I now want to share a bit of good news, given that we’ve been bombarded with a torrent of bad news of late.

The good news as I see it is that the “new normal” we are likely experiencing could become simply “normal” once the crisis subsides and ultimately drifts into history.

And it will. I am confident that the coronavirus pandemic will dissipate. It will take some time, which brings me to my point.

Which is that we are going to spend a lot of time and energy changing the way we do things.

There might be so much hand-washing, using sanitized wipes, extra precaution taken with “social distancing” that it will become second-nature even after we no longer need to do all these things.

My wife and I are wiping down fuel pumps, shopping carts, door handles … you name it, we’re wiping it down. “You never know who touches these things,” my wife says with her considerable wisdom. Indeed, we’re taking precautions we didn’t use to take.

We were walking through the ‘hood the other morning when we met a gentleman who works as a construction foreman on the houses being built in our Princeton, Texas, subdivision. He has an Oregon Ducks decal on the rear window of his pickup. I asked him, “Are you a Ducks fan?” He said he is. He then told us he grew up in Portland, attended Sunset High School, Portland State University — and attended the Pac-12 football championship game in the Bay Area this past season when the Ducks “destroyed Utah.” We told him we moved to Texas from Oregon in 1984. He’s a home boy!

I started to shake his hand, then pulled my hand back. “Hey, no sweat,” he said. “I get it.”

Handshakes with strangers well might become a thing of the past, too.

Yep, the new normal is upon us. It’ll take time to get used to this new way of living. I suspect if the crisis lasts long enough, what’s new will become, well, just plain “normal.”