Common sense and ketchup
The ketchup’s back on the table.
That’s a good sign.
Restaurant condiments were an early casualty of COVID caution. Last summer, when we were first reluctantly allowed back into our favorite bars and bistros we were greeted by bare tables, flimsy paper menus, and sandwich fixin’s served up in itty-bitty paper cups or squeeze-it-out fast food packets. And one napkin to a customer, please.
Needless to say, we acquiesced to the exigencies of disease control as understood or anticipated at the time, and proceeded, uncomplaining, with our hand sanitizer-scented sandwiches, simply glad to be at last out of the house and munching something that didn’t taste of our own refrigerators. The missing condiment caddy was a tolerable precaution against a biohazard barely understood.
We’ve spent a year now in the company of COVID-19 and man and bug have gotten fairly well acquainted. Well enough acquainted and understood, that we can share a squeeze bottle of Heinz’ finest with our fellow diners and contemplate enjoying socially-distanced state fair corndogs at summer’s end.
Science, my friends, is a wonderful thing.
Yes, credit science for the ketchup slathering your fries and the hot sauce perking up your scrambled eggs. It was the patient, methodical, trial-and-error work of fact-based observers that determined that the corona virus is not transmitted through casual surface contact, which means touching stuff somebody else might have touched won’t get you sick – at least not sick with COVID-19.
So we can feel free to share the ketchup.
Sharing the air, we’ve learned, is a different story.
Or, should I say, some of us have learned.
The same science that’s given the ketchup bottle the all-clear has solidly established how we pass the bug from one to another – an infected person spews the virus into the air with every breath, cough, sneeze or sniffle so anyone chancing to breath that air will suck that virus deep into their alveoli where those nefarious little critters set up shop to create another CDC statistic. Fortunately, it’s been demonstrated beyond question that if folks take the simple precaution of wearing a mask to keep the virus to themselves or strain out a fair share of the little buggers before they make it to the bronchi their nefarious designs can be thwarted. Even better, these clever folks have disassembled the pathogen, figured out how it does its dirty work and come up with not just one, but several, vaccines to stop it in its tracks.
Yup, it looks like with a piece of cloth, a shot in the arm, and a little space, patience, cooperation and common sense we can have this thing whipped.
Looks like a pretty good deal to me. I do worry about the patience, cooperation and common sense part though.
Yeah, I know it’s been a year since we were told everything would be over and the churches would be packed by Easter. Well, Easter is soon upon us, and unless we want the celebration of the resurrection to be a super-spreader event, there will be plenty of space in our churches again this year. And yes, we’re sick of the masks. We’re sick of the distancing. We’re sick of worrying about people getting sick and it’s so, so tempting to tear off the mask and pretend that it’s over.
But it’s not. The ketchup’s back, but the bug is still out there. If we listen to the doctors, to the scientists – the real ones, not the graduates of the University of YouTube – we’ll hang in there, get our shots, and in time -- no doubt not as short of a time as we’d all wish -- we’ll be back at the ball park, in the theater, the concert hall. We’ll be elbowing each other for a place in line for a Pronto Pup and not give it a second thought. All it takes is time, cooperation, a mask and a shot in the arm. And common sense.
We’ve got the science, I worry about the common sense.