When I made a return trip to the West from Quebec, to date Christian and marry him, I stopped in Ontario to visit my mother's family. I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle, and while my uncle was working, we'd visit my Grandma. She lived in a nice nursing home and one of her favourite things to do was to go shopping. Shopping, for my Grandma and Aunt had the aura of an endurance sport. You set out with a small mission and browse and browse, and only broke up the browsing with visits to the fitting rooms. Affection was manifested when things were bought. You accepted advice and bought something, or you accepted generosity while they bought you something. I have a grey merino wool cardigan I wear around the house, 16 years on from that day of shopping during the visit. It's extraordinary.
On our way to some destination or other in my aunt's comfortable car, on highways with so many lanes typical of the cities around Toronto, Grandma would be installed in the back, gazing out the front window with her watery pebble eyes and she would say "Look at all these people! Where are they all going?" I remember this clearly because she would repeat it, again and again, not because of dementia - which I don't think she had, but because, somehow, the rhetorical question pleased her. I couldn't understand that then because I was young and I was on a mission to date and marry Christian and that kind of question made me impatient. It is the kind of thing elderly people wonder, removed as they are from the world and its coming and going.
She comes back to my mind now in this period of pandemic-altered traffic flow. It was noticeable in Winnipeg at first: you could cross St. Mary's Road very easily. But it didn't last too long, and even as only essential businesses remained open, and then gradually others opened too, traffic picked up while we stayed home with the kids and hardly went anywhere. "Look at all these people! Where are they all going?"
If I multiply the out-of-house things we've done since social distancing has taken effect here, the list is as follows: shopping for food, shopping for craft materials, shopping for plants, Kijiji sales, getting to parks for novelty walks, and going to the post office to mail things. If the list were to include pets and affluent eating habits it would include: vet visits and food delivery. Still, the volume requires a supply of imagination, and so to fill in the gap a little, you might add: delivery people of all kinds - local, Amazon, and other - nurses, aids, tradespeople, construction workers and computer technicians. After that, my imagination starts to fail, and I worry I'm becoming like my Grandma: "Look at all these people! Where are they all going?"