Five years later, the everyday has returned to the pleasant New Jersey town of Maplewood. About the only visible trace of what was endured is the urgent plea that still adorns the caution-yellow marquee of the old movie theater.

There for the last five years, ever since the theater closed at the dawn of the dread, it says: STAY HEALTHY.

The letter L is tipped slightly, like someone staggered by a blow. That letter L might as well be us, upright but still staggering from a pandemic that killed more than seven million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the Maplewoods and metropolises of America.

Time’s passage has granted the illusion of distance. The veils of protection have dropped from faces, and crowds are once again bellying up to the bar, their conversations carrying echoes of what was being talked about at the start of 2020, as if the last five years had been excised from the calendar.

But then something noticed, something heard, unearths something buried. A message on a closed movie theater’s marquee. A face mask shoved in a drawer. A silhouette of footprints on a subway platform.

The strains of a familiar John Prine song, maybe “Angel From Montgomery,” which at first makes you smile because you love all things Prine, but then you remember that he died in 2020 of complications from Covid, and before the next chord plays your mind is back in that dystopian time.