Five Years Ago

In the midst of our current national conflagration, I forgot that it was five years ago this week that we began entering into the covid lockdown.

I looked back at my calendar for this week and I see a lot of emergency meetings for the large spring event I help organize. We ended up canceling it, of course, with huge financial cost.

My calendar also shows the last city council meeting I attended in person. And the morning the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul announced they were lowering speed limits on their side streets to 20 mph, and city arterial streets were decreased to 25 mph. A small crowd gathered outside next to one of the streets that connects the two cities as Public Works employees changed the speed limit sign. That was the last time I saw something like a crowd of people for quite a long time.

I did two last things in person. One (on Sunday, March 15!) was to help Daughter Number Three-Point-One and her partner move into the house they had bought earlier in the month. Several of her friends were also there. We all felt a little hinky about it, but it was fine. And the very last thing I did, on March 17, was get a haircut — just me and my stylist, alone in her shop.

I was the only person I knew who didn't need a haircut as the next several months wore on.

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These are my posts from March 2020... for posterity. As I reread them and looked at the dates of the posts compared to this recollection, it amused me to see how impossible it is to tell what I was doing on the various days.