"I lived . . . about midway between Aldgate Church and Whitechapel Bars . . . and as the distemper had not reached to that side of the city, our neighbourhood continued very easy. But at the other end of the town their consternation was very great: and the richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the city, thronged out of town with their families and servants . . .
"This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it."
-- Daniel Defoe, "A Journal of the Plague Year," 1722
March 12, 2020 was the beginning of our lockdown.
It didn't happen all at once. We were already being careful when we went out to celebrate Karen's birthday at a restaurant in early March. We weren't masked up then, but were wary and subdued and seated far away from the few other diners there on a Tuesday night.
Then Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive on March 11, and the games stopped. We woke up in a different country.
Even so, I kept coming into the office until March 19. Karen and a handful of other editors continued to go into the nearly deserted newspaper building for three or so months. But a sparsely populated office is lonely, especially when you're just beginning to learn about social distancing and the powers that be are providing hand-sanitizing stations and attaching no-touch foot openers to bathroom doors.
So eventually we set her up a work station in the kitchen; finally we broke down and brought her office desktop home to sit on a desk in the bedroom. I work mostly on the dining room table on my laptop.
There is some guilt attached to how smoothly this past year has run for us, though as a young reporter I was trained to feel guilty about hanging around in a newsroom. In the old days, we only came into the office to write stories and be yelled at by our bosses.
Thomas Mitchell, the city editor, would break us up if we huddled too long by the coffee machines, reminding us there is "no news in the newsroom."
If we were going to practice the art of conversation, we would better serve the interests of our employer if we were gossiping with sources rather than each other. (There was time enough for office gossip--and for the sort of antics that fueled office gossip--after our shifts.)
I got my first "portable" computer--a Compaq Portable with two floppy disc drives that weighed 28 pounds and cost $3, 590 (the equivalent of $8,775 today)--after receiving a small inheritance in 1984. Since then I've always done a significant portion of writing at home, even if it wasn't strictly allowed under company policy.
There are a few reasons why: For one, writing is not easy for me. Some people have the knack and do it quickly without much drama, but I am very willing to give in to distraction.
Also, my personal tackle is generally better than what's provided. (I'm writing this piece on Sunday morning at the office on on a wheezing 2010 iMac that's hot to the touch. It has a crippled disc drive and an apparently indestructible will to live.)
Our home Internet speeds are good and our Wi-Fi robust enough to support working from anywhere on the property (I can take my iPad across the street). And usually if one of us encounters a technical glitch, I can fix it so far.
Plus our home is comfortable, and our terriers don't bark unless I'm upstairs in a Zoom meeting while Karen's taking her early-morning bike ride. I prop up a couple of iPads--one for email and one for the constantly pinging abomination that is the Slack app, our newspaper's go-to method of instant communication and therefore must be attended to lest one be suspected of goldbricking-- on either side of my laptop and type away.
Every 20 minutes or so I can take a little break. Two or three times a day, we let the dogs out for a few minutes. I usually go for a short bike ride or walk in the early afternoon.
We work as deep into the evening as we need to, which really isn't much different than things were in the Before.
This isn't the sort of job you can slough off at the end of the day. Accounts carry over, there's always a next edition, and the newspaper on the iPad is a core sample of your character. At least that's the way most newspaper people worth a damn feel, even if they camouflage their pride with a certain insouciance. ("Pay's the same for the s-- work," the late great John Copes once told me, not meaning a word of it.)
So not having a physical newsroom is not a terrific hardship, at least not when it comes to getting work done. We're actually more efficient trading digital files over the Internet than we are running back and forth between each others' desks.
That is not to suggest I don't miss the cacophony of an energized newsroom. I've spent a lot of my life in newsrooms--when the Challenger exploded, when Magic Johnson announced he'd contracted AIDS, when the federal building blew up in Oklahoma City. I have loved them all for their profane irreverence, for the raffish camaraderie they encourage. A newsroom is not unlike a locker room; soldiers and health-care workers and cops and firefighters feel similar bonds.
But even in the Before, it's not like it was; those bottles of Scotch in desk drawers are not the invention of a screenwriter. Reporters don't dress as well as they used to, but are more professional and know more things. They work largely over the Internet, via email and text, and are more efficient than we were. They have to be. It's not like they have to hustle to produce copy for the bulldog edition; they need to get the news out digitally, as quickly as possible.
There is reason to be optimistic that our plague year will come to an end, perhaps before summer. No one should forget we lost more people to covid-19 than we did in World War II and the Vietnam war combined. Maybe it doesn't feel like that to you, maybe you were lucky, and all your losses were hearsay.
But there is no normal to go back to; what we call the past is evaporated experience, there is only the next step and the next. Everything from this second forward will be different, whether we advance masked or not. We live our lives in one direction.
Samuel Beckett's protagonist in "The Unnameable" understood: "I can't go on. I'll go on."
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.