Pandemonium
by
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The Roaring 20s. That’s what we labeled the decade that lay ahead. We readied ourselves to greet it with a confident, celebratory and forward-looking attitude. As the final hours of 2019 ticked away, many voiced their New Year’s intentions and hopes. Ironically, one social media poster wished for “a cure for the common cold” along with trivial things like “gum that doesn’t lose its flavor” and “Ziploc bag closures in every cereal box”. For my part, and buoyed by my 55th birthday celebration in New York City the day before, I paced from my beach area neighborhood to the local theatre company in our cheery, shoreline Fairfield, Connecticut downtown to enjoy a New Year’s Eve rock ’n roll show. It was a fantastic, wild performance with a joyous midnight toast. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in people that had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The seeds of the tsunami had been planted. CHAPTER 1: HAPPY NEW YEAR? New Years Day, 2020. With no awareness of what was transpiring across the globe, my 20-year-old son, Phil, and I welcomed the new year at home with homemade raisin and cinnamon waffles with bacon and coffee. He was on a month-long break from school and we ate together, admiring a bright red cardinal in the hedge at the back of our house. Our mood was peaceful and hopeful. A local personality, Ira Joe Fisher, sighed about the fading holidays in a Facebook post, remarking about “stepping into a new now. With the happy hope that this year will be different by being better than last year. The year will do as the year will do. It’s up to you and up to me to provide the better part. By BEING better. By DOING better. Rising from the calm and stepping into 2020… better.” Another post reminded us of the encouraging words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.” A thought that we would circle back to for comfort before much passage of time. In the day’s news, we read about soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, NC deploying to Iraq, where an attack initiated by Iran-supported militiamen had taken place at our U.S. Embassy. We wished our boys well, promising to keep them in our prayers and thanking them for their service. My 83-year-old Dad checked in by text from southern California. Mid-December, he had flown from his home state of North Carolina out to San Francisco and boarded the Carnival Grand Princess cruise liner to sail down to Mexico. The liner returned him to SF on Dec. 28 and he set off by car headed south down the California coast, to visit friends all along the way. His check-in came from Burbank in SoCal. Three days later, he was back home. Later that first week of January, our community mourned the closing of a local pizzeria after “50 years of slices”, the shutdown of a cinema that had offered wonderful offbeat films and the passing of an iconic steakhouse. At the same time, we looked forward to a year of celestial events that included 13 full moons, and we mused about the charming towns we might visit around our state when the weather warmed. Jan. 5. With an ache, we followed the terrible reports of widespread brushfires across Australia. To date, 24 people and over 500 million animals had died while an area the size of Belgium burned. That evening, a Sunday, I went to my local brewery in adjacent Black Rock for a beer or two, bumping into a couple of longtime friends I hadn’t seen in ages. We caught up, and had a burger as well at an eatery next door, running into more friends there. We hugged and sat close to each other and clinked glasses and shared food. The following morning, I woke with a sore throat, chills, a fever, headache, pink eye and body aches, and my lower lip had swelled up. I assumed it was the flu, though its presentation was strange — the side effects in particular. I had never been vaccinated for the flu, choosing instead to treat it like I would any cold, with natural foods, tea with honey and lemon, rest, over-the-counter medications and throat lozenges, to build up my natural antibodies. My quick attention to it mitigated its impact I think and the bout passed in a few days, during which time I kept mostly to myself. Jan. 7. Chinese health authorities confirmed that the “cluster” of pneumonia cases they had reported a week ago was associated with a novel coronavirus, which they labeled 2019-nCoV. We barely noted the report, instead marveling at new luxury car releases, celebrating the rise in the bald eagle population across Connecticut and frowning about new reports from Australia that animal losses had mounted to over 1.25 billion. Announcements of fundraisers, pledges and relief concerts related to the latter dominated the news.
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About the Book
There was no imagining what the state of the world would become when the news of the first cluster of infections was announced in late 2019. Those seeds would grow into a massively devastating global pandemic caused by Covid-19. It would have implications at every single level in society. And from his beachside home in Fairfield, CT just 40 miles northeast of New York City — the epicenter of the disaster — and as the editor of a local online news service, Mike Lauterborn was in a position to capture it all. The international and national impacts. The effect on people and commerce at the local level. The shift in lifestyle, attitudes, mental condition and future outlook that the pandemic caused. The humor, the tragedy, the cheer, the grief, the patriotism, the division, the conspiracy theories, the outpouring of love, the show of rage, the remarkable efforts of first responders, the toll on front line workers. It’s all here, as a lasting record for those of us who lived through it to recollect, but also as a roadmap for future generations facing similar crises. Here’s what we did. Here’s what worked and didn’t work. Here’s what you might try and here’s what you should avoid. But in the end, it’s tough love and community hugs and family bonds that win the day. #worldstrong #humanstrong #communitystrong #familystrong
About the Author
A 24-year resident of Fairfield, CT, Mike Lauterborn has been the Editor of Fairfield HamletHub online news service since Nov. 2011, serving Fairfield County, Connecticut. As a lad through high school, Mike was a dedicated journal keeper and graduated from college with a degree focused on creative writing. For the next 20+ years, Mike worked in corporate marketing, promotion and advertising leadership roles before transitioning to journalism, contracting with regional magazines, newspapers and online news services. Mike has documented over four decades of American culture, including all of his past travels. One of the most significant of these was in Fall 2003, when Mike set off by van to follow in the path that acclaimed author John Steinbeck had taken in 1960 driving counter-clockwise around the perimeter of the United States to write “Travels with Charley”. Mike used Steinbeck’s book as his map for a similar journey that became “Chasing Charley”. In this new non-fiction book, Mike has taken on another adventure, an unplanned one that didn’t take him much farther than his own community over several months as he witnessed how the Covid-19 disease set its aggressive hooks into the meat of the world, and thrashed it, and tore it apart, threatening the very existence of mankind. He recorded the pandemic’s impact at the international and national levels, and observed its effects very first-hand in his own coastal community and amongst its citizens and leaders. He captured every aspect of the attack of this “invisible enemy” to create a detailed, insightful record of these times and road map for future generations to see how we handled the crisis and to learn how to face similar challenges as they arise, to perhaps avoid the “pandemonium” that took us all by surprise.