It’s been a ritual for years. Generally, on Saturdays, I convene adults and kids in the family Donut Club. I rustle up the donuts. They readily eat them. And through most of those years, the orders for the kids have been the same – chocolate-glazed or sprinkled donuts from Bredin’s Bakery in town. Well, the pandemic and the closure of the bakery changed all that. The Donut Club hasn’t met as regularly as it used to. But last Saturday morning, I put out the call for the donut orders anyway.
“Boston Cream, please,” came back one order.
“Boston Cream? Since when?” I asked.
Well, because everything’s been turned upside down for these past two years. And the donut delivery guy (me) has been separated from the donut eaters (them) for quite a while.
Like every other relationship during the COVID virus outbreak and (at least in this country) through most of the recovery period, everybody’s lost step with routine, social norms, regular relationships and family rituals, such as enjoying contact via our Donut Club. On the road back to normalcy, we’ve all faced a lot of awkward reconnection, reacquainting, re-acclimatizing, and a sometimes difficult bridging of the gap that little or no social interaction has inflicted on us.
The art of contact with others truly needs a makeover.
With that notion in mind, I invited a friend to lunch last week. We enjoyed a socially distanced, masked (when not eating) and almost normal sit-down meal at Navarra’s. But I think what struck both of us was how much ground we needed to cover to fill the gap of time we’ve not seen each other – catching up on kids’ lives, sharing our favourite NHL teams’ wins and losses, exchanging travel nightmares during the pandemic, and acknowledging life and death in our community.
In fact, when we mentioned the recent accidental death of Bob Hubers, well, that sparked a wider conversation with a young woman at the table next to us. Bob had once been her hockey coach, and his death had consequently hit her very hard. But like so much during these locked-down, isolated times over these past two years, she’d kind of suffered in silence. It seems the pandemic has even driven a gulf between dying and grieving.
But this two-year viral wedge hasn’t just deprived people of expression. It’s also, for example, forced a complete rethink in the world of enterprize. And I’m not just talking about wearing masks in stores and sanitizing everything 24/7. If you shop in town, every merchant and her staff, every service manager and his employees has completely relearned the art of customer service.
They’ve all had to invent new ways of bridging the divide that masked faces, sanitized environments and mandated social distancing have imposed on commercial interaction. More shopkeepers around town are asking shoppers on exit, “Did you find everything you were looking for?” or “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
One store employee asked me if I’d been dissatisfied with any of their services. “I’ll spot a problem if you look into my eyes,” she said. When I left, I went out of my way to thank her by trying to make my eyes smile with gratitude. Awkward perhaps, but a necessary accommodation even as COVID cases diminish.
Over the Family Day weekend, a few of us got together for a meal for the first time in months. I found myself catching up weeks and months of what our daughters and their children have accomplished during the separation imposed by the pandemic. Grandchildren have moved on from elementary school to high school, or from one grade school to another.
Indeed, one family’s kids returned to in-class learning for the first time in two years. I revelled in the chance to see them off to class this week. We took huge breaths of fresh air as we walked together. We talked about clouds, puddle jumping and bird calls. We hadn’t forgotten how to do all that, but like everything else, we were a bit rusty at it.
Oddly, this week, I found myself trying to bridge the gap with our national flag too. So often over the past three weeks our Red Maple Leaf – draped over demonstrators backs in Ottawa or fluttering from pickup trucks at blockades at Coutts or Windsor – has symbolized endorsement of the so-called “Freedom Convoy.”
If anybody had asked (nobody did) “Are you supporting the anti-mandate demonstrators with the flag on the front of your house?” I’d quickly have replied, “No. It’s for the Canadian women who are Olympic champions in hockey.”
It’s kind of like donuts. There’s a big difference between Boston Cream and chocolate-glazed.