We are approaching our third month of at home lockdown. Some nearby counties are already introducing reopening plans – for example, in Monterey County, you can go and eat inside restaurants and even go to the hairdresser. At the same time, Berkeley and other cities are actually extending shelter-in-place indefinitely, and just announcing modifications, easing of restriction.
I dream of visiting a hairdresser, a beautician, or an open playground. Coffee is still only take-out, although you can sit down for a moment and drink it on the bench. There have been 96 people in our city with confirmed coronavirus, the hospitals are not overflowing, but no major changes can be seen since the shelter in place was first introduced.
At home, we already celebrated Easter, Dean’s, Maya’s and Rose’s birthday, American and Polish Mother’s Day, and this week also had Rose’s ballet recital.
Berkeley has local government (it’s a local speciality), but is a part of in Alameda County, which now has the fastest growth in people with confirmed virus.
The city does not provide much information about patients, and there is data from individual areas of the city, but generally I do not have the feeling that somebody is in control of it. Riots after the horrible and shocking death of George Floyd, further deepen the heavy mood, although there were also large peaceful protests. Instead, we have beautiful June weather, amazing summer light, and other varieties of plants, poppies, roses, lavender, cactuses, and palm trees bloom at every turn. It is not difficult to see hummingbirds in the bushes.
But let’s get back to another reality. The Berkeley School District said it would focus on continuing distance learning. Róża is going to school this year (In the USA, five-year-olds are already going to elementary school). We chose for her a non-public school, a smaller school, so I hope that she will have the opportunity to see her peers in person, and not just on the screen. No one knows what is going to happen, and school is supposed to start as early as August.
Maya is not going to preschool yet, these are only open to essential workers. We have no plans to plan any holidays, we also have to postpone our visit to Poland; I probably will never complain about jet-lag again.
People are starting to meet up again. The neighbors with glasses of wine in the gardens and on the front stairs talk and support each other. We took our neighbors a cake, which we baked ourselves (in quarantine we splurged a kitchen aid). Now, unfortunately, there will be a break from meetings after 8pm, because almost everywhere a curfew was announced here. These photos and video of people plundering stores, including the mall we know in Emeryville, will not be optimistic either. Still, I trust our Governor, who took responsibility for the riot.
We visited North West San Francisco, and it was empty, it lacked that incredible energy to change the world and drive the future, as if an invisible bomb had fallen on it. However, we managed to do some shopping at the Polish Deli.
Now we are waiting for official information on schools, businesses and gatherings.
This school year I was the President of the Polish School Board, and we are also waiting for more tips on what classes for students are to look like (we finished the year with online classes).
And finally, I will quote the historian H.H. Bancroft from the text that appeared after the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I found the inspirational quote in the San Francisco Chronicle article Crisis could mean cites’ death- or rebirth? (May 2020).
The simple fact remains that the city of San Francisco will be what people make of it, neither more nor less. … The shell has been injured, but the soul of the city is immortal.”
