I went shopping at Target today. In normal times a banal errand hardly worth mentioning. But these are not normal times. Besides the handful of times I have been grocery shopping in the past six weeks, this was the first time I went to a large retail store.
While most of the items I picked up were “essentials” (personal care and household products), admittedly the main motivation was to get a helium tank to blow up my own balloons. I had considered various options for obtaining balloons. Upon concluding that making the trip to Target for everything was the most efficient option, I braced myself to go out in public, which means waiting in line, social distancing, and now mandatory face masks.
The issue of public face masks is a contentious one that I have been distressed about. But I won’t go into it now. For the purposes of chronicling shelter in place, I simply note here that today was the first time I was out in public in which everyone including me wore a face mask.
It was hard to breathe with a face mask on, and it fogged my glasses. I was also constantly touching the face mask to adjust and pull it away from my mouth so I could get air. It was unpleasant and lamentable. Such is life in times of a pandemic. None of the above are why face masks are a contentious issue for me. But I will have to expand on that in another post.
With the mask talk, Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and in which masks figure largely in the story, might be worth watching again. It’s one of the few Kubrick films I’ve only seen once, although not because of masks.
As for shopping, I prefer to think of happier and more fun scenes like this one in Fried Green Tomatoes with the enduring and fabulous Kathy Bates.