A few years back I sliced a small nerve on the top of my right outer calf. I did it while multitasking poorly: chatting with my sister (head tilted to clasp my smartphone) and carrying two heavy bags of groceries up to my apartment. Perched atop one of those grocery bags was a six-pack of S. Pellegrino seltzer in little glass bottles. My life was going more or less fine until I tried to open the complex’s main door and the San Pellegrino tipped out and shattered across the concrete. A shard of glass grazed my leg, and the next two hours became a minorly bloody and overly-dramatic experience.
While the unscheduled ER visit showed no glass embedded in my leg, a few stitches were given that got eventually removed. And still, nearly a decade later I retain vestiges of the injury. If I look closely on my outer shin I can see the faint white scar. Massage therapists while working on my leg can feel an interruption and always ask if something happened. When they press down on the area of my lower leg I feel a strange ripple that runs right down into my right baby toes. When I touch the tops of those toes, I am reminded that some of the feeling is gone. These are all minor annoyances; my life as I enjoy it still continues.
Every day I walk into the building of my workplace and pass by a video monitor that displays a map of Italy. The country looks like an assembled puzzle because the regions are outlined to note the demarcations. For the better part of a year, the entire republic has been a patchwork of red and orange colors. Less often were some regions that were shaded in yellow. Usually the top of the boot was a persistent red, the middle seemed to alternate between yellow and orange.
Today I walked into work and glanced briefly at the map. It’s an act that I am not really conscious of— it’s more like the barrage of streets signs you pass but barely see: an object in my line of sight that exits the brain quickly as I turn right and, in this case, head up the stairs. Those stairs, by the way, used to accommodate both up and down traffic. But when that map started being displayed on the monitor, that’s when the stairs became “senso unico”. The map of a country, like the now signposted hallways and ladderwells, all took on a new focus once the tide of COVID reached our shores.
But this morning I entered the building and took special note of the screen. It looked strange because suddenly it was noticeably dull in color: the entire country was shaded yellow, with even a few spots now colorless. Or perhaps I should say that they were deliberately designated as white. Seven out of the 20 regions: Veneto, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Liguria, Abruzzo, Molise, Umbria and Sardinia. Che spettacolo.
The regional color designations were, for better or for worse, implemented to try and curb high COVID infection levels with tailored restrictions and controls. Curfews, school and business operating hours, travel constraints…nearly everything is impacted and these regional colors are always being adjusted. You take these new laws of existence in hand with the other gutting realities of COVID….and it is an understatement to say that it has made folks weary.
But the color changes that I see right now seeing are exciting. As of today, those seven regions are white, and the rest of the country is yellow. This not only means that curfew is now at midnight or not at all, but more importantly, the effects of a national vaccination campaign are being felt. Today’s COVID numbers are enough to make you want to breathe a sigh of relief….however we all know that the climb out will not be overnight. The Italian Army general who was put in charge of distributing vaccines—complete with his amazing Alpino headgear—announced to the public today that they should anticipate a third booster as the country looks to emerge from the pandemic. I’m sure that won’t be all. The aftereffects, when the virus finally does recede, will be felt for years to come.
I think about my leg from time to time usually only if I strike it funny. It makes me remember what happened, and it reminds me about how this change will always be a part of me. A more souvenir of my carelessness is a small bump I have on my forehead. I got it after walking straight into the thin edge of a door in an Irish cottage back in December 2019. The bump never went away, and I see it when a light hits my face in an askew way. Just like my bumpy calf, there is no amount of massage or ice that will make it go away. Each of these minor ailments are both reality and history.
It’s a bit vulgar to compare the minor dings in my body to something as virulent as COVID-19. But as we emerge from what this past year and a half has brought, I can feel in my body that remnants of the pandemic will always remain. And some folks will feel it more deeply than others. It’s like the depression-era generation who grew up knowing hunger but continued to stockpile food long after the country grew accustomed to excess and bulk buying. Or like minority group families and people of color who grew up internalizing discrimination-based trauma (and continue to do so)—I have to believe that they carry deep scars that will always factor into their societal calculus. Even when a situation is judged to have improved, our bodies still remember what we’ve live through…long after we finish picking up the physical pieces of a busted-up life.
More than anything, I’d love to close by declaring my optimism that we will all take the lessons we’ve learned and meet a future that will guarantee that no colorized maps will ever be needed again. But I have to tell you that I went to the supermarket on my way home today. I bought a few four packs of tonic water because nothing says the start of summer like a good gin and tonic. The door to my apartment is another heavy door, and I caught myself walking towards it with too much stuff in my hand. In fact, right under my nose—being balanced by my hands—were two four packs of glass tonic water bottles.
On this day, the bottles did not meet their end on the sampietrini stones below my feet. I did make it inside and safely put them away. But I will be honest and say that I did pause in the courtyard and took stock of what I was doing. “Do you learn anything at all?” is what I thought to myself. Then I shook my head and carefully made my way to the entrance. The door happened to be propped open and so I sailed in with ease. Maybe the future rests on a combination of luck and more careful handling. Time will tell.