“It’s eerie outside,” a friend said over the phone in March 2020, a few days after national lockdowns began. “It feels like an occupied city; like World War II movies about Paris.”
Just a little over a week before, I’d been with him and two neighbors in Baltimore. Our friends had been comparing notes on what to do with stocks, how to buy ammunition, and where to acquire deep freezers for weeks now, but while the world was closing in, a small group of us toasted a final afternoon in a nearby city.
We visited the Sagamore Spirits Distillery, where over delicious pours, staff and customers discussed word of impending closures. Rumors swirled of imminent travel bans, and tourism had slowed to a trickle while friends and family on the road exchanged updates and hustled home to avoid getting stranded. In Baltimore that Saturday, March 7, 2020, hotel rooms were cheap, upgrades for frequent travelers were easy, and Peter’s Pour House was still serving tall shots and the local lager in frosted mugs.
It would be our last evening in nearby Charm City for over a year.
Three days later, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a State of Emergency. The move, she insisted, was “largely… an administrative action.” It would, she claimed, simply give her “more authority to implement and fund the measures that we need to monitor and respond to COVID-19 in our community.”
By the following Monday, March 16, she’d used her newfound authority to force what she deemed “non-essential services” to close.
In the pews that earlier Sunday in Baltimore, 219 years after our American cathedral’s consecration, none of us knew for sure what was coming, but we wouldn’t have long to wait for the return of public suspicion of the faithful. By the end of that month, D.C.’s mayor would decree my local churches closed for business, and by the summer, a neighborhood priest would be harassed for praying the rosaries outdoors with the sisters. Before much longer, some of his own neighbors were calling The Washington Post to report on a Capitol Hill monsignor they falsely accused of deviating from the COVID order.
But for some, neighborhood subversion was already brewing when St. Patrick’s Day began.
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