I went and got a haircut yesterday, for the first time in months. My barber of some years greeted me at the door, a surgical mask covering his nose and mouth, wielding an infrared thermometer. Taking aim at my forehead with a pistol grip and projected point of light, our long-deferred reunion kicked off with a medical interrogation, curt, and to the point: “Any flu-like symptoms?” The subtle romance of social interactions is somewhat diminished, of late. So it goes, in this life-under-pandemic.
It’s the little things that I’m noticing, now.
After weeks of cloistered living, our solitude enforced by government-mandated business closures, I ventured out recently with my eldest daughter to pick up what had been a long-running tradition, pre-COVID: the Saturday morning breakfast “date”. Our favorite venue had recently launched into outdoor-only dining, per new state regulations. We arrived early, just in time for opening. Umbrella-bedecked picnic tables, placed at carefully designated distances across what had been the front lawn, greeted us. The masked hostess welcomed us cheerfully, as best one could tell through the facial obstruction, and directed us to our own patch of grass and a picnic table built for two.
The menu was familiar, but now printed on recycled copy paper destined to be discarded after suffering the touch of human hands. The food was as-remembered, hearty and satisfying, but now flanked by single-serving plastic utensils, single-serving syrups, ketchup packets and infinitesimal paper pouches of salt and pepper. In place of the usual, bottomless saucer of coffee, stood a tall, lidded styrofoam cup. And it struck me then, as I cracked the seal on the thin plastic lid and attempted my first sip of scalding, predictably mediocre coffee, that it was these little, unforeseen losses that might eventually drive a person to madness, given enough time.
Because, perhaps obviously, frequenting the hometown diner for Saturday breakfast is really only tangentially about the food. I’m certainly capable of frying an egg and making my own - objectively superior - cup of coffee, anytime I like. But the diner is about an entire, embodied and shared experience. It is about a physical space, and the relationships therein; the familiar faces and banter between regulars. It’s about bellying up to the counter; it’s about the sticky-handled syrup and the generic tabletop bottle of ketchup. It’s about the constantly-refreshed cup of bad coffee, served in a chipped, industrial porcelain mug. Sitting down to breakfast on this Saturday morning, meditating over my beverage, while trying to ignore the sound of traffic whizzing by on the busy road only feet away from our outdoor, socially-responsible seating, it struck me. I realized that in this season of so much loss and uncertainty and genuinely significant upheaval, it is actually the little things that are liable to wear down my spirit, over time. Dare I say: give me the large, the daunting, the catastrophic. I’m good in an acute crisis. Give me the direct assault. But this, the quietly micro-aggressive - the subtle, immeasurable attrition of the minutiae of “normal” life - threatens to undo me. Give me the hurricane. But please, don’t give me my coffee in that tall, white, sterile and styrofoam cup… It may prove more than I can bear.
I know it’s petty, clearly. But amidst everyone and everything else that we have been and will be required to miss these days, I find that I did genuinely miss the weight and feel of that well-worn porcelain. I missed the vinyl countertop. I missed squeezing uncomfortably, closely behind the other regulars on the way to our usual spot. I missed the cracked plastic menu covers and the whiteboard specials. I missed the simple normalcy of inhabiting a shared space, a shared experience, a hand on a shoulder in passing, perhaps instigating a shared smile. We are embodied creatures, you and I, incarnate, organic and messy things; sterility does not suit us, long.
Lord have mercy on us - speak to us, comfort and call us - amidst the daily sacrifices and minute, mundane, persistent desolations of this season. For our daily bread, you invite our prayer; and you are Lord over even these, little things.