No one has been in The Star’s main newsroom now for over a month. Email and online messages have taken the place of conversations across desks or in the second-floor kitchen. Reporters and editors work from home. Stories are handed back and forth online for proofreading. A skeleton crew remains to lay out the pages.
Downstairs in the front room, business functions continue, likewise with fewer people in the office at one time. Any physical business now is conducted through a mail slot. Subscribers who like to come in person pick up their copies from a plastic bin outside. Deliveries come to a side door; U.P.S. and FedEx drivers drop their packages and move on quickly.
The isolation may be balanced in other ways, though. Phone calls seem a little longer. Even routine conversations with someone in the outside world leave time for a few empathetic words. The upstate government spokesperson who previous to all this would have moved on quickly now asks how things are, and we both seem to appreciate the fleeting human interaction.
Outside, off the phone and email, conversations are kept to a minimum. A restaurant window slides open and your take-away order is thrust out by a gloved hand. Wearing masks, our smiles are perfunctory. A credit card could be an instrument of death. You just don’t know.
For those of us who have to go out, doing an errand for a neighbor becomes a way to maintain a sense of human connection. Dropping off half-and-half for an at-risk friend is much more than something to stir into a cup of coffee. It is a way to feel as if we can do something to make this terrible moment a little less terrible.