OPINION — The Coronavirus has shown us how connected we really are. A week ago, we were so selfish. Only we existed, and our own little circle of people. Now? That world has opened up a bit. Now we’re actually thinking about people continents away — and how their fingerprints could literally touch us.
I wonder who was in the airplane seat before the guy who just walked past me in Lac La Biche’s Main Street Petro Can gas station sat in it to travel back from the overnight business trip to Calgary he just told the cashier about during their quick customer-cashier banter about the weather and road conditions. But he didn’t explain the mundane things like he stayed in a hotel room by himself after a lunch meeting at a fairly busy Eau Claire Market’s Minas Brazilian Steakhouse, where someone in the booth beside his group sniffled and sneezed through the lunch hour, or that ate supper from room service, delivered by a friendly young man, and he forgot himself that he shared an elevator ride with a woman — a woman who whose car broke down on the Deerfoot, so she had to share a ride to the hotel where her sister works with the tow truck whose brother just got back into town from visiting his Airdrie buddies — one who got his hair cut a week before by his regular barber whose sister, Marisol, a ski-school owner in Banff, just returned from a trip to Vegas where she attended a small conference about ski wax that was attended by international delegates — restricted due to some countries’ fears over the early virus concerns, but still seeing a good 70 people. Marisol exchanged business contacts, cards and passing cell phones with two women from Argentina and a man from Switzerland.
I’m only curious because the guy just coughed — nicely into the bend of his elbow — as he was hitting the buttons on the Petro Can’s debit card machine — and I’m next in line to pay for my fuel.
Hopefully that guy from Switzerland who Marisol met had washed his hands after he ran down the stairs in his apartment building, grabbing the handrail intermittently to keep his speed and balance as he rushed to his girlfriend’s awaiting car at his building’s front entrance that would take them to a special fourth anniversary lunch the day before he heads to Vegas. He grips the handrail a bit tighter as he speeds up his descent, hoping the policeman he saw from the third-floor staircase window leaning on the ledge of his girlfriend’s open driver’s side door window isn’t giving her ticket. Little does the running Swiss man know that the policeman isn’t in the mood for tickets as he’s tired from the Golden Boy electronica concert he was at the night before, jumping and shimmying to Switzerland’s best EDM along with 7,000 fans from across Europe in a shoulder-to-shoulder general admission show at the Samsung Hall in Zurich.
Should I ask the Lac La Biche Petro-Can cashier to wipe the debit card machine with a Lysol wipe?
COVID-19. One bright side of the sweeping pandemic is that it’s made us think about each other.
Renowned medical specialist Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a late night talk show tonight: “We are co-dependent on each other in a way that I’ve never seen before.”
Rob McKinley to paraphrase: “We all share the same handrail.”
