Part 1: Chapter 5

Parking Lot Meeting

Sunday, March 29, 2020
	Can’t stand staying home another instant. Am pretending I know nothing about the governor’s extension of the quarantine. Today after watching church service online, Dianne Young from my gals group and I clandestinely met in the Whittier shopping center parking lot after watching church service online. Would’ve liked to meet all my prayer group ladies there, but as Lucy and Beatrice and Bev seem to be taking this quarantine quite seriously, we didn’t invite them. In fact, when Beatrice learned I didn’t own a mask, she dropped off five cloth masks for our family. She is too kind. Believe she hand-made the child-sized masks for the children.
	Dianne and I bring coffee cake, strawberries, and thermoses of Earl Grey tea. She brings me a bag of snacks for my children and a few toys her kids have outgrown: a transformer, some window stickers, and washable nail polish. Wish I’d brought her flowers or something, but didn’t even think of it. Can’t understand how she has time to think of these considerations when her own life is so hectic.
	We sit on our tailgates, swinging our legs, exchanging news, and laughing. Such delights make me feel almost normal, except that we’re the only ones in a deserted parking lot. That empty lot turns the scene from quaint to post-apocalyptic. She tells me how her parents lost millions in the stock market and now they can’t retire like they’d planned. They’d worked so hard and for so many years in the public school system, she says.