THANKS, COVID:

We have grown used to masks now, those of us who wear them. It took a while. The first time I looped one self-consciously around my ears, it felt all wrong, like wearing a piece of underwear in public.

But on a good day, wearing a mask brings strangers oddly closer. For one thing, I've noticed we've begun to wave to each other. I wave at the man behind the fish counter, older couples braving sidewalk ice arm in arm, dogs in fake fur, any child in a stroller in a grocery aisle. Not a single one of them is known to me.

Everyone except the dogs waves back. It's a friendly acknowledgment of our mutually undesirable circumstance, as if the waves were holding their own conversation. "Neither of us finds the situation ordinary," one says. "Whoever you are, we have this in common." So, hello stranger, and goodbye.

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