On May 29th, the Massachusetts governor rescinded all COVID-era orders. This means, officially, that things are now “back to normal.” Restaurants and movie theaters and concert venues and stores are invited to open at full capacity. We do not need to wear masks indoors or outdoors in these places. We don’t even need to keep our physical distance from one another. We’ve gone from zero to sixty in one proclamation. There’s theoretically nothing stopping my karaoke bar from taking up karaoke again, or Tanglewood from opening at its usual capacity, or me from spending an entire day working at a table inside without a mask on, next to someone else working without a mask on. Wow.
I have been eagerly awaiting this day. I got my family vaccinated in order to speed up this day. I’m also, I realize, not quite ready for this day. I’m in a kinda, sorta, half in, half out stage when it comes to reopening myself. I’m excited to get out and see new places and reconnect with people, unmasked face to unmasked face, again. Yet I’m also convinced I’d be better off alone at home with the doors closed. The petals are still tightly folded in, preparing, hesitantly, to bloom.
When I do venture out, I wear my mask at the ready, around my ears and under my chin. The soft fabric against my skin puts me at ease. I think maybe by now the mask is a defense mechanism to ward off conflict, like a can of bear spray, or a taser. Or maybe it serves a talisman role, bringing not only good luck, but regenerative, healing interactions with the fellow humans I’ve been avoiding for the past 15 months. Or maybe it’s just a good excuse to hide the part of my neck I’ve never liked.
In any case, Memorial Day in West Stockbridge felt like a test run in “how to be with other people again.” The town had publicized its pared-down parade, followed by a service on the lawn in front of the Town Hall and Police Station. I thought of Memorial Day parades past, and the organic, unforced way they bring us together. The weather was not reminiscent of start-of-the-summer-season so much as it’s-beginning-to-feel-a lot-like-Thanksgiving. Boots and fleece weather, not free and easy flip flops and tank tops.
But when I arrived in town at 9:30, several other families were making their way toward the Congregational Church to decorate bikes, also the destination of my 10-year-old son. We milled around, checked out the go-cart coming off of a truck, picked up red, white, and blue necklaces and whirligigs and flags. The children were young, so young that my comparatively big kid started to feel a little self-conscious and mumbled aloud something about putting the bike back in the car. (As you can see in the photo, he stuck it out.)
I was also self-conscious, about proper mask etiquette. What’s the vibe here today, I wondered? Some folks were fully-masked, some had them on halfway, and some were entirely maskless. One guy had a gator waiting conveniently around his neck. I put mine on, having determined to defend myself not against conflict, but against the discomfort of being around people you don’t know and have forgotten how to break the ice with.
My favorite parade component, the high school marching band, was not there. There were, however, two men dressed in Revolutionary gear, playing a stirring tune from that era on flute and drums, one of them Selectboard Chairman Eric Shimelonis. There was another selectboard member, Kathy Keresy, a line of emergency vehicles from our town and from Richmond, a big red firetruck, a phalanx of our police officers and emergency responders, and Wayne, who runs the town dump, suited up in camo and driving his red mule festooned with veterans’ flags, an old-timey British convertible, and the kids bringing up the rear on their bikes, my big kid out in front on his big kid bike, trying hard to ride slow enough to keep pace with the car ahead without collapsing.
My daughters and mother-in-law and I followed the parade train up Route 102, turned left together onto State Line Road, and then left again onto the lawn at Town Hall. I chatted with Jennifer, whose son had been a classmate of my son, before COVID prompted them to pull their kids out of school to do remote learning. I chatted with Tim, who owns the Public Market, who I hadn’t talked to in forever. But, as my town’s Memorial Day program got underway, I looked around, and realized I didn’t know most of the people around me. I didn’t know, or even recognize the name of, the deacon who offered a blessing, or the girl who executed an excellent and touching reading of the Gettysburg Address, or the cute little boy who read “In Flanders Field,” or the young woman who so beautifully sang the national anthem, or the “future jazz star” who played taps. I don’t know why I don’t know them. West Stockbridge is a very small town, and it seems wrong that I do not know so many of my neighbors. Now that the world is opening up, it seems I am more acutely aware of the ways in which I’ve always been closed.
The event also did what it set out to do, remind me of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for all of us. What a heavy word: sacrifice. We don’t hear it much. It feels like it belongs to history, like it’s past and dead. But surely we would like future generations to look back at us with admiration, too. Surely we, too, can be called upon to sacrifice for one another, even in our relatively peaceful little town. What would our sacrifice look like? Can we call it by a different name? Can we call it civic-mindedness? Can we call it volunteers spending a lot of time and effort to put on a parade for their community for Memorial Day? I think so. I want to help build on that. I want to build, or rebuild, a community, out of the pandemic’s ashes.
My father knew he’d be drafted into the Korean War, so he volunteered instead. He completed basic training on the day the armistice was signed. If the timing had been just slightly different, and he’d been sent instead into combat, I would probably never have been born. But I’m here now. We’re all here now, called up by history to make of the reopening world a better one than the one that closed down on March 13, 2020.
A girl, whose name I didn’t recognize and don’t now recall, read the Gettysburg Address. It seems to speak just as well to our own divided age as it did in 1863. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The unfinished work — the fallen soldiers so nobly advanced — was the work of union and common purpose. I don’t know what this looks like for us, but I’d like to help figure it out.
I think of June as peony-popping season, but in fact there are peonies all over our region that have already opened up fully. I have five peony plants on my property and none is open yet. The first plant to bloom is always the one closest to the driveway, the one whose progress I get to track whenever I arrive back home. It starts out as a red spear breaking through the earth, then thins into long stalks, which turn green, then expand outward and grow little globes at their ends where ants converge. The globes grow and grow, and the protective green covering splits open, and recedes, until finally, there’s just an enormous, brilliant pink flower. Today, one of the globes is close to opening up. It might be tomorrow, or the next day.
