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Covid-19 got your tongue?
What’s left to say in our brave new world?
There was a point, back in the distant mists of time (when we could walk barefaced in public, cluttering the air with our breath with the abandon of dinosaurs trampling twenty-foot ferns) when talking to other people made up a reasonable portion of my day. Between household conversation, routine bus/grocery/bar/restaurant interactions and several hours of classroom teaching my voice would come home ragged.
When the slow tsunami of Covid-19 manifested the talking shape-shifted. Suddenly, with everyone perhaps about to die there was a flurry of out-of-character video calls and a spate of WhatsApp voice check-ins with friends and colleagues. Communication was urgent. A pandemic, ohmygod.
I wrote an article about the collapse of the music touring business which provided a welcome reason to talk to lovely people I haven’t seen in years. A dear friend and I had mid-week Zoom dates. My brother, stranded apart from his family in the Dominican Republic, left chatty voice messages at odd hours.
It felt right, this talking. Despite or because of the crisis, I was speaking to people I hadn’t spoken to and hearing from people I hadn’t heard from. We were connecting. Covid-19 could shrink my daily routine to spooked twice-weekly, hand-sanitizer-drenched grocery store trips but it couldn’t take…
