Panic in New York City

It has been a long strange day.  It is 10:45 P.M., and I am only starting to sit down to think about writing and commenting. 

Sometime in the afternoon, reports started circulating on twitter and elsewhere about New York City and a potential state of emergency.  Both my daughters live in NYC.  False rumors were taking off fast and one of my daughters heard they might close the subways. My other daughter, who was on an Amtrak train from Baltimore to New York, received scary texts from a friend saying get on the next train: Things could shut down in New York.  Between hearing this from my daughters and then hearing that Broadway was closed for a month effective today, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera were closing, I began to panic.  As many of us do, I alternate between panic and temporary calm.  Seeing last night’s hashtag “CancelEverything” put me more in panic mode, as did the President’s speech.  

So in the late afternoon I decided that this was the time to do that big food shop and be sure I had everything in the house for a possible 2-4 week stay.  This could be it, I thought.  I allayed my anxiety by buying more and more food and supplies as I went down each aisle.  More cat litter, more cat dry food, taco kits, desserts and chips for my daughters who were planning on staying over when the time came. My cart literally overflowed.

As it turns out, they didn’t shut down the subways or close NYC public schools today.  But with each passing hour, things are changing. My one daughter, who was planning on coming out Sunday, instead took an Uber out tonight, accompanied by her two cats. She can and will work from home, in this case, my home. My other daughter will wait it out for now.  We live on Long Island, a suburb of NYC, which is less crazy than NYC with its crowds and subways.

I now know I overreacted, and some of the news on twitter was just not true… at least for today. So now we have a whole lot of food for a long time to come. Day is done, it’s raining and three cats are running around my den.  What will tomorrow bring?