For my job, I go inside about four homes per day. Almost every customer I encounter is a white boomer. I always wear a mask in their homes. I actually knock on their doors without my mask on, then put on the mask as I step inside, to lower the chance that they will say anything.

In the last year or so, about four people have said something about my mask. Three were obviously liberals, one was probably a liberal (he drove a Volkswagon with New York plates). Just yesterday, a white male boomer told me that he didn’t have covid when I stepped inside his home; I told him that I wear a mask inside every house I enter, and he changed the subject. He was watching MSNBC on-demand while I worked.

A few months ago, a white boomer woman whose house was filled with turbolib decorations told me that no one in her house was sick and that I didn’t need to wear a mask. I think I said “okay” and kept my mask on. She didn’t say anything else.

Last spring I was waiting for my kid to finish a basketball game and dying of hunger, so I went into a small café to get a muffin. It was packed, and I was of course the only one masked. Liberal decorations were on the walls. The unmasked owner, working behind the counter, loudly remarked that I must be vaccinated. (I am.) Since I was surrounded by anti-maskers, this made me pretty nervous, but they all ignored us. I said something about long covid as I left the café. I never want to go back, which is a tragedy because the muffin was honestly the best I ever had in my life. A few weeks later I saw the owner, unmasked, enter a grocery store packed with unmasked tourists from around the country.

The guy with the Volkswagon was deranged. He acted normal until I put my mask on while we were talking about something, then he started angrily shouting that he couldn’t hear me because of my mask. (He had asked if my mask was company policy, I told him that I couldn’t work if I got sick.) As a coworker and I worked in his basement, he loudly stomped around upstairs for at least twenty minutes. Oddly enough, many of my coworkers found out about this and they supported me, although none of them wear masks. The only liberal thing about this guy was the fact that he didn’t have a pickup truck in his driveway, so I’m not really sure about his political views.

One very wealthy white boomer lady who owns a huge hotel and multiple properties remarked, as I stepped inside one of the houses she owns: “Are they still making you wear that goddamn mask?” I told her I was wearing it for myself. She said: “Oh.” The decorations in her house were standard white boomer grandma-type stuff. I didn’t see anything blatantly political there, so I’m not really sure about her political views.

I almost never encounter homeowners who are not boomers, but one white millennial I met pathetically picked up a mask that he had left on his kitchen counter, then set it down again.

My experience has been that fascists don’t say anything about my mask, unless we spend a long time together (riding around in a work vehicle, for instance). Then they will maintain that covid is “just a cold.”