"Suddenly nobody can make a sandwich"

Last week I started talking to strangers: not just saying hello and smiling at people on the street. Everyone's doing that now, and it‘s a really fun feature of social-distancing, at least for people who live alone in this normally reserved and somewhat snobbish — though beautiful —

seaside village. I'm not counting those hellos as conversations with strangers.  I'm having long talks — 45 minutes,  an hour — on the phone with people I've never met and never will meet:

• the young mother taking the Sears repair-center calls from the office, not her house,  

“because it's driving me crazy to be home! When I’m around suddenly nobody can make a  sandwich! When I'm not there, they all cook. But when I'm home they want my help with everything, even the cats are driving me crazy, we have seven and.....’’

There was an almost hysterical energy to what she was saying: it sounded as though she hadn't talked to anyone who had listened to her in weeks, months. Maybe she hadn’t.  

• the twenty-five year old  assistant to my financial advisor in NY, now in Pennsylvania with 3 siblings and both parents; everyone's working in their own rooms. 

“I only brought 4 outfits with me –– I expected to be back in my apartment in two weeks.’’ She and her room-mate have been paying rent all this time, and their landlord won't reduce it. I advised her  to use her security deposit for her last month’s rent and she said, “Thanks, that’s a really good idea!”

We talked about how lucky we are, she to still have a job and me not to need one (and be in this beautiful place), and how many people her age had been fired.

“There are so few jobs that it’s really competitive.”

We talked about how appalling the news is, how when it first started we were eagerly reading every day and now, less....she said what a waste it is to spend all this money on the election — “It could feed everyone!” and how most politicians seem to “care only about money and power.” She said this have to change and sounded hopeful that it will.

•  the young Apple customer-service rep who shares an apartment in Oregon with three other guys; they, too, are all working from home. They don’t go out and see each other at meals, sometimes.  He said Apple is treating its people well.

It's actually been really interesting talk  to them all— I live in such a New England (and, as my friends my age and I frequently comment, privileged) bubble.

The young mother is in Florida; her children both speak 4 languages,

“I don't know where they got the other two!”  The whole family speaks Spanish and English, and the oldest girl is on a “full scholarship” at her high school.

“Is it a private school?”

She wasn't sure –– she just knew that the scholarship paid for “everything” and that her thirteen-year old daughter always gets As, never anything else, and rides the bus between two and three hours every day to get to her school. The nine-year old is just as smart and she, too, knows four languages.

Call me corny, but especially with all the horrible horrible news this week, I’ve been heartened and buoyed up by these talks. It's not just the human connection, though there's that of course. It's that all these people –– people for whom life is hard and the future uncertain –– are managing and upbeat. It gives me hope that, somehow or other, the country will be too, someday.