The Club I Didn’t Want to Join

Is there anything more intimate than sharing another person’s breath? With a loved family member or friend, the heat of breath is a reassurance. So long as we live, we breathe. It’s so intimate strangers instinctive recoil if their heads draw too near. We reserve the exchange of breath for those closest to us, and no one else.

Perhaps this is one reason why viruses cause such alarm. That delightful intimacy, that reassurance, becomes deadly in a pandemic. It turns the normal order on its head. The closeness we normally prize becomes something to fear. Indeed, we understand its potency by how quickly transmission happens breath to breath, body to body, traveling across the city or country in the world. We greet a pandemic with a kind of horror when we realize the danger this sacred exchange brings.

Yet there is another dimension, one I wasn’t aware of until Monday. Two and a half years into our current pandemic, most people I know have had it. The club of the uninfected diminishes by the day, and it appears I’ve joined the one that grows and grows. Yep, I finally caught Covid. I contracted it on Sunday while spending a few hours indoor with an infected friend. In a sour irony, I got my third booster, the newly revamped one that’s supposed to really help fend Covid off, the day before.

It’s kind of amazing I hadn’t caught it until now (or, to put all the appropriate caveats around that statement, haven’t tested positive for it before now). Last fall, I went on a book tour that took me to twenty cities and 22 flights. I went to New York in mid-December last year, just as the city was experiencing an epic spike in cases. And beyond the travel, I was in bars and taprooms for months, surely exposed to at least a few actively-infected people. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve taken precautions, and really stayed on top of the vaccinations, but I was also more social than many people. I had friends who, fairly late in 2021, announced they hadn’t been to a restaurant since before the pandemic started. Sally and I were dining outside by summer 2020 and chattered our way through that first winter eating outside. I kept bracing for it to come, until finally it seemed like it never would. So of course.

This appears to be the mildest of cases. I have nothing beyond the scratchy throat, and it’s not worsening. It hardly bears mentioning, except as a programing note. Patrick and I have scuttled our planned on-site fresh hop podcast. I had to cancel a rendezvous with a visiting brewer. Depending on how this all plays out, I may or may not be attending any fresh hop fests. So, anyway, I’ll see you on the other side.

My best to all of you who have had or will contract this accursed pestilence. At least you can welcome me now to your club—