My daughter is an ambulance-driving paramedic. One city over from mine, that's all, but for us she's a voice on the phone, a face on the screen, until somebody can promise that sharing a kitchen table won't inadvertently set off a new chain of transmission. Our deepest human impulse for the giving and receiving of comfort, especially in crisis -- to move closer, to join hands, to feel the literal nearness of others -- is the one we cannot indulge.

I listen every morning for the boys across the street. Their mother is Australian, and the school-gone-online routine starts with driveway cricket, one parent pitching, the other jiggling the baby sister. They shout and whoop, the ball smacks off the cricket bat, and somehow it's like the sound of those Italians singing in unison off their balconies, and the people in great cities opening their windows for evening salutes to frontline workers, and the balloon-covered Happy Birthday Kevin! car that honked and blasted music through my neighborhood this week. Halfway out the sunroof and waving like the star of a parade float, his legs pinioned by adults within, Kevin -- I'm going to go ahead and assume that was Kevin -- had block after block of Oakland residents wishing him a happy birthday and merrily waving back.