One Thing or Another: Panic in Aisle 9

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

This one’s for posterity, since the terms ‘coronavirus’ and ‘covid-19’ will hopefully be behind us in a few months.

Who needs that much toilet paper, seriously? I can understand a couple of 12-packs, but an entire shopping cart? Are these people planning on being housebound for the next month? And what do they expect the rest of us to do—the ones who don’t think filling our garage with paper products is the best use of resources at a time of national crisis?

I’m not one to take a pandemic lightly. Not only am I at the age most ripe for paying the steep price of negligence, but I care about my friends, neighbors and co-workers. A good Corona beer joke seemed acceptable a couple of weeks ago, now, not at all. I’ve always been one to admit what I don’t know, and I don’t know, as most of us do not, how this will play out. Will we see a surge in people running to the emergency rooms, overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure and exhausting our healthcare workers? Will fatalities begin to pile up, expanding exponentially as this novel virus spreads like a silent, gaseous killer among the population?

One odd thing is that if our efforts to stop this prove effective, we may never know how bad it could have been. No one wants to see that, but I imagine many people—the ones who are currently saying it’s no big deal, or a media invention, or a hoax—will use our success in stopping it to say it was never a threat to begin with. That’s an outcome I’m willing to live with in exchange for a return to normalcy.

For now, the new normal is school closures, darkened businesses, Latex gloves, media saturation, and mobbed grocery store aisles. I work in one (a grocery store, not an aisle), and for the past few days it was as if someone in the highest authority, a deity perhaps, had announced that we would all be confined to our houses for the next six weeks. And it’s not just toilet paper: there’s no spaghetti, no spaghetti sauce, no bread, no meat, and very little coffee, which for me is probably the worst shortage of all. Wave after wave of customers panic shopping, with some of them there for the sheer thrill of it all. What’s more exciting than maneuvering down crowded aisles of people nervously piling canned goods into shopping carts?

It’s a historic time in so many ways. We have a presidential election coming in November. My husband and I have a cruise rescheduled for December, since we canceled the one in June. The county I work in is under ‘lock down,’ with only essential businesses open, and the news is a torrent of warnings, misgivings, and dire predictions.

‘May you live in interesting times,’ the saying goes. Better yet, may we not.

Mark McNease is the author of nine novels, two short story collections and miscellaneous fiction. He’s the editor of LGBTSr.com, “where age is embraced and life is celebrated.” He was the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors, and he currently hosts the One Thing or Another Podcast.