My grandmother, an almost 90-year-old immigrant from Italy, spent the first few months of the pandemic quarantining with us. We were holed up in my mother’s house in the wilds of suburban New Jersey, and it reminded my grandmother of when she fled Rome as a child, to hide from the fascists in an abandoned barn in the country.
As my grandmother and I sat around the house, cooking pasta, breaking up squabbling kids and watching the death toll tick up and up and up on the news, my grandmother kept asking, “Ma quando finisce questa guerra?”
“When is this war going to end?”
She spent countless hours (we had hours, plenty of them) hearkening back to her experience as a child in Italy during World War II, and pondering the similarities between that war and what she’d come to think of as the Covid war.
One distinct difference, she pointed out, was that in our current situation, we were lucky enough to have plenty of food. Toilet paper, not so much, but who needed toilet paper? They didn’t have toilet paper back in that abandoned barn she lived in during the war with her parents, four siblings, the local priest, and his two sisters. And back then, they didn’t have food either.
“My fadder would walka hours to get a loafa bread.” She clucked her teeth. “If he found uno pomodoro for us to share, we woulda cry wit happiness.”
Meanwhile, in our Covid quarantine, where the only novelty or pleasure could be found in what we ingested, we prepared lavish feasts, the likes of which we never enjoyed in pre-Covid days.
“We eata like kings!” My grandmother laughed, as she regarded her loaded plate — barbequed ribs, fluffy mashed potatoes, garlicky string beans, and a pie cooling on the counter. “What kinda war is dis?”
But as the pandemic wore on, her opinion of the Covid war changed. The isolation, she said, wasn’t something she had to deal with as a child in Italy. In the war of her youth, there was an enemy you could see. But, during Covid, the enemy of contagion turned even the people you loved, people you trusted – friends, family, neighbors – into a threat. As spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall and fall turned to winter, the loneliness of isolation grew and she decided, for certain. This really was a war – cruel, terrible, merciless.
“Ma quando finisce questa guerra?” she’d ask – more plaintively, it seemed all the time. “When will this war be over?”
Just a few days ago, my grandmother, a Park Sloper, had the tremendous good fortune to receive her second Covid vaccine dose. This has filled her with optimism for the future. She sees the light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel. Instead of asking when the war will be over, she’s started to talk about what she’s going to do when it is. She imagines the “End of Covid” the way she remembers the end of World War II – the Americans driving into Rome in tanks to liberate the Italians from fascism. One day, the war was raging. The next day, it was over.
I do not tell her what I am thinking, which is that this may not be “over” for a long, long time. Maybe it won’t ever be over. Certainly it won’t be for the half a million families that lost loved ones. But even in the most literal sense, it seems likely that Covid, in some form, will persist. We’ll have to find a way to live with it, around it. That’s not helpful for my grandmother to think about. It’s probably not even helpful for me to think about. We have to be forward-looking. We have to delude ourselves a little bit. As my eighth-grade-daughter recently wrote in her essay on Of Mice and Men, “There is no guarantee that dreams will come true, but they fill your life with purpose and meaning.”
As true in our time as in Steinbeck’s. We need our post-Covid dreams, and we need to talk about them. We need George to tell us about the rabbits. And we definitely need to forget how that book ends.
As far as my grandmother’s concerned, her dream is simple but vividly-imagined. “When dis is over, I’mma gonna go shopping. I’mma gonna buy all de fruits and vegetables. I’mma gonna load my shopping cart full. Then I’mma gonna make a big dinner, and you come over to eat, all of you.”
That’s what freedom means to her.
For my eight-year-old daughter, the after-Covid dream is to go to Harry Potter World in Orlando, Florida. Browse wands in Dragon Alley. Eat Bertie Bots. Geek out about quidditch.
My 16-year-old son wants to ride the rails again with his friends. Hop on a Metro North out of Grand Central with no particular destination in mind, get off at some sleepy Hudson town, walk, explore, eat a burger in a gazebo, come home when he feels like it. Wander free.
My 14-year-old wants to see her grandmother in Tennessee. Curl up on her couch with those big, slobbery Southern dogs piled on top of her, while eating Little Debbie cakes and looking at the Smokies out the window.
My husband dreams of live music, concert halls pulsating with sound.
I have a list of after-Covid dreams as long as the Christmas list my daughter sends to Santa. But the main one is: I want to see new things. Radically new things. Unimaginable sights and sounds and tastes. I want to marvel. I want to ride an elephant. I want to climb a mountain. I want to float in the Dead Sea. My appetite for adventure has been whetted like never before. I could devour the Earth and still be hungry for more New Things. To sate my hunger, I’d probably have to get intergalactic.
People are speculating that when we reach herd immunity, it could be like the Roaring Twenties all over again. Life in Technicolor. Famished people let loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet of celebration. So much time to make up for.
Who knows if that’ll come to pass. What I do know is that soon, very soon, my grandmother will dust off her handy shopping cart, secure a mask on her face and head out to the grocery store for the first time in a year. I know that it’ll be the Roaring 20s in that shopping cart. You can bet your bottom dollar that it’ll be piled high with eggplants and tomatoes, three kinds of meat for bolognese sauce, prosciutto and melon for an antipasto, and probably those rocket ship popsicles the kids love. I’ll accompany her on that first trip, just to see her face. Her mouth will be masked but her eyes will be grinning. I’m sure of it.
Nicole Kear
Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s), and many books for children, including a new middle-grade novel, Foreverland (Macmillan Kids).