When the doors to the extended van with the out-of-state plates parked in front of St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church opened late Saturday afternoon, an entire family poured out.
A family of seven, with five kids. And nobody was wearing or carrying a mask.
Which I noted, with concern, as I walked wearing my mask toward and then past them to the front door of the church.
They seemed like nice people. And I love it when visiting families join us for mass at St. Isaac Jogues. Wait, maybe I should say I loved it, before COVID-19. Now it makes me a little nervous, especially when the family shows up without masks or a reservation.
A reservation? For mass? Yup. It isn’t required, but it is preferred. There’s not much room in the already small church since it has been divided up into COVID-safe individual enclaves of worship by small gold ropes that mark some pews off-limits.
It’s a smartly designed plan, and it leaves those inside feeling about as safe as we can feel in a public setting indoors these days, with plenty of room to breathe between each individual worshipper or family group.
But it doesn’t take many to fill the available seats, even with an “overflow” option in the coffee room down the hall past the sacristy and the pastor’s office. That’s where the family members, who were greeted warmly by Deacon Lou Usera, were headed as I strolled in the opposite direction to find my spot in a pew and prepare to be second lay reader of scripture.
Once in place, I considered my initial reaction to the approach of the family and felt guilty that I hadn’t been more welcoming. Also, I hadn’t felt welcoming, not a bit.
We are called upon, after all, in more than one piece of meaningful scripture to welcome the stranger. That call doesn’t differentiate between those wearing masks and those not.
Still, in a time when more than 4 million people in the United States have contracted COVID-19 and 150,000 of them have died, doesn’t it seem logical for a traveler to assume that mass might be a bit complicated? That calling ahead might be a good idea? And that masks might be a really good idea?
And if there’s no sign that strangers seemed to acknowledge those realities, it can make you wonder how careful, or not, they are and have been in their daily lives. Because this is a time when care is essential.
It’s important to welcome the stranger. It’s also important to protect the stranger, and for the stranger to protect the people he or she is visiting.
It could be that the parents of the family just forgot. We forget. I forget. Even with something as serious as COVID lurking about. But I also wondered Saturday before mass, as I have wondered at other times since if it might have been something else.
It seems like a higher percentage of people who are or appear to be summer visitors to our state aren’t wearing face coverings in places where they should be. To me, that’s pretty much anytime you can’t keep at least six feet distance (In consultation with my doctor son, I prefer eight) between you and others, especially indoors.
I was thinking of the family at church the next day as I stopped in Sturgis, drove through Deadwood, and then made another stop at Lead, strapping on the mask when I got out of the SUV to buy something. Lots of people without masks. And especially it seemed, the tourists.
I have to admit, I felt pretty unwelcoming toward them, scriptural directives notwithstanding. I felt especially unwelcoming to those who didn’t wear masks and didn’t seem concerned about keeping their distance, from me or anybody else.
This is coming, by the way, from a man who’s in the lower end of a higher-risk group of people for COVID complications, should we get the virus. Most sentient human beings who look at me can tell I’m in that age group and might deserve some space.
It made me wonder if the relatively stable and sometimes decreasing rates of COVID infections in South Dakota, and the much-lower-than-forecast number of COVID patients in our hospitals, have people thinking we’re sort of a COVID-free zone, a vacation-from-the-virus resort that is 77,000 square miles big.
It also made me wonder if there was a little bad in the otherwise good news that President Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore for a July 3rd fireworks display, where masks were scarce and co-mingling common, apparently did not result in any surge or even noticeable uptick in COVID cases here in western South Dakota.
What could be bad about that? Well, maybe that it strengthened an already existing belief in some that the seriousness of COVID is being exaggerated, as is the need for social distancing and the appropriate use of masks.
I was still thinking about that on Tuesday, as I stood at a self-checkout station in Safeway here in Rapid City and reviled aloud my own stupidity for showing up at the store to buy some groceries at 5:15 p.m. Which is, of course, crunch time.
Retired people don’t have to do that. Retired people shouldn’t do that. We have free schedules and sometimes even our own shopping periods. We also sometimes don’t stop to think before we act, just like people of any age.
I thought I’d get in and out. I didn’t. It was crowded and getting more so. And after erring in my choice of times to shop, I doubled down on dumbness by deciding to pick up some extra items. Which meant more trips down more aisles, where I ran into more people, including a guy with a beard and a face mask hanging from a loop on one ear.
Sometimes — like, say, when a store employee walked by — the guy would use one hand to lift the mask up to sort of cover his mouth, which was always moving, mansplaining one thing or another to anybody within earshot. Then he’d let the mask drop and resume, without even the charade of covering his mouth, a loud monologue that included complaints about store regulations.
I veered away from him a couple of times on my circuitous route to the self-checkout aisle, where I got stalled by problems with the checkout machine and surrounded by people, most of whom were wearing face coverings.
They included the masked man behind me, who urged me to “Come on, Woster, hurry up!”
Turned out, it was Karl Jegeris, recently retired as chief of the Rapid City Police Department, now a management-level staffer at the Children’s Home Society of South Dakota and a church-going fellow, like me.
Recognizing Karl, who I’m quite sure knows the “welcome the stranger” readings, I knew there was a smile under the mask. I also wondered immediately if he’d heard me mutter: “I can’t (expletive deleted) believe this.”
I directed that F-bomb-infused statement to the only guy in our cluster who wasn’t wearing a mask: the one standing right next to me. And by “right next,” I mean a foot and a half from his elbow to mine. He clearly didn’t know or care about social distancing any more than he did about masks as he blabbed about some checkout problem to the young store employee who was trying to help.
The unmasked man looked even older than I am, so maybe he didn’t hear me. Or maybe he chose to ignore me. Either way, I had the urge to welcome this particular stranger with a more forcefully presented string of derogatory epithets, which would have been loud enough for all to hear.
But after a glance back at Karl, I decided against it. And as the checkout process proceeded without incident, Karl seemed a little relieved that he didn’t have to step back into his old peacekeeping role and break up a checkout-line swinging session between a couple of old codgers.
Only one of whom was wearing a mask.
