I Found Hope in an Unexpected Place

On a snowy weeknight early this past winter, after the plows cleared the roads, I drove carefully downhill to our family-friendly neighborhood bar with my wife and two boys. We were supposed to meet another family of four there. The old triangular brick bar would have been charming in the snow—full of merry townies in damp sweaters, I imagined—but after parking and trudging through the slush, I looked through the windows and realized it was closed. I gave two futile yanks to the door handle and then checked my phone. There was a text from the other dad. He had just been through the same thing. We got back in the car and headed to their house for homemade pretzels and beer, instead. 

During the COVID pandemic we had isolated with this family, and on this night, around their dinner table, while the kids played in the next room, we shared the myriad ways we’ve noticed people isolating today: the community at our local bar dispersed after the place was purchased and scrubbed of personality by a developer; my coworker had told me that morning that people are leaving her historic Harlem church for virtual megachurch; and our friends had just read about a strange new way men online were proudly bonding over, and even basing their identity around, their inability to get laid. “Did you read the “gooning” article in Harper’s?” they began before explaining its horrors. “Call me old fashioned,” I thought to myself in my internal Sylvester Stallone voice. (I resist the urge to do voices in company, but does anyone remember Stallone’s line in Demolition Man, when he rejects the VR headset?)