By Chris Satullo

One of the more irritating phrases people toss out to let you know they are sophisticates of the first order is…This ain’t my first rodeo.

That said, let me say this: This ain’t my first quarantine.

My first happened when I was 18 years old. It was far shorter than this one and the infectious disease in question was merely annoying, not petrifying.

Still, that long-ago sequestering lives in my memory as an experience more tedious, more lonely and more depressing than what we’ve been enduring together since mid-March. In telling this tale, I hope to tease out why that’s so.

That quarantine happened to my college freshman self. A little useful context: I went to Williams, a tiny liberal-arts college tucked into a corner of Massachusetts, near the Vermont border. Back then, Williams operated on what was called the 4-1-4 system.

The one, tucked between the fall and spring semesters, was an interlude called Winter Study.  For the month of January, you were supposed to take just one course, something off your beaten path, something adventurous.

What I didn’t realize when I chose this school nestled in the Berkshire Mountains was that, for most of my classmates, Winter Study was really just rich preppy-speak for…let’s ski every day. And I was a working class kid from very flat Ohio.

A sidebar anecdote, before I get back to quarantine: One Winter Study day during my sophomore year, I was standing in the cafeteria lunch line when the young woman in front of me turned and said, “Hey, Chris, we’re going up to Jiminy Peak this afternoon. Wanna come?”

“Thanks, but no,” I said meekly. “I don’t ski.”

She fixed me with an unforgettable look, equal parts amazement, pity and contempt: “Why in the world did you come to Williams if you don’t ski?”

An excellent question. In four years, I’m not sure I ever answered it.

Anyway, before Winter Study, I’d spent a lot of time over Christmas break at the home of my high school girlfriend.  In all that time, I never saw her little brother, which was no loss, but one time I did think to ask where he was. “Oh, upstairs in bed. He has the chicken pox,” came the reply.

OK, you see where this is going.  On the drive back to school, somewhere around the Canajoharie exit on the New York Thruway, the infernal itching began. 

After a miserable night or two, I went to the college infirmary. Once there, I didn’t get out for two weeks. I was told to call my roommate to bring over some underwear and toiletries. I wouldn’t need anything else; I’d be confined to one room in a hospital gown for the whole time.

I freaked out, not so much because having chicken pox at 18 – and lacking the discipline to avoid scratching – was going to leave me with the cratered face that peers out at friends on Zoom. No, because Type-A nerd that I was, I fretted that the quarantine was going to keep me from executing my Winter Study project, producing a short film based on the Nathaniel West novel, Miss Lonelyhearts.

As it turned out, to my relief, being quarantined was deemed excellent cause for an extension. That left me with only two challenges.

One was avoiding an excruciating death by boredom. For two long weeks, I was by myself, with no TV, 30 years away from the invention of the smartphone, the only inhabitant of one floor in the college’s old infirmary building, which sat at the outer edge of a mostly deserted campus.

I don’t know if you’ve ever endured a Massachusetts winter, but that’s a master class in gloom. I swear the sun rises at, oh, about 11:15 and sets a little past noon. The long, echoing hall I was on was crepuscular and creepy; it had me expecting at any minute to see Jack Nicholson’s maniacal face coming through my door, brandishing an ax and yelling, “Heeeere’s Johnny!”

The other challenge was the beets, as in, the vegetable. I hate beets, nearly as much as I hate liver, but every night beets were the featured vegetable attraction on the sorry plate of victuals placed on the tray by my bed. Do beets contain some vitamin that fights the pox? I’ve never bothered to check.

That’s why, the day I left that infirmary ranks – along with my wedding day, the births of my kids and grandkids (and, if I’m honest, LeBron beating the Warriors in Game 7) – as among the happiest of my existence.

This quarantine has, by contrast, been a piece of cake for me. Yes, like you, my heart goes out to COVID-19 victims and their families; I’m moved and humbled by the heroism of hospital staffs; I’m appalled by the toxic narcissism on display each night at the presidential “briefings.”

But here’s what’s different from that long-ago infirmary stay.

First, I get to spend this lockdown with my best friend in the world, my wife. And Zoom, for all its quirks, effectively connects me to everyone else I love or care about.  

Two, while the self-involved freshman in that lonely room seethed with grievance at the unlucky injustice of it all, today his graying heir knows how insanely lucky he’s been – so far – in having no symptoms and a job he can do from home. The older me knows his main duties these days are to maintain a prayerful attitude of gratitude and to do what he can to support those whom fate, or a heroic sense of duty, have exposed to COVID-19’s wrath.

And here’s a paradoxical comfort: This challenge does not isolate me spiritually from the rest of the world. It connects me. The cliché “we’re all in this together” has never in my lifetime been more powerfully, poignantly, revealingly true.

We really are all … in … this … together.

So, if (when, God willing) the lethal cause of  our current lesson in community stops looming over our days, let us never, never – as individuals or as a society – forget the old lesson we’ve been forcefully retaught these last few weeks:

No man is an island.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.