500 Words: Wait, Wut? #1

Welcome to the web version of 500 Words, a place for creative risk-taking. I’m posting about what happens when we slowly accept the impossible. When you see posts that are numbered, they are part of a series. To receive the posts in order as they come out, just click the link. You’ll receive 500 words of short-form goodness in your inbox once a week.

I made a mask out of an old t-shirt and it was flawed, terribly flawed, and my breath fogged my glasses. I looked around at the world and admired the masks that other people wore. That mask fits well, I said to myself. Right there, that is a stylish black mask. Look, that mask has a filter so you can breathe a little. Many people were walking around without fogged glasses. I began to despair.

I considered going to the tailor down the street who was making them. I wondered what kind of mask you wear when you go to buy a mask. Would there ever be an answer to that? I spent some evenings with my iPad reading articles in the New York Times about mask-making. T-shirts, scarves, repurposed maxi-pads were all drafted into battle. Weeks ago, when Farhad Manjoo ran a piece in the Times claiming that soon we would all have to make our own masks, I considered this proclamation as unlikely as hearing that my seven-year-old son would have more Zoom meetings that I would. I snapped the iPad shut. This pandemic wouldn’t last that long. In no…