if I needed some deodorant. I walked into the bathroom and picked up my Old Spice and realized then that I probably hadn’t put on deodorant in maybe a couple of months. I stood there with the Old Spice in my hand, wondering why I had stopped using it. Has the pandemic caused me to stop sweating? I can’t imagine it has.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve stopped wearing shoes. When I get up in the morning, I put on my slippers, and they pretty much stay on my feet all day. Even when I have to go outside to take out the garbage or check the mail or take a walk around the neighborhood or drive to the gas station to buy some gas, I do it in my slippers. The last time I put on my favorite pair of shoes in fact was about a week ago. I saw them in the closet, and I thought I would put them on for a slight change of pace. As soon as I did, I realized it was a mistake. My favorite shoes, ones I had worn for years, suddenly felt awkward, tight, like they didn’t belong to me at all.
But the biggest weirdest, most unexplainable change is the one that I hate the most. I’ve lost my taste for snacking. Don’t ask me why, but suddenly I’ve stopped snacking. Before the pandemic, I would snack on cranberries or almonds or wasabi peas all day long. I’d take a handful in the middle of the morning and the afternoon and the evening.
Now I see one of my old favorites, I just keep walking.
John Guzlowski
