Nancy's Notes
What have you learned about yourself during the pandemic?
Several times in my life I have kept a diary; but I could never keep it up and rarely made it through a month or two, let alone a year. I kept a diary religiously in high school, and I’m pretty sure it’s buried in one of my Time Capsules (okay, plastic storage box), preserved for some hilarious enlightenment after I’m gone and my kids and grandkids find it among my other personal things.
But at the start of 2020, I resolved to really give it a go and keep a diary again, mostly because “Twenty-Twenty” seemed like a great year to document. Boy, did I choose a crazy year! But after it was all said and done and documented, I have enjoyed going back to see how quickly our lives were changed by the global pandemic that none of us saw coming.
Exactly one year ago, March 4, I was with a group of ladies practicing for a hand chime/handbell program in a combined effort with several other groups; a program that was to be at the Huck Boyd Center in Phillipsburg. One year ago, March 5, I was part of a group here in Stockton that met to talk about our interest in kick-starting another Arts Council in Stockton. One year ago, March 10, the Stockton High School Tigers’ basketball team, with a record of 14-11, had earned the opportunity to play in the 1-A State Basketball Tournament in Dodge City and knocked out the #1 seed, Berean (25-0), like David knocking out Goliath. That was the 10th of March, according to my diary.
Life was grand! Life was exciting and fun! We all had a lot going on with enthusiasm and anticipation of some wonderful things to look forward to. What could possibly go wrong to keep all that excitement from happening?
Just a mere two days later, on March 12, the train came to a screaching halt. LIFE as we knew it, changed. The state basketball tournament was cancelled; in fact, all sports activities—from biddy basketball for little kids all the way through the NCAA “March Madness,” the NBA, professional baseball and golf—everything came to a halt, in an effort to slow the spread of the virus by eliminating large crowd situations. I documented all of this in my diary as, day by day, more events were called off and services were halted.
People panicked, and shelves in grocery stores and the Walmarts of the world were empty. There was a world-wide shortage of toilet paper, for Pete’s sake! Retail stores and restaurants, manufacturing companies, other businesses, and our churches were forced to close, affecting millions of jobs and tanking the global economy. And two days before I was scheduled to get a haircut, Jes notified me that she had to close her shop! Are you kidding me? I needed a haircut!
Then, on March 17, the Governor of Kansas closed all K-12 school buildings for the rest of the academic year. She was not alone in this decision; before long, schools all across the nation were closed. There would be no proms, no graduation ceremonies. And in Cheney, Kansas, our 18-year-old, high-school-senior granddaughter cried a river that didn’t dry up for days. I recorded all of it in my diary, with too few lines to write each daily account.
And then it got real, and we began to understand this was bigger than no sports or cancelled proms. On March 31, I wrote: “More than 300 people died today in NYC.” Two days later: “More than 1,000 people died in NYC today.” And on April 5: “We have our first coronavirus case in RoCo, someone in Stockton.” On April 9: “The news is worse every day. Lord, have mercy!” By May 19: “Our country is nearing 100,000 deaths.” Personally, my worst entries in my diary were the nine days in October while my husband was in the COVID-Unit at HaysMed, having watched in my rearview mirror as an ambulance transferred him there from the ER at Rooks County Health Center. I do not remember driving home that day.
I have a personal philosophy that, for everything bad that happens, there has got to be something good that happens, too. And there were a lot of good things going on. For many of us, our hectic lifestyle of chasing our own tails was forced to slow down. And through much of this “down time,” many of us may have taken an opportunity to rest a little more, read a little more, Zooming to visit family and friends a little more, watching out for each other and caring a little more.
But before some of you think I was living in some kind of dream world, it wasn’t all peace and love and taking care of each other that I wrote about in my diary. After all, 2020 was when, for the first time as an apartment manager, I had to go to court to get rid of an angry, dangerous tenant in order to preserve the fragile little world around a circle drive on McKnight Street. 2020 was when George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, resulting in protests and riots. And 2020 was an ugly election year that seemed to never end, resulting in protests and riots.
As 2020 came to a close, the pandemic was far from over, and it continued to take its toll on families near and far. At the end of my diary for 2020, on a page reserved for NOTES, I included a summary from The Washington Post about the unfathomable year: “Nearly one of every 1,000 Americans has died of covid-19—the equivalent of losing the entire population of cities such as Orlando, Pittsburgh or St. Louis. There have been more than twice as many American deaths as those killed in World War I. Five times as many as in the Vietnam War. One hundred times as many as in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The year of coronavirus has altered or diminished almost every American life. It has ended the lives of nearly 300,000 of them.”
If anything was to be gained or learned from this period in our lives, I think the pandemic has forced us to look deep within and have some hard conversations with ourselves on many fronts. You know, that “get real” kind of stuff where we figure out what really makes us tick, what makes us angry, anxious, depressed, happy, sad—you know, all that stuff, and not necessarily in alphabetic order.
For me personally, in the year of “Twenty-Twenty,” I affirmed within myself that I have more inner strength than I thought I had, yet I can melt down like a blob of silly putty at the flip of a switch. There were plenty of opportunities to visit both extremes.
So, am I keeping a diary again in 2021? Yes, I am; but I seriously hope it is less eventful. So far, I’ve recorded in great detail our extreme weather patterns. At this rate, it will make for some dull reading at the end of this year.
