What a Long Strange Week It’s Been

I got on a plane to Durango, CO at the beginning of March, ready for a two week work-related stay at one of my favorite towns on the planet. When I was walking through Terminal A at Denver International Airport to get on that flight, I remember passing more than a dozen people in face masks on the way to my gate. At this point, there were sustained rumblings about COVID-19 being a global pandemic, but no significant steps had been taken within the US to stop or restrain domestic travel. With my healthy immune system and general sunny outlook on life, I wasn’t particularly worried about COVID-19.

By the time my stay in Durango was coming to a close last weekend, I was glad the combination of a canceling pet sitter and a warm spring resulted in Basil being able to join me in Durango early and us being able to return home by car. The seemingly drastic government measures I had heard about from co-workers in the Midwest had started to manifest in Colorado by the time Basil and I were headed back to Denver: restaurants and bars closing, with toilet paper and water suddenly becoming unfindable at stores.

The firm I work for had already grounded me and my fellow road warriors through mid-April. At the dawn of last Saturday, I received an e-mail informing me our offices would be closed, with everyone being directed to work from home for at least the next four weeks.

Whatever you want to call the events of this week, I know they are like nothing else I have lived through. And yet the feeling of dealing with these new developments was vaguely familiar, which left me wondering when I had felt these emotions before.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I was checking in with one of our newly hired consultants at work. He had just started full time at the firm in February. I IMed him on Monday morning to see how he was doing. He told me he had decided to drive back home to Illinois to see his folks until the work from home mandate was lifted. I was glad he had a family to drive back to: parents to fuss over him, parents who made him feel safe enough that he felt compelled to take on the fifteen plus hour drive in order to get there.

I tried to remember the last time I had driven home with any such hopes for my parents, and then it came to me: it was right after September 11, 2001.

Although my father was still alive at this point, nearly two years left on the clock before his untimely demise, he is oddly absent from my memory of this homecoming. By this point I was not voluntarily speaking to my mother unless I had to, and so my coming home at all was really to see him and Max anyway. Why I can’t see him there in my memory, I do not know.

I remember exactly what he was working on writing-wise: he had been hoping to further publicize his Rocky Point book, as Dan Willoughby, the main defandant/accused in the case, was coming up on a new trial that fall. But between September 11th and the Arizona Diamondbacks going to their first World Series, Dan Willoughby’s retrial was all but annihilated from the news cycle.

The one thing I do remember from that weekend was driving to pick up breakfast for my parents from Filiberto’s, our family’s taqueria of choice. My mother always ordered the huevos rancheros. My father and I usually went with their steak super nachos — one order for each of us. I was hardly a drinker at this point in my life, so I didn’t yet appreciate what fabulous hangover food this was.

When I got home with our order, we would be sitting down to enjoy Mesa’s warm fall weather on the porch overlooking the pool and backyard. My mother would be starting on her first drink of the day: likely Cook’s champagne in a red solo cup with ice. This was eight months before I began to work at Peet’s, where my obsession with coffee made its next evolution, so I don’t think I would have had coffee with my super nachos. And now my older self can’t imagine: if I wasn’t drinking champagne or coffee, what the hell did I have with my breakfast? Water?

It was the drive to Filiberto’s that remains the most vivid memory of Saturday, September 15, 2001. I drove alone to pick up breakfast. I took Dad’s white Camry so I could roll back the sun roof and feel the wind whip through my hair. I don’t think I would have had a country music station on in my father’s car (Dad respected county legends like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton, but was not a listener to the pop country of the late 90s and early aughts). But somehow Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” came on the radio.

I had never heard the song before. When Toby’s patriotic diatribe got to the verse: “We’ll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American Way”, my stomach sank and my face reddened with embarrassment, even though I was completely alone. I was overcome with the bewildering feeling that things were never going to be the same again.

And of course, they weren’t.

I assume we have some time before the COVID-19 crisis begins to subside. I don’t know what the Toby Keith song equivalent will be for this momentous turn point in history.  I am thankful that instead of having to try and drive home to feel safe, I am at home in Denver, with a wonderful husband and our herd of animals. I am very glad to have a good job, a roof over our heads, a place where we are healthy and where, I think, we will be able to weather this storm together.