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Maplewood, New Jersey

One friend of a friend said: "Smile, when you're out on your walks. Social distancing doesn't mean you need to frown. In fact, we need to see smiles more than ever."

Sometimes, the smile is reciprocated, and sometimes it isn't; sometimes, I'm met with strange coldness. But then I just think of Teri Hatcher on the set of "Desperate Housewives." Felicity Huffman was relentlessly kind to Hatcher, though Hatcher was--famously--a monster. Huffman said, "Just because she acts that way, it doesn't follow that I can't be nice!"

One set of neighbors is *too* friendly. The elderly lady, carrying wine-in-a-thermos, sticks her face inside my infant's invisible "distance bubble." "That smile!" she says, breathing her fumes all over my baby. "That witty bitty face!!"

I laugh uncomfortably, and later she circles back to apologize. "I just couldn't resist! I know there's this coronavirus...." I make empathetic noises, but they are fake noises; I don't empathize. No baby would make me forget the six-feet rule, even for a moment.

My local email list--"The Back Road"--becomes obsessed with a pothole. "John, I just want to say you did a beautiful job fixing that pothole. That hole threatened to grow, and grow--and you took care of it." Something like ten others chime in; all feel compelled to use the "reply all" option. It seems to me that the pothole has become a symbol for the world's falling apart, and John is like Churchill, or Obama; John is a bright face in an earlier era, showing that, yes, we can bring about positive change.

I, too, feel moved by that pothole. I'm moved by the cement-pouring heroes in our world, fighting, fighting to make things right.

This is life--for now--at 67 Maplewood.
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