While the Covid-19 pandemic continues, I will post to this blog site. This is a moment in history that needs to be documented at the personal level. I will attempt to do that.
I write this at 5:30 am on Saturday, March 21, 2020. I am in my home office looking out the window on a quiet, mostly inactive site. Downtown West Chicago, Illinois, USA. City Hall next door. Our building is a 4-storey condominium containing 39 homes/apartments. Across the street is a small grocery store, well known for its Mexican heritage. It is popular and always crammed. It will be today as well despite the pandemic. People need to eat and they buy food. Next to them is the Metra commuter rail station with a huge parking lot. that lot is now empty and will be so every day the pandemic continues. All this past week the lot has been mostly empty. Eerie. Street traffic is almost nonexistent.
We are on the mainline for ambulance, fire and police traffic. That traffic continues 24/7 as does traffic for city services and the nearby hospital. We are in the thick of things. The population of our community is 27,000 in a county of 1 million. Chicago metro has a population of nearly 10 million. Bustling with human activity describes the norm. That is not so now.
Also across the street, is perhaps the busiest rail line in the nation. No passenger traffic other than commuter, but freight is 24/7/365 and constant. A quarter mile west of our building is a north/south freight line that runs from central Canada to the port near New Orleans. That rail line is busy 24/7/365 as well, and runs trains of one to two miles in lengths, most likely 28 to 32 per day. So West Chicago is a rail center as it has been for all its history. That is the reason this community came to be and continues.
The rail lines are constant. The nation and the world is supplied by these rail lines. And the world lives so the rail traffic continues unabated.
It's the people who are abated, or at least their activity.
Yes, it is weird. But we get along with electronic connections, naps, and making arrangements for food and supplies of all sorts. What we need is delivered or we arrange a curbside pickup. Restaurants take our order and we drive by for a quick takeout pickup. Eat at home. Safe and sound.
That's the message - safe and sound.
We keep at this discipline because we are told to and it makes sense. We cooperate to preserve health and life. It is not emotional yet. Just tedious at time.
Reading, thinking, writing, napping, cleaning, eating, showering, dressing, doing laundry, taking the trash to the chute. All these activities break the tedium. We have cause to think about what is important.
We think of family near and far, and those who have passed away. We ponder what is real in life.
Lately, I have ponder on the languages of life. More or that in a future post. Until then, be safe and love and be loved.
March 21, 2020
PS: today is my 14th anniversary of being sober.
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