On June 25, Oracle Park goes back to normal.
Well, as normal as things get right now. There will still be reminders to wash your hands, and at least a honor system check on being vaccinated to enter, and a bunch of people will have masks on. It will be COVID-normal, but that’s a form of normal, and it’s not really that far from normal normal.
But the park will be back to full capacity. Fans will be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, yelling and eating and singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame right next to each other. All of the most dangerous activities we’ve been warned about for more than a year will all be happening in San Francisco.
And it’s fine. It’s good. It’s fine. Did I say it’s fine? Because it’s fine. Really. I know and think and believe that, and am in no way repeating “It’s fine” in order to convince myself. Why would I have to do that? It’s fine.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know the last year has given me the gift of a constant, low-level paranoia. Will going outside make me sick? What about standing too close to someone I don’t know? Has that normal-looking person decided that they don’t believe in science and even if they did they don’t really care if I live or die and even if I did they don’t care enough to slightly inconvenience themselves by wearing a goddamn mask? And what if there’s another toilet paper shortage?
Lotta balls constantly in the air, is what I’m getting at here.
And now we all just have to accept that…it can be over. Like, right now, it can be over. I’m fully vaccinated, and more than 40% of California is fully vaccinated, and there isn’t some figure of authority who’s a supporting character played by a recognizable character actor who’s gonna tell me I’m fine now until it sinks in. I just have to accept that I have done what I needed to do to change my circumstances, and now my circumstances are changed. I don’t feel different, but I am, when it comes to immunity from this virus.
That’s it. It’s done. I got vaccinated and felt crappy for the next day and waited two weeks and it’s over for me. I don’t have to worry about this anymore.
The thing is, though, I can’t get rid of the nagging voice: What if it’s not over?
This isn’t a rational thought, and I’m well aware of that. The best we can do in a world that has grown too complicated for any one person to understand all of it is trust in the experts who do understand this one particular part of it, and the experts are clear: I’m fine. Any fully vaccinated person going to a baseball game is fine, so we can have lots of people at baseball games and it’ll be…say it with me…fine.
Boy, though, that habit of being afraid just won’t disappear. Month after month, we watched people make poor decisions because they had things they liked to do and they wanted them to not be poor decisions, and then the coronavirus multiplied and propagated, and the people who made their poor decisions blamed everyone else and then, belatedly, gave a “This is really bad and everyone has to take it seriously” speech. Not wearing masks became a marker of identity, so wearing masks naturally developed into its own marker of identity to combat it. The whole goddamn thing became politicized, and it was impossible to not get caught up in it.
This all sucked, by the way. It was very bad. Zero stars.
But now, not wearing a mask outside doesn’t have to be a marker of identity anymore. It can just be something you don’t have to do. Listen to experts. Rely on their advice. Trust it’s okay. Listen. Rely. Trust. The ballpark will be full of people, and that’s not a problem anymore.
Intellectually, this is easy to grasp. Emotionally, it can be harder. This represents more than a year’s worth of habits that we have to break, and a large gap in trust of our fellow Americans that we have to bridge.
And yet: it’s fine. Day by day, it’ll get easier to accept. Every day that there are tens of thousands of fans packed together and we don’t see dire consequences from that is a day that we move closer to feeling normal. The new normal became normal through repetition, and it’ll take the same thing to bring back the old normal.
And so, when it’s my turn to go back to a ballpark that doesn’t have a skeleton crew’s worth of fans, I will tell my nagging voice to shut up, and I will go. Because it’s fine. I know it’s fine. I have now typed the word “fine” 14 times in today’s newsletter, and I’m going to lie to myself and you and claim it’s helping me get over it. The experts say we can do this. Listen. Rely. Trust. It’s fine. We can be in public around strangers again. It’s fine.
I can feel the confidence coming. Just gotta say “It’s fine” 35 more times or so.
Maybe 40.
But it’s definitely coming.