REPRIEVE #2

It’s Mother’s Day today, my last day off, so Aurora and I decided to make a strawberry cake. I had to take a short trip to the grocery store to get the missing ingredients. The grocery store (a fairly nice establishment called Metcalfe’s), like most stores around right now, had signs up everywhere notifying patrons they would be required to wear a mask inside and had signs directing traffic down newly one-way store aisles. I watched the management stop someone who had snuck in without a mask on. She proceeded to get into a shouting match with the store management, who told her she needed to either put on a mask or leave. She claimed she had no way of knowing, and how dare they prevent her from completing her grocery trip.

I’ve seen plenty of similar videos and claims of similar behavior made online, but it continues to blow me away how utterly unreasonable people can be over something as inconsequential as wearing a mask. How are there so many people who are so narcissistic that they react to someone correcting their mistake by shouting them down? I can’t even wrap my brain around why it’s such a huge deal to have to wear a mask. Covering your face for 15 whole minutes is of so little consequence it’s laughable, and most stores are now selling masks if you do forget it. It’s like the people who got angry when Washington state added a mandatory surcharge of $0.05 per bag for people who didn’t bring their own grocery bags and needed the store to supply them. The stakes are so low and the effort to fight such a minor change is so great; it just doesn’t make any sense.

Aurora gave me a fairly special Mother’s Day gift. She has a particular stuffed dog, Violet, she loves and has to sleep with every night. She has three, to be exact, because we always build redundancies into the system. She gifted me one of them, the one we call Pox Violet (because Aurora drew spots all over it with a marker), and told me it was to have something to sleep with while I was away. So now Violet is coming on my adventure, and I have a good excuse to bike around some of the Manhattan sights. I’ll take Pox Violet with me and snap some pictures at some of the usual tourist places.