Hand flipping wooden block cubes for new normal wording. The world is changing to balance it into new normal include business , economy , environment and health.
Our last Pfizer vaccine was on March 24. Two weeks later, on April 7, we were officially bolstered against Covid – but maybe not. No one knows yet for sure how long the vaccines are good for.
But I did two things that haven’t happened in more than a year – I returned to the gym, working out masked, and went to the mall, also masked, Until my third visit, the gym was great. Not many people there and most of us wore masks while working out. One employee is tasked with wiping down each piece of equipment with disinfectant, the handrails on the stairs, the counters, everything. But on Saturday, a couple of young men showed up maskless, so I left.
The mall: ours is dying. It went up in 2001, had fabulous stores, and now, 20 years later, it’s dying a slow, agonizing death from the pandemic because Amazon is king. Why go anywhere when you can sit down in front of your computer and browse and click for whatever you want and it’s on your doorstep the next day?
The busiest store in our mall was Apple. People were hanging outside the store while an Apple employee went around, jotting down names and reasons people were there. In Chico’s, where I went, the clerk and I were the only ones in the store and we discovered neither of us was ever a fan of trump’s. Good start. It was strange and wonderful to actually try on clothes.
I’ve done a lot of returns to Amazon because that try on thing doesn’t exist. Maybe it will someday, when some whiz kid makes a holographic experience shopping experience real. We also got together for a dinner with vaccinated friends where none of us wore masks.
Throughout the pandemic, except for a month when Florida closed everything, even dog parks, we’ve gone maskless to the huge dog park here. It’s easy to social distance. Now most of us in our mid-afternoon group have gotten at least one vax. We share our experiences – Pfizer, Moderna, J&J. Where and when. And we are grateful for every second that we don’t hear trump dominating the news.
Some of us are planning trips – mostly in the U.S. but also to foreign countries. The artistic woman who cuts and colors my hair is headed to Brazil with her husband to pick up his mother and bring her stateside for several months. They’re also going to L.A. to see her son, whom she hasn’t seen since the pandemic started.
In other words, a return to normal isn’t normal. It’s part of the new normal, which is still revealing itself to us.
