We can wonder which temporary closings will truly be reversed. What has survived and what has not? Many familiar things have shuttered: a Persian restaurant here, a much loved stationery store there. Much of the emotion is like what must be felt at the end of a tsunami: the great wave came, washed over everything, and now has pulled back and we can inspect the beach. We mourn for the thing coming down, and root for the one going up. Emergence may or may not be a stronger natural force than entropy, but we favor it emotionally. The same time span felt faster, like an explosion rather than like a declension. But it felt less like an iris closing and more like a flower blooming in time-lapse photography. The reopening, promoted by falling COVID case numbers and rising vaccination rates, seemed to have happened over a similar weekend, in May. The shutdown was like the closing iris at the end of a Chaplin film, less and less of the outside world peeking out through the aperture of sight each day. No schools, no clubs, no gyms, no “indoor dining” (a term that, like “unsafe sex” and “analog watch,” turned an age-old default into a special condition)-we accepted it and went on. Broadway had never before closed for a year, not even during the 1918 pandemic the mask mandates, even then, were not so extensive. So much that seemed impossible has happened, and yet as each thing happened it registered as merely the next thing happening. Adjusting to the unprecedented, we have instant amnesia for the unimaginable. Much of what was taken for granted then-the breezy confidence that life would be normal again by, well, maybe June?-has faded from memory. Grand Central Terminal, still busy as that weekend began, was nearly empty by the following Tuesday. Birdland Jazz Club, open on a mid-March Monday night, with a singer nervously bathing his hands in Purell, had closed a week later. When the city shut down more than a year ago, a walker within it could track the oncoming withdrawal and hibernation, block by block, and even-as people walking dogs moved farther away from each other-tautening leash by tautening leash.
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