I have video of the last normal thing I did

This video is from Thursday night, March 12, 2020. You know what happened next.

A few weeks before, I had been chatting with Tina, a musician I’d met playing open mics near my home in Greenville, South Carolina. Tina had recently moved from Greenville back to Florida’s Space Coast, which also was where my company’s offices were located. I had mentioned to her I would be in Florida for work that week, and asked if she knew of any places to play. She invited me to join her at an open mic at Jenna’s Breezeway in Cocoa Beach. She said there’d be a twist.

The open mic was hosted by a musician named Steve — a local legend who ran open mics at little spots along the Space Coast. He also has made a few albums. Tina said that week was a celebration of some sort for Steve. I can’t remember exactly what they were celebrating — maybe a milestone birthday, maybe just a thank-you for all he’d done for the local music scene.

As part of the celebration, Tina said everyone playing that night was learning one of Steve’s songs and was going to surprise him by performing it as the second song of their three-song sets. Could I learn one and join in? Sure, that sounded like fun to me.

She sent me a link to Steve’s songs on Spotify. I picked one and figured it out pretty quickly. It was a good song, one with which I connected.

I had combined the work trip with a Florida weekend for CC and me. We went to a music festival in Tampa. We noticed an unusual number of hand-sanitizer stations at the festival. We were more worried about sunburns than viruses. We saw Brandi Carlile, who thanked the crowd for coming out to the festival while things were getting weird.

“I know it’s an uncertain time,” Carlile said from the stage. “Thanks for taking a leap of faith with me. And, you know, we gotta take it seriously. But thanks for choosing music over being really scared tonight.”

Sunday evening after the festival, CC flew home to South Carolina and I drove a rented car across Florida to Melbourne to meet with some of our company’s European customers. Business, as usual.

As the work week unfolded, we had more than an offhand notion that things were getting weird. The mystery disease then known as the “coronavirus” had been in the news since late January, but we were all still going about our lives. Even my ex-wife N, a nurse practitioner, had been relatively unconcerned — until that week.

On Monday or Tuesday, N and I talked through contingency plans in case our daughter M’s university in Miami shut down. The decision hadn’t been made yet, but schools were talking about an “extended spring break” while they figured out what to do if there was some sort of virus going around. We had loosely decided that if M got an extended spring break, she’d spend it in South Carolina with CC and me rather than with N in the Tampa Bay area. N and her husband are both medical professionals, so if in fact there was a weird virus going around, well, you probably didn’t want to be hanging out at their house.

I texted CC, “Things are about to get weird.”

But while things were getting weird, we continued business, as usual. My meetings in Melbourne wrapped up Thursday afternoon. The customers, who had traveled from Norway, Denmark, Austria, and Finland, had originally made plans to stay in Florida and make a long weekend of it. All of them eventually reconsidered, which was a shame, because the weather was going to be beautiful, as spring weekends in Central Florida often are.

I had some time to kill after the meetings and before the open mic, so I drove to a beach near Patrick Air Force Base and took my guitar to the water’s edge. I sat in the sand and ran through Steve’s song a couple more times. My phone buzzed with messages from CC and N about the status of Florida International University.

At the moment I snapped the selfie above — 4:49 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, March 12 — we still didn’t have a firm plan and were just starting to come to grips with the reality that we needed one. I was vaguely aware that the U.S. had issued a travel ban for visitors from continental Europe. The word “pandemic” was starting to sound official. The NBA had suspended its season. And I was about to go to a bar and play music.

Jenna’s Breezeway was a little bar and grill three blocks inland from Cocoa Beach. The big windows in the front gave a full view of traffic on Brevard Avenue. It had a few tables, a few taps, and the usual Florida bar-and-grill fare. I ordered some kind of seafood dish and a beer, and sat at the bar while I waited my turn to play.

The old fellow next to me at the bar was chatty and tried to strike up a conversation. Then he coughed in the general direction of my food. I remember making a conscious decision not to eat the rest.

I played my songs. I played Steve’s song and introduced it with, “Here’s a song I wrote yesterday,” as Tina had told us all to do. I was the second or third person to play, and by that time, Steve was catching on to what was going on. He seemed to really dig hearing his songs performed by others, including people he didn’t know. It was a genuinely good time.

After I played, I had another beer and listened to the rest of the players’ sets. I talked to a few folks who had nice things to say about my songs. I made my way back to Melbourne under a beautiful coastal moon.

Back at the hotel, when I should have been winding down and getting ready to go home, I was still juggling five different conversation threads trying to firm up that plan that we by now very clearly needed. FIU had indeed declared an “extended spring break.” M had Thursday evening to grab what she could from her dorm and drive from Miami to Tampa. I bought her a ticket to fly with me from Tampa to South Carolina.

M was supposed to be in South Carolina for two weeks.

It’s five years later. She’s still in South Carolina.

Things got weird. And I’m not sure anything has been “as usual” since.