It's the little things I miss the most

I miss the pastries.

Gather 'round, young 'uns, while Granny tells you what life was like in the old times, before the virus banished us all to isolation inside our phones. We used to have big gatherings of people--hundreds and hundreds of people--all inside the same room, mingling promiscuously, gabbing, hugging, laughing in each others' faces--without masks.

Every year about this time the College would gather all employees--faculty, staff, administration--for Fall Convocation, where we would welcome new employees and hear presentations about the state of the College and the challenges ahead, and since you can't expect several hundred people to sit quietly for three hours of PowerPoint without some sort of incentive, we would all be given goodies (like a new College t-shirt or, one year, a branded multi-use tool that I never found a reason to use) and plied with coffee and pastries.

Coffee I can live without--and in fact I've been living quite well without it since early March--but I do miss those pastries, especially the flaky little knots filled with apricot yumminess. We would gather up our goodies and sit at tables surrounded by friends and colleagues, chatting away and catching up on how we'd spent the summer, and those of us who sat in the back could lean in and make snarky comments during the PowerPoint presentations. Given the uneven distribution of PowerPoint skills, there was always something to snark about. 

One year (this is true) they didn't give us a rest-room break. You can't put several hundred people in a room, ply them with coffee, and then subject them to three hours of PowerPoint without a rest room break. That's got to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Well that won't happen this year. Fall Convocation is all online, and until someone invents an app allowing YouTube to serve coffee and pastries, we're on our own for refreshments. There will be no hugging, no chatting, no laughing in each others' faces, and while I'm free to make snarky comments to my heart's content while watching the event from my office, solitary snark is no fun.

But it's probably more fun than being hooked to a ventilator in an ICU, so we do what we have to do to carry on so that we'll survive long enough to tell the tale to our grandkids.

It's just not the same.