For years, the elevator in my doctor’s Cambridge office building carried patients safely up and down six floors. When COVID arrived, it was no longer safe. Every stranger’s breath was filled with fearful possibility, and even wearing masks, we stood too closely together. An elevator had become a petri dish.
My doctor’s office is on the top floor, a long ride up. One morning, pandemic fear drove me past the elevator bank and into the stairwell. I had never climbed those stairs before — they were institutional and unfriendly, but they were empty. No one took them, and why would they? There was an elevator.
Six flights were orthopedically miserable. But a few days later, I decided to climb again. Any improvement in my health would help the over-scheduled, under-compensated PCP on the top floor.
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Eventually, I began to climb the stairs a few times a week. It became a strange meditation: no mountain vista, but time to think, to make lists, to plan for the future everyone hoped would arrive. I rarely ran into anyone. Once I passed a maskless woman sitting on the cement landing outside the second floor, holding her head and yelling into a cell phone. She was directly in my path, but — it was clear — too busy breaking up with someone to move.
Another morning, a woman making her way down from the fifth floor noticed the backpack. “Rucking?” she said. When I got home, I looked the word up. Climbing had become educational.
Then I met the man in a gray uniform. I was on the fourth floor, coming down. He was standing in the vestibule of the third floor, holding a spray bottle in one hand and a cloth in the other, wiping down the hallway doorknob. He stopped what he was doing and held the door open, a gesture so courtly it was impossible to refuse. I thanked him, walked through, straight down the hall to the other Exit sign, and took that staircase to the bottom. The third floor had never been the destination, but his courtesy could not be resisted.
A few days later, I ran into him again. I was rounding the third floor, and he was in the stairwell, wiping down the banisters. He stopped again and stood to one side to let me pass, another gesture so gentlemanly that if he had been wearing a hat, I know he would have doffed it.
For him, essential and invisible, there was no working from home. Yet his stairway calm was the opposite of everyone else’s elevator panic. I imagine few people noticed him, or realized that his day was filled with banisters, doorknobs, and sanitizing fluid (for one thing, they were busy taking the elevator).
Elevators are more or less safe now, though on behalf of my PCP, I have come to prefer the stairs in the medical building. Since the pandemic ended, I have not come across the man in a gray uniform. I would like to hold the door for him.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.
