Suburban Phoenix during COVID-19, July 2020


It's July of 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic (which means Coronavirus Disease 2019, when it was discovered, and a pandemic is a worldwide epidemic). As of this writing, there is no vaccine, and people all over the world, including in Arizona, are being asked to do social distancing, and wear face coverings in public in order to slow the spread.


As a retired person, who mostly worked from home before that anyway (doing computer graphics), it really hasn't impacted my life severely. I have found the lack of traffic in the past few months has made my pedaling around easier, and since I don't have any difficulty following basic directions, I've not had any problem getting the necessities of life, like bananas, or dog food. The sign in the pic up there is from the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Thunderbird and 75th Avenue, and, speaking for myself, I've found following their rules to be simple. I have a nice cloth mask that the Woman in My Life gave me, and while it seems strange to wear a mask when walking into a grocery store (I even wore one going into a bank!), it's really not that difficult for me.

Schools are closed, and my heart goes out to parents who are stuck in the house with their kids all day, especially now that it's summer, with temperatures over 100 degrees. I've never had kids, but I used to be one, and the thought of my brothers and I being cooped up in the house with our parents isn't something that I even like to imagine. We were little monsters, because, well, we were kids.

And I do feel sorry for people who love to do things like go to sporting events, etc. That kind of stuff has never interested me, I'm not really a crowd person (but don't get me wrong, I like people - just not crowds of them, squashed together). I enjoy spending quality time with friends, even quaffing a beer in the backyard, or at a restaurant, but I've never spent much time in bars. But I do sympathize with people who do like those places, where everybody knows your name.

When all of this started to get serious, last April, I remember telling someone (who had been born in 2000) that he would remember this, and that it would something he could tell his grandchildren someday. My point of view is ultimately very optimistic for the future, in spite of people who can't seem to grasp what's going on. Arizona, like all of the United States, has traditionally been a place of rugged individualism, but there have been times, most notably during World War II, when Americans have pulled together, and won a tremendous victory. It's happened before, and it will happen again.
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