Grocery shopping in the age of COVID
Gloves, masks, what makes us human
Just got back from Farmer Joe’s, the local micro-chain grocery store of two links a mile apart. 15 minutes before closing, and the parking lot was eerily empty, the store mostly deserted, except for about a dozen shoppers, three-quarters of whom were masked, about half gloved, and a small fraction defiantly neither, an implicity “F*** you!” to the virus, as if a bright smile and beatific attitude could keep the plague at bay.
The rest of us awkwardly made corner-eye contact, doing the now-standard dance step of maintaining six feet of distance while securing our respective bulk oatmeal or bananas, like two boxers, each wary of getting within the other’s striking distance.
Though I was wearing rubber gloves and the Manila-grade mask left over from our last sabbatical, back at home now, beer successfully in hand, I realize I’m just now bleeding off the underlying tension I had the whole time in the store. Despite the precautions, I was running a low-grade cortisol drip the whole time I was in the store, as my reptilian fight-or-flight brain was telling me I was at risk.
Seeing nearby humans as potential threats rather than assets goes against everything we’ve evolved to be.
Banding together, pooling resources and lessons, sharing wisdom and stories around a meal— that’s what enabled us to expand beyond caves and campfires to become the dominant species on the planet. No animals are as communal. No animals learn as much from one another. No animals are capable of what we are together.
But fear and mistrust of those around us? That’s the soil every dictatorship grows from, every authoritarian regime thrives in, every dystopian novel trades in. It’s inhuman, which is why evil can take root in it.
And we’re all hungry for connection, damn all this precaution and sheltering. The bright spot of the evening was when the liquor store clerk offered some unintentional COVID gallows humor, by complimenting me “Hey, that’s a fancy mask! Where’d you get it?” I almost didn’t catch it, the remark was so unexpected, but when I told him I’d gotten it years ago for nonprofit work in Manila, he immediately brightened and said “I love me some Philippines!” And we exchanged a few remarks about that beautiful, blighted country of hospitality as warm as the climate, world-class scuba diving, and endemic inequality, corruption, and natural disasters — closing with the shared reflection on the heat there, and how our weather here in Oakland was the best.
Despite the two pairs of rubber gloves between us, we had this connection — the liquor store worker and me. And where these connections can still exist, I still have hope.
Well, and as long as liquor stores are rightly deemed “essential services.” Bottoms up!
