New York City’s Landscape Shifts Each Day as We Brace Ourselves for the Inevitable.

On my early morning walk this morning I passed a crew of masked construction workers setting up a parked 18-wheeler outside the Urgent Care extension of Lenox Hill Hospital. They had just finished constructing a wooden ramp leading up from the street to the barn doors which open to the back of the truck.

I called “Good Morning!” to the three men from across the street. They all ignored me with an unfamiliar energy. It was different than that of the individuals I sometimes pass on these walks who recoil at my “Hello”s with a kind of shrinking. I imagine that shrinking to be borne of shame. Because it is shameful to be human and to be simultaneously fearful of every single other person we encounter.

Because it is shameful to be human and to be simultaneously fearful of every single other person we encounter.

This is not natural. We are social creatures. We long for connection. In fact, in most ways and under normal conditions, our lives depend on it. These days, in a way, every stranger we encounter on the street becomes a slap in the face of what we know we are meant to be. To be human is to connect. And the slap asks us a bitter question: “What are you without others?”

These days, in a way, every stranger we encounter on the street becomes a slap in the face of what we know we are meant to be.

But the three construction guys across the street ignored my “Good Morning!” with a palpable united purpose. And that firm impenetrable purpose was its own slap in the face for me. A slap in the face that made me look twice at that truck parked beside the medical building which I’d assumed might be a future staging station for outdoor testing, placed safely outside the walls of the building where patients might be treated. But something in the way they refused to look up from their work was familiar.

But something in the way they refused to look up from their work was familiar.

It reminded me of the look of the military officer in his dress blues who has just folded up the American flag in that iconic triangular form before handing it to another grieving widow of another unfathomable war.

And so I assume I may have been witnessing the construction, not of a testing station, but of a makeshift morgue. Ready for the onslaught.