Which Relationships Survived the Pandemic and Which Didn't?

“Have you gotten your vaccine yet?” has lately replaced “How are you?” among the people I text, talk to, see when I walk the dog or stay in touch with on social media. It’s even replaced the organ recital that sometimes constitutes conversation among people my age.

Now that I and many of them are answering affirmatively, we are emerging gingerly from lockdowns and isolation like survivors of a nuclear holocaust in one of those old movies like On the Beach. We are not being foolish; we’re not making any reservations we can’t cancel with no fee, we’re thinking of flying to visit the kids and the grands, but we haven’t booked the tickets yet. We’re not even celebrating the landmark birthday extravaganza we were supposed to have last year because we’ve already been that age for so long it’s old news now.

But we are stretching our pods a bit, having dinner with a friend or two while following the restaurant protocol, even visiting a museum or taking the youngest generation to a park or playground. We’re beginning to think about our social life, reflect on what and who we’ve let go of or held on to, whether those friendships satisfied our needs for relatedness and still do, whether we’ve pared them down to an essential few or become closer to some through circumstance, like the neighbor we used to just nod to, the an aide at the nursing home who cared for our mother because we couldn’t, the young couple we met just before lockdown who checked in on us regularly thereafter.