What unexpected relationships did you create during the pandemic? – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Our neighbor leaves the bagels many mornings …

… the paper bag was tied over the handle of our porch. It is usually a single bagel, a blueprint for a seven-year-old child, who now knows he likes this type of sacrilege. But sometimes he’ll throw some bananas at us too, or an extra bag of green beans. I will wake up with a text. Leave things at your door! When I open it, I find the bag rocking there.

Often ours will also be full of dishes or bowls. I fed him pizza or cake or cookies or stew. Want some soup? We have tons. Be careful with the bay leaf! Every Friday night I split a clean piece of homemade xah, a new recipe every week. Shabbat Shalom! will write. This is the best yet! He cleans and returns a few days later.

This is a small, unexpected community we created during the Covid era, this little bunch of gestures along the hallway of our Los Angeles apartment building. We have a larger community in this city – our daughter’s school friends, our synagogue, my sister an hour away – so I hardly knew Jay before our neighbor in the pandemic. I could barely know him outside the confines of our block. It would have that fuzzy glow of something familiar that doesn’t match: I know … that guy …?

But now a days we write to them a lot about building upgrades or the fall in Covid numbers. October and November – then do you remember ?! – We threw a lot of anxiety in exchange for the election. She lives alone, even though she has two adult daughters, and sometimes I think, during this pandemic year, she has started to think that I am like one of them, poor, that she will come to my rescue forever in terms of apartment disasters. , as if my father were down the hall.

Can you come? I will write to him while the washing machine pours water. And there he is, still, still among his mask, before he takes on a tremendous panic. He is seventy years old, retired. She recently got her second dose, so her world remains small. He doesn’t go to the market anywhere else at 5am or take long walks before taking an afternoon nap.

How could I ever live without him? How could I not know he was there all the time?

In return, I give him everything I know: a warm chocolate cake, baked biscuits, soup from the kitchen, hot bread. I leave her at the door. Later, he will send me photos of the cookies on a plate with an espresso, The risk in the background. I’ll leave these sweets to Jay, but I’m in another alternative universe, for parents far away in Montreal, for my uncle in New York, for my seniors who I hope people in the hall can help. People I haven’t been able to see in almost two years. The people who are most attached to my heart.

But over the last two years we have been taught that community is something else, closer, more abstract, and more fundamental. We may not have the people we love the most, the children, the schools, or the people we share history with. Maybe they are people who are geographically close, people from our perspectives.

They’re the kind of connections I don’t want to lose as the world opens up. I don’t want to go back to what I knew before. I want to let my world grow with those of me who are here. What if, on Thanksgiving Day, Jay came? What happens to get into my own world as well?

In April, when we were still vaccinated and had no family or friends around, I decided at the last second that we should have an Easter Seder for our three small families. I threw what we had in the fridge on the table – eggs, orange, parsley, salt water, roasted vegetables, Matzah, wine, the soup I picked up at the local restaurant, the cart I made up – and wrote to Jay. Can I bring you a dish?

The next morning, knowing we were going to the desert for a week, he left us a package at the door: oranges, apples, bananas. Enjoy your free time. And wear masks!

There’s a way I need Jay, and he hopes he feels like he needs us too.

Abigail Rasminsky is a writer, editor and professor based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing at USC’s Keck Medical School and writes a weekly newsletter. People + Bodies. He has also published Cup of Jo stories marriage and motherhood.

PS The 13 readers of the Jo Cup share cheerful reunions, and making peace with my quarantined body.

(Illustration Alessandra Olanow Go to the Cup.)