The prospect of several weeks in stay-at-home mode can seem daunting.
It’s a lifestyle and a work style foreign to most of us, and making it happen is an adjustment. It takes time. Every day feels a little different from the day before. We’re all on a learning curve as we work to flatten the curve.
So far, so good, I’m finding. Staying home and retrofitting routines to fit this temporary new reality, I’ve experienced moments of feeling defeated and despairing. They’ve been few, but intense.
Humans — a social species by nature — weren’t built for isolation. Just watch “Cast Away,” which has Tom Hanks so desperate for companionship he befriends a volleyball.
The amazing technologies that are helping us mitigate the sting of literal social distancing and are keeping many of us working through this crisis are wonderful and indispensable, but Zoom can’t hug you.
So in those fleeting moments when I feel anxious about the prospect of weeks of staying at home, I wonder how we’re going to do it. Then I remind myself that a month, even two or three months, can go by fast. It seems only like moments ago, for instance, that we were celebrating the new year, even if we were clueless as we raised our glasses cheering 2020 what a peculiar new year we were toasting.
But the span of time between then and now doesn’t seem wide, and I’ve kept that thought — about the speed with which days, months and years pass — close while navigating these uncertain COVID-19-era waters. Even a decade can breeze by fast.
To cite a timely example, it’s been that long ago that a fire sparked in the windy month of March badly damaged the Chatham County Historic Courthouse in Pittsboro.
As tempting as it is to reach for a cliche — “Seems like yesterday!” — to describe my memories of the fire, it wouldn’t be entirely true. Doesn’t seem like yesterday. But it hardly feels like 10 summers, 10 Christmases, 10 periods of 365 days each have come and gone since the afternoon that Chatham County’s historic courthouse shot flames and smoke.
It’s been long enough that there are certainly more than a few folks new to our area since 2010 who may not know the stately courthouse they see as they drive into Pittsboro ever survived such a calamity.
But it has been that long. And survive the courthouse did.
After the passage of 3,650 days, my memories of that time — of March 25, 2010, the day of the fire, and the immediate days after — remain sharp and clear, though, paradoxically, also somewhat of a blur.
I remember the hectic pace of our bustling Siler City newsroom as we worked overtime to put out a paper documenting the dramatic and historic event.
We were short-staffed that week, with one reporter on vacation, so those of us on duty were working furiously. Though it’s probably a trick of memory, I conjure an image of myself as the Tasmanian Devil from Bugs Bunny cartoons when I recall the pace of our output. As soon as I finished writing one story, I’d turn my attention to another. That’s the blur part of my memory of that time.
I also recall one memorable moment of almost eerie calm that occurred the Saturday morning after the Thursday the courthouse caught fire. I’d gone to town to see the smoldering building and to talk with anyone who might be doing the same. At that early hour, there were some other folks standing around, gazing at the odd, illogical sight of the courthouse’s charred remains.
As familiar as Pittsboro and its old county courthouse were to me, having spent countless hours in old building, and working for years from an office right across the street from it, I could have been standing on Mars for how foreign Pittsboro’s newly-adjusted landscape looked.
I wondered — looking at what remained of the courthouse on that mild March morning a decade ago — would Pittsboro ever be the same?
Fast-forwarding 10 years — a period of time long by some measures, swift by others — the courthouse was rebuilt, the familiar landscape restored, and life in Pittsboro returned to normal.
Normal.
These days, nothing feels or seems normal. Everything is overshadowed by the pandemic. The things we know and love — the normal things — are on hold or modified, not the same, so I can’t help but view the anniversary of the courthouse fire through a lens smeared by COVID-19.
In those times ahead when COVID-19 stuff overwhelms me — and it will happen again; the other night, Jessica (my wife/office-mate) and I watched Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks sing and play in a live show on CBS, and the husband and wife duo’s inspiring song and spirit making me nearly weepy — I hope I may remember examples like the courthouse, which stands as a beacon of hope, a reminder that time passes quickly (even two months under orders to stay at home) and a return to the life we know and love, difficult to imagine now, isn’t so far off.
