Living with a Pandemic – The New Normal

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After five months (and counting!) living with a pandemic, I have gathered my thoughts and began writing. This is the first in what will be a series of blog posts about “Life During a Pandemic”.

It is February 4, 2020 and Steve and I are at LAX airport waiting to board our plane back to our house in South of France. We had just spent three months in Southern California, our usual visit for the holidays – November to February. It was another wonderful visit with our kids, precious grandsons Isaac & Oliver and many of our friends. We celebrated Oliver’s first birthday, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, New Years’ Eve and our 40th Wedding Anniversary. More about that later. Here are a few of my favorite photos to share with you.

Isaac wearing his new Car T-Shirt
Oliver wearing his New T-Shirt
Good Shabbos. Our Family Celebrating the Shabbat
Isaac Smiling for the Camera
Bubbie’s Happy Place with “Her Boys”
Happy 1 Year Birthday to Oliver and Many More
Bubbie holding Isaac and Oliver and their Cousin Elliott
Papa holding Isaac in his New Cars Jacket
Look at all of the Candles in the Menorah Glowing – Happy Chanukah

During that time there had been very little talk about “the virus” that had hit China. It was life as usual in the USA (I suppose in the rest of the world too). When we arrived at the airport in Los Angeles, we did not expect to see an international airport half empty, no one in the restaurants or shops and many of the people wearing masks.

For two years now – since my cancer experience and lung infection, I have been wearing a mask (an ffp2) whenever we travel. It protects me from everyone else and I wear it as soon as we arrive at the airport, the entire 11 hour flight and when we land until we leave the airport. When they finished boarding our plane – an A380 that holds 500 people – and we looked around to see that it was half empty, we started to wonder what was happening. It was a very eerie feeling and then we realized that something was going on that we would hear about very soon.

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