“Throughout the worst of the pandemic I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu; to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic…”
―
David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky
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If anybody has the energy in this pandemic to write about this pandemic, it would be Sedaris. A collection of personal essays, you can expect the usual offbeat observations, sometimes drily expressed. He is always interesting and given the details he inserts, it makes me want to keep a journal, an audio record even, but perhaps I am meant to live my life more prosaically.
This is a wonderful record of the pandemic years. Everyone’s experience is of course different, but some of the broader themes are there, soothing to see in the written word.
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“Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic canceled the tours I had scheduled, I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.””