Quarantine Chronicles Day 53: How we’ll shop as restrictions are eased

For fun now in my 53rd day of soul-crushing loneliness and isolation (if you discount my daughter and, after work, my wife, and throw in a couple of dogs, but other than that, yes, soul-crushing loneliness and isolation) I cruise Amazon, just like as a child I cruised the Sears catalog in the weeks before Christmas, carefully curating a gift wish-list to make shopping life easier and convenient for my parents and grandparents who couldn’t be trusted to buy presents for me without a road map of my wants and desires.

The difference is, now I can just click on things that I actually want (and in rare cases, need) rather than just dog-earing some pages and hoping for the best.

And buying online—it doesn’t have to be Amazon, and there are some good ethical reasons for it not to be Amazon—is a lot like Christmas. Better, in fact, because you only get what you want, and if you do it often enough, gifts from yourself come in the mail unexpectedly virtually every day; things you forgot you ordered (for maximum surprise, do your ordering right after cocktail hour).

“Wow, how thoughtful of me to buy myself some nice fleece-lined slippers! And look, I got myself some great Carhartt T-shirts. How in the world did I know I wanted forest green?” I would give myself a huge hug if that sort of thing wasn’t now, and perhaps for years to come, taboo.

Granted, you still have to pay for all this stuff, but you get to keep it, unlike the junk you spend money on for other people at Christmas.

With the state, the county and the city exploring some options for the very near future of how things will be in Long Beach, it’s not the glimmering brilliance of the sort of freedom we all experienced back in the weeks before St. Patrick’s Day when, if you’ll recall, we could dawdle in the aisle of a Sears or a Ralphs, feeling the heft of a work boot or the thump of a melon.

You could just meander around the store without a shopping list, just grabbing this or that and then taking it home and enjoying a barbecue or potluck with 25 of your friends and neighbors all scrunched together.

Now, it’s looking more like the new normal will be sort of like Amazon, but you have to go pick up what you buy rather than have it dropped on your porch. You’ll need to look at your favorite shop’s website, pick out what you want, order it and then drive over and pick it up curbside.

But no loitering in the aisles, checking things out, like giving the wind-chimes a whack at Fern’s Garden, or taking a whiff of a mango-mandarin candle at Blue Windows.

And no more unexpected packages, unless you drive over to Fingerprints or Marshalls and yell “Surprise me!” at anyone who looks like an employee.

So, yeah, it’s a little more of a hassle, a little less of a convenience, but it gives you a chance to help the town’s small businesses rebound and stay around for a while longer.

Food, too, will remain problematic. We’ve been ordering via Grubhub and Postmates three or four times a week during the stay-at-home order, with regular deliveries of groceries from Instacart. You haven’t lived a life of true despair and disappointment until you’ve tried to order Mexican food from a decent place on the explosive confluence of Cinco de Mayo falling on Taco Tuesday in a lockdown. Yeah, I know, first-world problems, but that doesn’t make it not a problem.

I suppose we could’ve had a bright-side fiesta and sat around voicing our gratitude for those blessings we have, my good health, for instance, though I haven’t been tested to verify that I’m still in possession of that. Still, it was nice to have a platter of enchiladas and a jug of margaritas, even if it was from my fifth or sixth choice of a restaurant.

So the days continue to flash by. Oddly, time passes quickly while in lock-down. There are a smattering of things to look forward to in the coming days, perhaps, including walking or riding on the beach path, or hiking through the Nature Center or along DeForest, as long as I don’t bump into anyone.

Oh, and golf! Once the lobbyists and higher-level businesspeople in town get on the course, they’ll stop their demands to throw everything open and get this economy rolling (by November, ideally).

Can the city and the state and the nation return now to full-on, old-fashioned normalcy as some people wish for?  To swipe a phrase from Hemingway, it’s pretty to think so. But, to swipe a phrase from my granddad, it’s a good way to die.