Bear with me here. Last week in my office, I made a horrible mistake during a staff meeting. I left my glasses on. I usually take them off once I get inside, because they’re more for distances than they are immediate surroundings.
I usually rock the Dunkin’ Donuts mask my wife ordered for me, because, well, Double-Ds is our second home. If I don’t go there at least once a day for coffee there’s a disruption in The Force. I missed a lot of things during the pandemic shutdown, but what I missed most was the daily Dunkin’s run. I had to make do with a Keurig and, well, take my word for it. It just isn’t the same. (To all you Starbucks people out there, you can write your own column).
The cloth material for the mask, though, is very heavy. And it doesn’t have one of those little metal thingys in it that you can wrap around your nose to keep your glasses from fogging up (allegedly).
To sum up thus far: I wore glasses when I normally didn’t. I was indoors, in an enclosed room with no ventilation to speak of. We shut the fans off so we could hear each other talk during the meeting. And my glasses got fogged up.
So I did what we all do in that situation: I took the mask down off my nose and mouth so I could de-fog the glasses (why I didn’t just take them off, I don’t know), and then forgot I’d done it. And I, who have no problem at all wearing a mask, was exposed. Literally and figuratively.
And I got called on it. One of the participants, at the opposite end of the table, interrupted me to tell me I needed to put my mask back on. I was taken aback by that, especially since I hadn’t realized it was off. So I slid it back on, and finally realized I should just put the mask back on and take my glasses off!
Later that day, I noticed that a co-worker who deals with walk-in business at The Item was wearing a face shield that she got for a nominal fee from Amazon. I said, “Gee, I like that. Maybe if I had one of those, I wouldn’t get humiliated in meetings for not having my mask on correctly.”
Next day, in the basket in my office, was a face shield. And let me tell you, they are the proverbial breath of fresh air. No more fogged-up glasses because there’s plenty of air coming in at the bottom. You may look like one of those townspeople in “Close Encounters” who walk around with haz-mat suits on due to a fake virus/gas that’s allegedly in the air, but you can at least see. It’ll take some getting used to, though.
This pandemic, and the steps we’ve had to take to keep ourselves — and others — safe is a gigantic pain in the you-know-what. Nobody, regardless of what we think of the safeguards, could possibly think otherwise. I have good friends I haven’t seen since March 14. They only live 45 minutes away, right over the New Hampshire line, and this is easily the longest time between visits we’ve ever had. Then again, we went almost four months without seeing my 97-year-old mother-in-law, and she lives in Saugus.
Some of us say, “Well, what are you going to do? That’s why it’s called a pandemic.” Those on the extreme opposite side might say, “By forcing me to wear a mask, especially if you’re setting up mandatory mask zones, like they’re doing in Swampscott, you are infringing on my freedoms.”
We had the same arguments for three months while life virtually shut down. People like me thought that while it was really tragic to see parades of people in food lines, the underlying motivation was to put the brakes on this virus that was spreading like wildfire. Others saw the shutdown as an attempt by the government to control our lives. How, I don’t know. Save our lives, maybe. But certainly not to control them.
But with all the bellicose rhetoric these days that passes for public discourse, the mask has become the Mason-Dixon line in this pandemic. It doesn’t just represent the difference between safely corralling this virus and allowing it to spread unfettered. It represents differences in political philosophy, it’s become a rallying point for crackpot survivalists who storm public buildings with rifles, and not wearing one has become, by now, a visible act of defiance against … I don’t know what, exactly. Government control? Wussism? Ovine-ism? Refusal to live in fear? All four?
I prefer to wear a mask. And if it turns out to be overkill, so be it. We’re still here. Because the alternative — not wearing one, turning out to be wrong about it, infecting people due to my negligence, and perhaps causing someone’s death (not to mention mine), is not something I want to contemplate.