Time Warped

As if life in the time of plague wasn’t challenging enough, the grocery stores have now instituted one way aisles. In this city, it’s all we can do manage one way downtown streets or 4 way stops and they think we can handle (or will obey) red arrows in floor diagrams. Many of the store’s employees and most of the shoppers are mask-less and seem to be wandering aimlessly. Some are outright lost, hypnotized by the barren shelves where the paper goods used to be. I have the feeling I am trapped in some kind of post-apocalyptic underground film, that the very next turn I take could lead straight into a nest of the undead. The other thing I notice is that it’s almost eerily quiet, no piped in elevator music is playing and the only sounds are the stops and starts of the shopping cart wheels. The shelf stockers move slowly and silently, as if in a daze and the cashiers are pale and glassy eyed, moving woodenly and seeming to look straight through me. The automatic doors whoosh open and a bag boy stumbles in, pushing a line of carts and looking bewildered. He doesn’t navigate the turn well and the first cart crashes into a display of bakery goods, sending containers of brownies and eclairs and freshly baked pies in all directions. It’s enough for me. I hand over a hundred dollar bill for $97 worth of groceries, tell the cashier to keep the change and make a run for it, swerving wildly to avoid the wreckage of the collision at the front doors and escaping to the parking lot. I was fully prepared to run right over anyone who got in my way.

Once outside, I came back to myself, feeling silly and ashamed for letting my imagination have its way. The grocery store was just a grocery store, not a scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The shoppers were just tired and quarantine-fatigued consumers, the employees no more than harried and overworked clerks. The bag boy was likely sleep deprived or over confident or had simply not been paying attention. It was, after all, just past 7 am on a Saturday morning in the 10^th week of this crisis. We all should still have been in bed.

I unloaded the groceries and dutifully returned the once again ordinary shopping cart to its corral. The morning was sun was warm and the pavement beneath my feet was reassuringly solid and substantial. I found myself thinking how odd it is that we don’t appreciate normal until it’s gone – I miss the unremarkable pre-virus days, the ordinary routines, the self indulgent complaining and complacency we allowed ourselves. Any distraction, even one born of a runaway imagination fueled by too much Stephen King and too little Walt Whitman is welcome. I had no idea that just a few days later, there would be widespread looting and riots with cities set on fire and the national guard patrolling the streets. Sometimes even my imagination can’t keep up.