Pushing my cart of groceries through the Fred Meyer sliding
doors, I stop because the man in front of me has come to a standstill. I pause
for a moment, not wanting to violate the sacred six feet of open space between
us, but quickly realize he is lost in the screen of his phone and won’t be
moving forward any time soon. To my left, a steady stream of patrons are making
their way into the store, so my only option is to cut around the man to my right.
Maneuvering the unwieldy cart as best I can, I manage to steer clear of the man,
but accidentally clip a tall flowering plant on the edge of a garden display. It
starts to topple towards me, the pot dropping off the edge of the slightly
elevated display platform, and I instinctively reach down to grab it before it
can hit the concrete. At the same moment, a woman whose presence I have not
until now been aware of, does the same thing. And in that fleeting second of
reaching for the flower pot and setting it back on the display, our bare hands
touch for the briefest instant. It’s a flash of skin on skin, accidental and meaningless,
but it goes through me like a lightning bolt, this unsanctioned contact with a
stranger’s body. It jars me the same way TV shows do, when they portray
day-to-day life from pre-quarantine times – friends going out to dinner together,
families hosting parties, and strangers crowding into buses and trains. All
these people touching each other as well as the surfaces around them without
any thought of the germs they may be acquiring or spreading with their fingers
or their breath. Behaviors that none of
us would have thought twice about just a few months ago now take on a veneer
of unbelievability, seem shocking in their disregard of social distancing norms.
Because of course, both the woman whose hand touched mine and I are wearing
masks. We both bagged our own groceries so the clerk wouldn’t have to touch the potentially contaminated reusable bags we brought from home. And we were
both careful to take hold of the receipt by the end farthest from the clerk's hand. All these little
moments of caution and attention to avoid not just contact with another human
but with anything another human has touched. And yet in this moment – when I try to drive my cart as if it is a sleek and agile
machine instead of an awkward box on sticky wheels, when I overestimate my ability
to steer clear of the scenery, when my cutting the corner too tight results in
what could have become a larger mishap – a woman reaches out to help. Even
more than her fingertips, I am touched by her impulse to assist, to overlook
the safety protocols and close the cautionary distance between us rather than letting
me fend for myself. This, too, feels like a vestige of the old word, and if I
can’t have the gatherings and the shared meals and hugs between friends that
have been relegated to the world of television, I will take this: choosing to be present
for a fellow human being when she needs a helping hand. Even if we both have to pull out the sanitizer immediately afterwards.
