On Sunday March 8th, after packing Emily into a friend's car for a two hour drive to Schenectady for a soccer game, I headed down to New York City for what was to be a two week arbitration of the largest case of my career. Including weekends and holiday, I've worked all but two days since Christmas preparing for this arbitration - reading briefs on my laptops during long Saturday track meets, taking conference calls while we took down our tree on New Year's Day, you name it. We got through opening statements and the direct examination of our first witness on Monday, and then headed back to the office to continue prepping. I returned to my hotel around 8:30pm, only to realized that I'd left something at the office and headed back over; and while walking over, I received a text that it was important that I return to the office immediately, something had happened. Around 9pm, I learned that someone in the office building where we were conducting our hearing had tested positive for COVID-19. He had been self-quarantined for more than a week, but opposing counsel was freaked out because prior to that, someone from his office could have been in contact with this person. After the initial shock wore off, we thought that his reaction was a bit over the top and the arbitrators agreed, urging us to push forward. Opposing counsel, even with pressure from his own client, refused and so on Tuesday evening, we packed up everything and headed back to Connecticut. When the car dropped me off around 9, I proceeded straight upstairs, threw all of my clothes in the laundry and jumped in the shower; but other than that, I really was not concerned. There were 17 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a city of 7 million people; what were the odds, really. As the week went on, however, things became a bit more alarming. The CIAC cancelled all post-season tournaments on Tuesday afternoon and although Elizabeth was not impacted, she said that watching the juniors and seniors sobbing in the hallways, along with many teachers, coaches and the AD, absolutely gutted her (a petition to play without fans got 80,000 signatures in less than 12 hours, but alas, it was not to be). By Thursday afternoon, US Soccer had cancelled all practices and games through mid-April; Northwest Catholic announced that it was going to online learning effective March 16th; and there was a run on toilet paper and other essentials at our local grocery stories (NB: this did not effect us, as I made Lee buy extra toilet paper, paper towels and Clorox wipes two weeks ago. He thought that I was crazy, but he did it. I looked a little less crazy by the end of the week.)
Over the weekend, Emily met up with some of her teammates to run and kick the ball around; the parents stood 6 feet apart and instructed the girls that they were not to touch each other. We'd like to keep them going with this, but I'm not sure how much longer the fields will be open and how soon we will move to snitching on our neighbors for going outside.
The grocery store on the afternoon of March 11th.
Picking up Elizabeth from school on March 13th.
A little bit of pick up after 45 minutes of running for Emily and some her friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment