Your March 11 Stories

It has been two years, somehow.

Two weeks ago, I asked you, on the heels of the two-year anniversary of the unofficial, not-entirely-accurate beginning of the pandemic in the United States, to send me your March 11 stories. For my personal newsletter, when the pandemic first hit, I had readers send me personal tales of what they were going through as they were going through it. As I went through these stories, sent now, two years later, I noticed how much more wistful, even hopeful, they were. Two years ago, we wondered if it were legitimately the end of the world. Now we know, at least in a personal sense, for some people, it really was. Every one of us is a little different now than we were two years ago. I thought these stories were good examples of that.

Here are your best stories. At the end, I’ll add in my favorite of those stories from two years ago … one that still gives me hope today.

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I work in fundraising for a Big East University. The second week of March is often the busiest week of the year as we hold lots of events, meet with lots of alumni and, of course, watch lots of basketball in New York. As the week approached, and the news got more dire, events and meetings were being canceled at a prodigious rate. I still had some meetings and the tournament was still on, so I made my way to New York on Wednesday morning. On the train a few more meetings were canceled but I was already on my way up.

In addition to being a very busy week, this is also a week where I spend a lot of time with my colleagues at the hotel bar. After a dinner with some college friends, I headed to the bar. As our much reduced crew sat there that evening, the news began to trickle out. Our athletics and ticket teams were trying to figure out who they would give the 500 tickets we were allocated to. At first this seemed like a problem of limited supply, but quickly became a problem of limited demand. As the night wore on, more and more events were canceled, someone mentioned that Tom Hanks had it and then the bar stopped as the Jazz game was canceled. It truly didn’t seem real, but we didn’t know any better so we kept enjoying ourselves at the bar, oblivious to what was truly to come.