California, during the pandemic, fells like 1974.
In 1974, my parents were living in the married quarters of the local army base. On a Saturday morning, my mother would drive about 20 minutes away to a large retail center where we would do our grocery shopping. The aisles were packed as trading on a Saturday ceased at either noon or 12:30pm.
Up and down the aisles we would travel, filling the cart, amid the noise of people chatting. If you weren't in the store when the doors open, by the time you reached some sections, the shelves would be bare and from past experiences, you knew that they would not be restocked before the end of the day, so you moved on without that item.
At the checkouts there were lines of people seven and eight deep, but there was room to move as each shopper gave a courtesy to the other occupants in the store. The groceries and items were bagged into a light brown paper bag, and placed back in the cart.
The parking lot was multi level, so on days when you parked on the lowest level, when you exited the store, you couldn't tell what the weather was like. You would look down and see streams of water beginning to run downhill through the parking lot and you knew it was raining. If you were exiting the store at noon, the rush would be over, and you might see the other stores closing up for the weekend. By the time 1:00pm arrived, everything was closed. People were home, no one was on the street, traffic was non existent.
California feels a bit like those Saturday mornings in 1974. With the health issue across the nation, the eyes that I have 46 years later take in a different perspective, but it still has the same feel about.
Except that in 1974, those were some of the best memories of my childhood. Not a lot of memories from the Covid crisis that I want to carry for the next 46 years.
