I Miss Covid Drinking

While we lost many of our freedoms during the Covid, we gained others... including the ability to knock back a couple of beers at home.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

by Justin Rosario

After the better part of two years, life is mostly back to normal in most of the United States. Restaurants are open. Hooray! Movie theaters are drawing (smaller) crowds again. Hooray! Traffic is back. Booooo!

Covid is far from over, of course. Never forget that. It is possible, although not likely, that a new super variant will pop up that is incredibly infectious, incredibly deadly, and completely laughs at our vaccines and previous immunity, thus putting us right back at, if not quite square one, close to it. Even without a killer variant, winter weather is predicted to bring another nasty surge and a lot of people will die. But for the majority of the United States, Covid is now just an ordinary part of life. Some of us take it more seriously and wear masks when around large groups of people indoors. Others take their chances with their vaccines, post-infection immunity, or Fox News-fueled wishful thinking. 

By and large, though, even those of us who still take Covid seriously do not miss being cooped up inside for months on end. I’m a homebody and even I’m happy to be able to go out and do stuff whenever the mood grips me. But being unable to go out came with some perks as well and I miss a few of them. Mainly, the ability to get (mildly) drunk.

Hit the brakes

An odd juxtaposition of Covid isolation was that I took on a great deal more responsibility while also being free to be much more irresponsible. Looking back, it wasn’t the most even trade-off but, seriously, I miss the Covid drinking.

During the first 4 months of Covid, there was a lot of stress over schoolwork and babysitting the neighbor’s kid, Dominic. Dominic was…not well-behaved. The details are not important but suffice to say that everyone was done with him by the middle of April. Even Jordan, who is as easygoing as it gets, wanted him to not be there anymore. It’s really really hard to get on Jordan’s bad side because Jordan’s bad side hardly exists. Dominic managed to find it.

On top of that nonsense, I had to keep my extended family from freaking out about the deadly virus running around that no one really knew anything about yet. It was not easy and inflicted no small amount of strain on me. 

At some point between April and June, though, two things occurred to me in rapid succession. The first was that I was barely driving anywhere. That was the point, right? Don't travel, don’t spread Covid. On some level, I knew that but I didn’t “get” it for a while, and not without good reason. I was the permanent designated driver.

Debbie, my better half, was born with a congenital defect in her right eye. It got worse as she got older until it had to be removed in her early 20s. Her left eye doesn’t have the defect but her eyesight has never been all that good. Thus, her parents refused to let her learn how to drive, even as a teenager with two working eyes. This is part of a lifelong pattern of treating Debbie like she is made from spun glass when she is tougher and more capable than any of them, but that is a story for another time….