Things are looking up
Last year, life everywhere stopped.
It’s restarting now – and with a vengeance.
This month, Major League baseball parks are starting to fill with delirious fans who’ve been starved for peanuts, and popcorn, and the cracks of the bats.
A recent home series for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field was their first with 100% seating capacity.
There were massive crowds for the four-game sweep of their rival St. Louis Cardinals.
This time last year, there were only cardboard cutouts where fans were supposed to be.
Heck! Last season Major League Baseball started two weeks late, and only after a truncated spring training.
Anybody, on any team, who tested positive for COVID-19 would lead to games being postponed. There were a total of 43 postponements across the league, which meant a lot – since each team only played 60 games instead of the normal 162.
The same kinds of restrictions had existed for the NBA and NHL. And those sports are slowly returning to normal during the current playoffs.
When the NFL resumes in late summer for the upcoming season, its games won’t be played in the stark, near-empty stadiums of last season. It’s certainly worth noting how far things have come since the winter of 2020. (That seems so long ago, doesn’t it?)
Going to the movies was out of the question. Many of us had to resort to the low brow, binge-watching of series like, well, er, “Tiger King.”
Over the years, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will still bravely look in the mirror after spending time watching people on TV, who I’d cross the street to avoid in real life.
Joe Exotic is one of those people.
But I watched him and that show, with much of America. (A year later, I can’t remember much about it. I feel blessed that I can’t.)
During the early days of COVID-19, I, like just about everyone in America, fell prey to “The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020.”
Just as I, like many Americans, suffered from “The Great Disinfectant Glut of 2020.”
My wife, Terry, the trooper that she is, was particularly good at getting up before dawn, and heading to our local supermarkets, with the hopes of bringing home the contents of her predesignated lists of supplies. (Substitutions – bad ones – were the order of the day.)
By contrast, I slept until she returned. I didn’t want to get in her way, I suppose.
I doubt that many people in those days even dreamed that by now there would be no need to plot a visit to a convenience store.
But here we are.
Most of us are now vaccinated and ready to go anywhere and do anything.
Schools are slowly, but surely, getting back to normal in most parts of the country.
For a while, it seemed as if school kids might’ve grown up being more familiar with touchscreens than their teachers.
That should change in the fall.
These weeks it’s time for young folks to start heading outside and engaging in pursuits tailor-made for summer.
When it was clear the world was in the throes of a pandemic (the official declaration by the World Health Organization was on March 11, 2020), nearly every newscast carried updated lists of infections and deaths.
That’s no longer the case. It hasn’t been for months.
As a result, there are far more announcements about the openings of things than there are of closings.
Meanwhile, another sign everything is getting back to normal has been the fact that President Biden joined leaders from around the world at the G7 and NATO Summits, and his audience with the queen of England.
The leaders at the G7 enjoyed what you might call “Elbow Bump Diplomacy” while they gathered maskless.
Biden’s audience with the queen was without masks too.
At the NATO Summit, there were masks, but the fact that the leaders were even in Brussels is a testament to how the world is slowly, but collectively, throwing off the shackles of that damnable disease.
Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 40-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.