Pandemic Perspectives: One Night on Lockdown 7:00-7:02 pm

By Carol Segal / Manhattan

An ongoing series of stories by Insider readers. Do you have a pandemic tale of your own? Please send it to editor@theinsider1.com

Written in April 2020

When you live in a New York City apartment and you look at night at the windows of apartment buildings across the street or across the courtyard, it’s like looking at illuminated snapshots formatted on the pages of a photo album. That scene looks like lit-up snippets of a hundred people’s lives. Yet, New Yorkers learn to ignore the people in the windows; we don’t want to invade privacies or be inappropriately observed ourselves. We try to respect everybody’s right to live their lives freely with the shades up.

But during every evening’s 7:00-7:02 p.m. “Essential Workers Appreciation Clap,” the rules are changed. People are leaning out of those windows, reaching hands out to make noise, waving and smiling. We shout our thanks to the bus drivers who pass by, the food delivery men on bicycles, the doormen, the officers in New York Police Department squad cars, the taxi drivers. For the first time ever, we are reaching toward each other from inside our windows, seeing faces we never saw before.

On one such night, I see the head monk step out the front door of the Korean Buddhist Temple that occupies a brownstone directly across the street from me. The rarely seen abbot is standing on his stoop, tapping his meditation bell with a stick as his contribution to the clamor. I catch his attention and raise up my hands to clap directly to him. He mirrors my motion. I clasp my hands together and yell across the street “I see you. Stay strong!” He motions the same back to me. I open my arms wide in a gesture of welcome and inclusiveness. He does the same.

I crane my neck to look at the windows above my head and wave to a woman who lives with and takes care of her wheelchair-bound mother. I’d learned days earlier that the older woman asks to be positioned at the window when the clapping begins. Tonight, the daughter draws her mother’s hand to extend outside the window so that I may see that she is there and enjoying the sound of the people.

I rarely think to open my kitchen window because it faces the back of the building, a rather dark and gloomy interior courtyard of brick walls and pigeon poop-covered air conditioners. But tonight, my spirit is on fire because the human connection is pulsing strong and alive.  I hear clapping and pot-banging from this side of my building, too, and the energy compels me to open my bleak kitchen window and stick my head out.

This has me facing another side of my own building where I see into the window of my 88-year-old widowed neighbor sitting at his dinner table, still grieving the loss of his wife, suffering from the effects of Parkinson’s disease, often sad and lonely in his daily life. His home healthcare aide catches sight of me, raises the shades all the way up so that the elderly gentleman can see me, and I throw kisses to both of them.

Something makes me look upward to the window of new tenants who just moved in last week, and a strange woman is standing there. I motion to her to open her window.  I yell “We welcome you!” The woman clasps her hands to her chest in thanks. I yell “When this is all over, we will get acquainted over a glass of wine!” and she yells back “And I will hug you!” I don’t even know her name.

From my kitchen window, I can also see the back of another brick building full of windows and vertical columns of small balconies. After the two-minute applause-fest, a man on his terrace sings one song each night on a microphone, accompanying himself on his electric guitar. One evening it was Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Tonight, it is “Let It Be.” He sings off tune much of the time, but his passion is palpable. Although I cannot see him from where I am, I yell my “thank you” multiple times toward the brick facade, hoping that my voice echoes and bounces from building to building, and that he may hear my faceless appreciation.

This nightly tradition has become an increasingly loud and passionate roar of encouraging voices, cowbells, spoons hit against pots, whistles, honking cars, whoops and hollers, even tambourine-shaking. It has heightened my consciousness of the human spirit. We New Yorkers know that we are at the epicenter of this most virulent storm. We know that as we cheer to see each other from our windows, the body bags are piling up across the park. The human race has been knocked to its knees and is fighting for its life.

Yet, for two minutes every night between 7:00 and 7:02 p.m., we are looking hard for each other in our snapshot windows, we are reaching out to one another while staying far apart, and in these bizarre times of forced distancing and isolation, we’ve never felt closer.

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Born and raised in Portland, OR, Carol danced with the Portland Ballet Company for six years. After moving to New York City in 1979 and marrying a musician a few years later, she built a flourishing career as a personal trainer. Her business has spanned four decades and continues to this day, now specializing as a senior citizen fitness consultant. Two children and three grandchildren later, she is a published memoir essayist: “25 Miles to Go Now” Feminine Collection, 2018; “Warm Bread,” The Cooks Cook, 2023. Her first novel is nearing completion.