You and I are currently advised or required to stay at home, “shelter in place,” and hunker down for what, in the time of World War II, we called “the duration.” But hundreds of thousands of us can’t do that. Doctors, nurses, and medical staff can’t stay home from work now, of all times; heating oil deliveries have to continue (mine came this morning courtesy of a masked driver who, instead of handing Kiki a pair of treats, threw them to her); grocery stores need to stay open, if carefully so; and pharmacies, as well. I bought a few gallons of paint yesterday with the same sort of hugger-mugger, through a barely open door, once reserved for scoring a couple of ounces of pot. Life’s support systems have to go on.

Thus a lot more of us than usual are beginning to appreciate just which human services are, if not essential, at least very important to us. I can certainly get along without a manicure or the nightly news, and my truck can wait a week or two (or more) for an oil change, and I can do fine without a haircut because by the time I really need one, all of Vermont will be hairy. Those are Stage One problems. Should the hot water heater quit, though, or either the well or septic tank pump stop working, or the Prius refuse to start (the dealer is closed till mid-April), well, that’s Stage Two: not impossible to work around for a while. But if my daily temperature check suddenly spikes, or my dog is lying groaning in the floor, or a pipe bursts somewhere in the house, then the true definition of “essential work” kicks in.

The television news is dominated each evening by the latest “briefing” from the White House. With large public gatherings contraindicated or even forbidden, political rallies, thankfully, are suspended for the time being. Undaunted, our leadership, eschewing the nitty-gritty, statistic-filled type of briefing favored by the Governor of New York, assures us instead how lucky we are that, no matter how bad things may get in the coming weeks, we’re in amazingly capable hands. That, to me, at least, is not an essential service.

What is essential, among other things, is to appreciate that many small business owners’ income has evaporated. It’s difficult for many of us to appreciate how devastating that can be. Congress has responded with a bill that gives these folks, who aren’t eligible for workmen’s compensation, some funds to tide them over. But it’s hard not to notice that the amount provided for larger businesses – even those who used earlier subsidies to buy back their own stock – is far greater, and that the government web site set up for applying for the small business funds is a snarl, much as with the early mess in Obamacare applications. The folks in the greatest need seem to have become abstractions to their presumed representatives.

I like to think of the structure of any culture as a pyramid, a shape which for millennia has embodied human aspirations. Large at the bottom and tapering to a summit – the pyramidion– as high as its builders could manage, it’s a natural progression: The great mass at the bottom supports the ever-diminishing weight of its upper tiers. Could there be a better image for our society? Everything beneath supports what’s above it, culminating in what are presumed to be our finest. But if the peak becomes heavy and unresponsive, the goals become blurred and threatened. If it tumbles, so does the tacit compact between it and all the ever-expanding tiers supporting it. If the tiers beneath crumble first, so goes the rest. Truly, we need each other in order to succeed – or in this case, survive.

It’s likely we’ll never return to the lives we led before the attack and our blundering response. But it would be an honest thing, if afterward we began to give just deserts to, among many others, health care workers, plumbers, chambermaids, waitpersons, and truck drivers. Ismail Ferdous, a Bangladeshi photographer currently based in New York, celebrated them this way: “I had a decision to make....I chose to stay. Every day at 7 p.m., New York City claps for two minutes to show gratitude for all essential workers. At these moments I’m enveloped in our collective positive energy and feel validated for staying.”

Essential services, like essential workers, are likewise overwhelmed these days. Send a generous gift to your local food shelf; call people you know who can’t get out (or shouldn’t) and ask what you can get for them; thank the woman stocking the produce shelves. One way or another, we’re all in this boat together, and there’s no one much better to have around than a smiling, happy shipmate.