Last night was the first CSA veggie pickup of the season. And usually I love the start of the CSA season: sunchokes! garlic scapes! cilantro! sorrel! bounty and beauty and face-to-face connection with the person who is feeding my family! But last night was weird.
We had been instructed to come in masks and line up six feet apart. But some people wanted to leave more than six feet between them and the person in front of them. I'm fine with that -- I don't know what kind of risk factors they may be facing. What I don't know: are they worried if I'm standing a mere six feet behind them? Lines get long in a hurry if people are standing 12 feet away from each other.
In contrast to the folks who wanted more than 6 feet of space, there were the folks who did not really heed the 6-foot boundary. The women behind me were chatting, and they kept moving closer to me. One of them stepped right up to me to brush away a carpenter bee that had settled on my back. In a non-pandemic context, that's a neighborly thing to do. But in the middle of a pandemic, when Gladlyville has had a recent surge in its case count, I'd probably rather take my chances with the bee.
One of the things I usually love about our CSA is the way it pulls together so many different kinds of Gladlyville families. There are university colleagues and former neighbors and parents I met at preschool long ago, all coming together to support a local farmer and eat delicious sunchokes. There's also a crunchy-con contingent, and this is a weird season for conservatives of any stripe. One of the long-time CSA members, a guy whose #1 identifier might be "pro-life Catholic," got out of his van right as I got into line. "Looks like we're going to have to wear these dumb masks," he said to his wife -- but he didn't don his until after his up-close mask-free conversation with another guy from our church. (One of my high school friends told me that a gun shop near her home has banned mask-wearing. Which might, in other circumstances, cause me to roll my eyes and mutter about Darwin Awards. But instead I am thinking about the avoidable risk borne by the elderly loved ones of the store's staff and customers. From where I'm standing it looks like a peculiarly lethal flavor of political posturing.)
OH AND ALSO -- I suppose it was inevitable that a person who often finds reflexive phone use frustrating would find it especially so in this context. I'm feeling like we all need to pay a little more attention than usual to where we are positioned with regard to the people around us, and phones make that harder. When the line is longer than usual, I feel more impatient with people who are texting instead of moving forward. When a pandemic is raging, I feel more impatient with the people who are walking into me because they are texting.
So! Isn't it great that the pandemic offers us so many opportunities to grow in charity and patience? Do you love growing in charity and patience as much as I do? Have you been in a crowd recently, and was it weird?
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