I can’t explain the feeling except to say that if you are a Seinfeld fan, you have surely seen the episodes about Bizarro Jerry. Folks, we are living in Bizarro-Jerry-Times: There are weird parallels; things seem to be normal but they are not. We are: Through The looking Glass, remakes of Frankenstein, the horror scene in The Birds where normalcy can peck you to death. The oddity is thus: what is normal, is no longer.

A lot of it has to do with the season. Usually at the beginning of spring there is an “ahhhh” feeling of relief and the excitement of new plantings, cool, yet warming air, the anticipation of watching tomatoes emerge from yellow, star-shaped flowers. You know the feeling: It is rebirth.

So, today, when I ventured out into the chilly air of early April to go to the mailbox, I noticed that I was virtually the only person walking about. Just a few short blocks but the only other movement was a car or two. On my block, there was silence except for my immediate neighbor who I chatted with from afar, whose daughter is on the front lines, at the city’s epicenter, a physician and single parent who doesn’t have the words to tell her mother that she has been working without protective gear and that they are are bringing out the dead to their almost final and lonely rest to the back of a refrigerated truck parked and idling behind Elmhurst Hospital.

Right after 9/11, it was similar. The sky was very blue, the air temperature still spoke of summer. The same neighbors had visitors, who had a baby with them. I remember the sick feeling in my stomach. I recall the smell of burning, albeit from miles away, smoke and death mixed in the air. And my neighbors had visitors and they were all laughing, they were able to ignore the reality if not for just a moment.

Here we are again. That blue sky, here though, the air is cool and fresh, too cold to hose down my deck for the first time, a deck full of last summer’s blooms, now dried and still standing, blooms that will likely not be replaced. Tomatoes that will likely never appear. And no parsley! What will become of the butterflies?

I hear birds in the mornings, I waited for months during the winter-a winter that was supposed to come but didn’t, to hear birds. A natural, beautiful sound as opposed to the post-9/11 fighter jets that roared over the city for months in the dark. So opposite from dawn and light and normal.

But, what is so bizarro, is that when it is sunny it is supposed to be normal. And it is not. We are in a huge theater playing the roles of  characters that are saying, “All’s well that ends well!.” We are cool, we are fine: But we aren’t. This time there are no planes flying and crashing into major structures. There is nothing to shoot down or swat at. Each day we listen to Governor Cuomo speak, factually and articulately, from the heart, invoking his “little brother” who is sequestered in his basement with the Corona Virus, away from his wife, kids and dogs. He’s on day 2. I know of young people who are on day 14 and still have raging fevers and can’t function, who are praying they don’t need hospitalization.

It is THE NEW WORLD ORDER. In my book, something had to give. The level of hatred in the country had peaked. The number of fires, floods, quakes, storms was edging up daily. In short, there was so much negative, brutal energy in the air it had to be dispersed somehow. Science is speaking: My God speaks.

And then there is my mother who is in a senior apartment building that provides meals and activities. She has eaten in front of the TV for years and doesn’t leave her apartment. I get phone calls on an almost daily basis, ordering me to call this one or that one, that her lunch or dinner is late, that she should have special dispensation because of her age. And when I did call the dining room to get a grip on what was going on I learned that there WERE twelve people working to set up the meals: Eight are staying home. Now FOUR people are doing the job of twelve, providing and delivering the meals to over THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE. I get it. If I tell my mother and make the facts as austere as possible, she will hear the message for a moment and then default to herself. I no longer have the patience to explain. I no longer have the patience for empathy. My ability to be empathetic has been short-circuited by fear and anxiety, feelings I have been fighting for a number of years, what I call, “the-other-shoe-will-drop-syndrome.” I had a sixth sense that something was coming and this must be it, this uninvited guest that might linger for months and then reappear full force next fall. In this bizarro world of sun and light, oceans and air are clearing, as seen from satellites, nature is reclaiming itself; it needed a break from the everyday frenzy, from the focus on money, it needed to provide a scenario for introspection, for change.

We cannot go on the way we were.

“We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.”