Good news! Amras and I have been officially released from our “just returned home to Canada from abroad” self-isolation period. We will soon be free to at the very least walk around the neighbourhood! My first trip to the drugstore was…an experience.
However, even though the Canadian government is taking pretty good care of its citizens, we cannot live on the C.E.R.B stipend, at least not with that much ease. Which means I step into a title I never thought I would hold: I am, as of tomorrow, an Essential Worker.
Yup, those hometown heroes you keep reading about? The ones keeping the grocery stores open and the lights on? I get to join my Dad as one of them. Turns out one of the business types that has been deemed essential in our province is hardware stores. Which means my little go-between job at the local store has been transformed into…something…important?
I’ve been in and out of retail most of my adult life. It was a way to make ends meet through school and continues to be a way to make ends meet now. I usually swing in between contracts because the store needs the help and I need vacation money. But this is not a vacation. Amras and I are “landed” for the indefinite future, the jury is very much still out on whether or not we will ever return to ships again (please don’t ask, we don’t know yet), and we have to do day to day things like eat and pay bills. That means heading out into the fray…
If I really look it in the face, I’m more than a little nervous about stepping back into the retail world tomorrow. For one thing, it’s actually been quite some time since I was around a lot of “normal” people at once. It’s been two weeks since I returned home and, while I’ve been doing nothing but playing video games and watching streaming TV, I honestly don’t know that I feel fully rested or recovered, and I’m not 100% sure how to handle being back “out in the world”. For a second, way more important thing, since I’ve been home? I’ve seen a shocking amount of people who seem to think that just because there is a plan to slowly return things back to normal that they are back to normal.
I never expected things on land to be as insanely strict as they were on the ship, but I also never expected to so quickly starting seeing the opposite of what was enforced on us. When I step out the door tomorrow, and walk through the doors of the stock room, I can’t help but feel like I’m playing some bizarre game of Russian roulette. We all are! Every single person who will be working that floor – and every other floor – with me. Every grocery store worker, hardware store clerk, delivery man, all of us. We’ll be working because we have to on many levels, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not more than a little bit…uneasy about the concept. If it were possible (and it’s not) I would have my whole family staying here, in the house, safe and isolated and away.
But that’s not possible.
So I ask this of you, of all of you: please remember that just because things suddenly seem “normal” doesn’t mean they are. Science and history tells us that this is the most vulnerable part of the curve, when everything seems so much better and everyone seems fine and we’re all tired and we all have cabin fever. Remember ,the virus is not tired. It is not gone, it’s just been controlled. To keep it controlled, we need to keep being sensible.
Stay home if you can. Please. And if you must go out, if you must do more than just take a walk down the street and back for exercise. Please, be smart about it. When we ask you to wear a mask and practice social distancing, to not try to pay with cash (yes Canadian cash is washable, but with the number of transactions going through at the store right now we don’t have time to do that), and to stay on the other side of the plexiglass – we are not doing it to annoy you, we are doing it to protect us. You may be only jumping out of your car to grab one item from the store and then running straight home again. People like my Dad and I? We’ll be in that store 8 hours a day, multiple days a week, dealing with hundreds of people…
Normally that’s not at all a big deal, it goes with the job. Now? It’s a little bit scary…
So please, I remind you all of what I’ve been trying to remember myself through all of this: be kind. Remember that sometimes being kind means you have to be a little inconvenienced for the good of someone else. Sometimes being kind takes a form that you don’t expect. But please…be kind.
And…as for me?
Well… “May the odds be ever in [my] favour”