
Oh, the places you’ll go after moving to a city with so many stores within walking distance. And so many firsts. And not just the Firsts of the day program I attended, such as visiting a fire department and a police department, or the Firsts of the new residence, such as the first snowstorm, or first long power outage.

Or first frozen hard-boiled egg because I put a salad too far back in the fridge; or other more trivial things like first nosebleed, or first ant; it was no April Fools joke to see that a-hole ant in my room the first of this month.

But firsts like restaurants I’ve never visited before, from greasy burger joints (sometimes those hit the spot), to a Chinese buffet of many types of food, to a native-Spanish-speaking Mexican restaurant. My mother and I had gone out less and less over time until it was rare that we ever did, but ever since I moved out, we’ve gone out twice a week, for lunch or a movie. I’ve now had more pizza and lasagna in months than I had in years. And on one part of my desk sits a pile of tickets. 🙂

Often, we’d walk thru the Mall, and eat at the food court, even if the food we got didn’t come from the court.

And… then the economic struggles hit home. Across the country, stores and whole malls have been struggling for years.

But never would we guess what would come next.

The coronavirus SARS-2 pandemic was the second punch that shuttered the rest and a great deal of U.S. commerce in general. Continue reading Growth in isolation