I extended my hand to the woman with whom I'd been chatting for the past few minutes. "I'm Virginia," I said.
To my surprise, she responded not with a handshake but with a closed fist. A white woman of a certain age, she was incongruously going for a fist bump. Her husband recommended it, she explained, to avoid spreading germs. We were, after all, on a cruise ship.
We were sailing from Los Angeles to Hawaii on the same line, Princess Cruises, that had the Diamond Princess ship quarantined in Yokohama with an outbreak of the coronavirus known as COVID-19. As we set sail in mid-February, a ship was either one of the safest places, isolated from potential contagion, or the riskiest. But even without the threat of a potential pandemic, we had reason to be cautious.