Wishing

I was whining the other day to my wife. Keeping in mind that I am not traditionally much of a whiner, but when I do whine, I do it full force. I was whining about normal. I was whining about how tired I was of the way things are and how I wish that I could return to that once upon a time when things were slow and oh so mellow.
It has been three full months of shelter-in-place, and for the most part I have been a good egg about following the recommended distances and masks and social bubbles and World Health Organization's stipulations. I never rinse my hands off anymore. Each time I turn on the water it is as if I were preparing to scrub in for extensive and delicate neurosurgery. I resist the temptation each time I stand in the little taped off box at the grocery store to pull down my mask and yell "What?" through the plastic shield as the cashier asks me some mumbled question.
At the same time, I am boiling over with anger and frustration with the way police across this country are brutalizing black lives. Each day brings a new outrage and while I feel compelled to speak out here and wherever I can make my voice heard, a new day dawns and I am delivered another fresh insult to our collective humanity. This war would be impossible to wage in the best of circumstances, but the fact that it is taking place during a global pandemic makes it all the more terrifying. It is a certainty that even more lives will be lost because we are trying to stand together as one when we would be safer at home.
Somewhere in the middle of this wild indignation came that weak voice inside my head that cried out for comfort. Something that felt safe and familiar. The trip to Best Buy with my son. A baseball game. A trip to the bathroom without worrying about the number of squares of toilet paper used or the song I would sing as I washed my hands. Having people over to my house without carefully screening their health records and cordoning off a holding area in which they could stand free of infection or infecting.
Whine, whine, whine.
We've got bigger fish to fry, metaphorically. We are currently being called upon to raise the stakes on how we live our lives. This too shall not just pass but create a lasting change in how we treat one another and how we demand to be treated. And into all this turmoil came the notice for jury duty. So I guess I should be careful about what I wish.