coronavirus part III

It's a whole new era, and there's nothing for it but for us to face that fact and move on.

I don't know any more about what's coming than any of you do, but I can tell you a few things. First, the crisis is going to last more than a month; life as we know it will be altered more or less permanently. Even if they managed to say, we're free of it all, after a month, say May 1st, would everyone rush right out and go shopping? Well, some would, no doubt, but a lot of us will have new habits that make that unnecessary.

Such retail spots as malls, J.C.Penny, Macy's, Kohl's, etc., I think, will be gone. Restaurants will be damaged in the sense that, even with lots of government bailouts, they may not be profitable when they reopen, or for years afterward. The fabric of society as we know it will be drastically changed.

In our town Burro Street was living with the hopes of expanding and in fact, it did seem to be getting more business. There were more people walking up and down the sidewalks, stepping into the shops, and buying things. Now I don't know if running one of those little shops was actually profitable; I couldn't see how you'd make enough selling beads, for example, to feed your family. But now, I think, finished. People don't want to walk slowly up and down the boardwalk. And they won't for the rest of the month, and even for a few months. Even if they get a lot of tests, and use them, and know everyone who has it, and quarantine them, I don't think people will come right out onto the boardwalk and go shopping. If there is even the slightest risk, they'll get it online, or just simply not get it. Or make it. People are learning to make stuff.

This especially goes for food. We were a spoiled society, my family being a prime example, and we were going out a lot. This wasn't because we couldn't cook, as my wife could, and did, and actually preferred cooking to going out. But we were lazy, and gave in to our kids' preferences, and of course they prefer grease and sugar. But now, we tell them, yes we go to town but we risk our lives, not yours so much as ours. And we've made it a once a week thing (we get groceries once a week too), and that's it, that's how often we go in. We save our cars and our gas. We are living more like life should be lived, when you are twenty miles from a small town, and we are just much more scarce than we used to be. But as far as the food goes, people are hurting. We don't go to Allsup's anymore; it's too cramped. We go to Fam Dol maybe once a week. We just aren't buying the junk as much.

I'm not saying the downtown will die. Rents will probably go down. Places will be vacant and stay vacant. It will be like a depression, maybe, with lots of people out of work, unless they're willing to do medical. Someone who makes masks will have a good market, and that reminds me, I need to talk to my sister (she makes them). People, I think, want to work, and need to pay the bills. They won't be happy with 30% unemployment.

I say this from a comfortable berth. I have retired, more or less, and am doing two part-time jobs, both of which are online and unaffected by the crisis. We get our social security and will be ok whether the world around us goes to hell or not. We of course fear marauding bands of unemployed vagrants, or rampant inflation, or city people moving out and taking over the countryside. More than that, we fear the virus itself, as we are older and vulnerable. It seems to us that a lot of people from our generation are going to be swept up in it, and it won't be good. We hide out here, out at the end of the road, and I'm grateful sometimes that I'm not famous, and never have been. The world is willing to forget about me. That isn't true of a lot of my musician friends.

As the sun goes down on another day in the mountains, I'm grateful to be here. We moved out to the end of the road while we still could, before this whole thing happened. We turned out to be in the right place when it did happen. We and our kids appear to be going to survive it, though the kids may not pass their level, being too powerful around here, and in some cases wanting to know what they can get away with not doing. The school wants them online, working on their skills. We support the school, but we're caught between. If they don't work, what happens? We keep feeding them, I suppose.

Life has changed forever. They may not learn another thing, except how to survive in it.