Maria and I both had a delightful pedicure, our first, as I wrote just a few minutes ago. We had fun; it went so well.

But there is something else I sadly need to write, and I thought it needed to be separate from the lighter, happier piece below.

Halfway through the pedicure, while Maria and I laughed at one another, I couldn’t help but look around. I sensed a dark shadow flitting over the salon. It wasn’t bacteria or danger.

We were the only people in the Nightingale Nail Salon at lunchtime on a weekday.

All the stores and restaurants in the mall around us were jammed with people; the parking lots were full.

There were six people in the clean, bright, and meticulously well-maintained Nightingale Salon in Saratoga Springs, the owner, and his wife,  two pedicurists, and the two of us.

There were a lot of empty chairs.

I looked over and saw the co-owner in shadow and then recalled the awful rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans now (a 150  increase  in 2020).

And I remembered watching yet another horrific video just last night showing a 65-year-old Asian woman kicked to the ground and stomped savagely while scores of New Yorkers watched and did nothing. It kept me up for hours last night.

I forced myself to watch it.

There are plenty of stories about health hazards in nail salons and now,  but fewer about the struggles clean and well-run nail salons in the country are having to survive.

“Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, ” said a report in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, “nail techs and salon owners across the country have been forced to go to extreme lengths to pay their rents and keep their salons open…”

There were 54,000 nail salons in the United States five years ago; the number is believed to have dropped by more than a third in the past two years.

That represents a lot of jobs for Asian workers and immigrants and livelihoods for their owners.

Apart from the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and two years of government encouraged bigotry (Asian American activists begged former President Trump to stop referring to the pandemic as the “China virus” and the “Chinese flu,” but he refuses to stop.)

Innocent Asian-Americans are paying for his cruelty.

The Nightingale Salon in Saratoga Springs today was spotless, clean, beautiful, and felt completely safe to me, and I have heart disease and diabetes. I know a clean and well-run place when I see one.

I would eat off the floor in that place.

There was an atmosphere of emptiness when Maria and I first went in there, but I also sensed an atmosphere of fear.  I think it was coming from me or perhaps the emptiness of the place.

We didn’t talk about it, but I was a reporter for some time, and I could feel it. There was worry in the air.

How could they not be afraid, seeing the same almost daily and increasingly horrific videos that I see? I sense gratitude for us that we had come in and felt safe.

I did see all the health department stickers and inspection records on the walls.

The pedicurist I had helped me stand up, wiped my feet carefully and lovingly, and heckled me into moving when I needed to, always with a smile.

The staff was cheerful and polite, but I had this sense of heaviness in the room as well, the sense of good and hard-working people running once again into the dark and hateful vein that runs through American life and have from the beginning.

They didn’t say a word, they didn’t need to.

The virus has opened this vein, and it is spattering our streets with blood and hate in this community.

We hope to be great, but we aren’t there yet.

I hope our visit made the people working there feel a bit better.

We signed up for next month as well. I will make it a point to be there. I rarely plug businesses on my blog; bedlam farm.com is a  national blog, not a local one.

But I am happy to put in a good word on behalf of the Nightingale Nail Salon in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (518 584-8512) or 3039 Route 50 Wilton Square No. 12, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 128166.

I could not have been happier or felt safer. Social Distancing was no problem.

If you live around here, check it out.

Like our refugee friends in America, I hope they will soon learn that the real America is not the one we see in the news or that we saw in the White House for some years.

The real America is generous, welcoming, and kind to its fellow citizens, new or old. We are cautious now but stepping out carefully into the light.

I don’t know for sure where or how the virus started, but I do know this: it is our virus now, all of us. We won’t beat it by coming apart, but by coming together or by blaming other people for our troubles.

Hate is a poison for all of us, as great a danger as the pandemic itself.

I hope people in close range of the Nightingale will consider visiting them; it didn’t seem right for Maria and me to be the only people inside for nearly an hour at lunchtime while the mall around us was teeming with shoppers.

Wherever you are, perhaps you could consider visiting a salon in your town or city if there is one and showing the hard-pressed people working there what it really means to be an American.

There are risks of infections in America in many of the things we do – buying food in a supermarket, walking through terminals, eating in a poorly-managed restaurant, buying fish, breathing the air on an airplane,  going to a doctor’s office, being in a hospital for more than a few hours.

Or crossing the street.

There are grave risks from living in America and not being able to afford health care. A lot more people suffer and die from our health care crisis than from nail salons.

Some of these risks we focus on, some we seem to ignore or look away from. We are selective in our choices of hysterias.

Nail sons get a lot of attention about the health risks for workers and customers. In fairness, I’m offering a list of five things that are most commonly raised as dangers in salons. You can read about them here.

Is it safe to get a manicure or a pedicure now? The CDC says it is a low-risk activity.

Getting a pedicure felt more like a medical experience than a relaxing one in some ways. The safety checks were surely more thorough than my doctor’s visits.

Nail salons require masks, sterilizing equipment after each use, performing temperature checks at the door (no longer required in most states), hand-washing on entry, following social distancing, eliminating chemicals that might be unhealthy.

Salons are taking state-mandated extra steps to clean and sterilize between patients. Salons were very different from salons two years ago, I read and am told.

If you’re nervous, ask the salon owner if they are following local and state health guidelines for opening or re-opening. And trust your instincts.

This morning, I called the state health department and asked them if salons are dangerous to visit now. I wanted to know what they said.

They told me that salons were not dangerous if they followed the state and the CDC’s recommended steps, and the salons, they said, are checked almost weekly and closed if there any violations.

The health care worker said she gets her nails done every couple of weeks and has no fears about going to them.

Most of us have learned by now to recognize a well-run business or a sloppy and careless one. Maria and I sanitized our hands in and out, wore masks, as did everyone in the Nightingale Salon.

I also have had both of my vaccines. I kept my mask on.

We all have our own decisions about the issues that affect us.

My choice is to be cautious but open. And to stand against hatred whenever possible.

The Asian-American community is in trouble and will need some help climbing out of it.  I see this with the hard-pressed refugees. I’ve met too many Asian refugee children who have been driven from public schools by insults, hatred, and physical violence.

They find safe haven at Bishop Maginn High School, a lifesaver for so many of them.

It’s hard to know how to fight people who stomp on the elderly on public streets; it isn’t hard to help the nail salon community.

All I have to do is get my nails done.

I help in small ways, small acts of great kindness.

I didn’t think much about this when I decided to get a pedicure, sitting in that chair clarified it for me. It was a good deed to go there.

If you are so inclined to support your local nail salon, that would be great. If not, it is nobody’s business but your own.

For me, there was little risk today. But even then, some risks are worth taking.