The Perkins Restaurant opened at 6 a.m. A sign on the door proclaimed, “We missed you!”

I walked in at 6:47 a.m.

“How many customers?” I asked.

Kelly looked up from behind her mask.

“You’re the first,” she said. “It’s going to take a while.”

Which is the lesson of Day One of reopening.

It’s going to take a while.

Businesses reopen with largely sparse traffic

I spent two hours driving around Monday morning. Another hour or so driving around at lunch.

Blue Plate Cafe was closed. Bryant’s was closed. 

There was a boot camp under way at LA Fitness — in the parking lot, out back.

Einstein Bagels was limited to takeout.

Same with Howard’s Donuts on Summer Avenue.

If you’re craving an apple fritter from Gibson’s Donuts, you should check back in a couple of weeks.

“We want to be the turtle, not the hare,” said Don DeWeese, the owner of Gibson’s. “We’re tentatively looking at opening on May 15. But we’re going to look and see what happens now that people are starting to open. We’re not going to rush into anything.”

That makes all the sense in the world, of course. And it drives home a point some people miss.

The government didn’t shut down the economy. COVID-19 did that. People haven’t stayed home because they were told to stay home. They’ve stayed home because they’re afraid of getting sick.

Just look what is happening now that Shelby County has said we can start to get back to business.

Most of us are saying, “I think I’ll wait a bit.”

So it was always silly to frame this as a choice between a robust economy and public safety. We can’t have one without the other. See Monday morning for more proof.

It wasn’t a government edict that kept Perkins empty. And it won’t be a government edict that will bring people back.

Customers will return when they feel safe to return. When they have confidence that they can eat a stack of pancakes without risk of contracting COVID-19.

And that’s where government action really could matter, of course. If the government — starting with the federal government — successfully implemented a massive testing program.

Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable going to a restaurant if you knew all the employees had been tested? Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable going back to work if you knew all your fellow workers had been tested? Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable going back to a university if you knew all the students and teachers had been tested?

Restarting the economy requires reestablishing confidence. Confidence is the requisite fuel.

Calkins: Ready or not, Memphis, it’s time to start reopening. So let’s not screw it up

The good news is that the data continues to look promising in Shelby County, where the number of positive tests went up Monday (to 101) but only because the number of tests administered went up (to 1,636). So, sure, more people are testing positive, but the positivity rate is only 6.2%. And that’s at a time when people generally have to show symptoms to get a test.

“We’re cautiously optimistic we will continue to see improvements,” said Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, and let us hope that is true.

Because everybody wants to have small businesses back — and with them, the small routines that have made up our lives.

“It’s wonderful,” said Linda Riggs, the first customer Monday morning at Three Little Pigs Bar-B-Q. “I thought I was going to have to go to Mississippi to get a biscuit and some eggs.”

Truth be told, a doctor might have suggested that Riggs should have waited before venturing out. She has asthma and is 72.

“I brought my mask,” she said.

Oh, great!

“It’s in my pocket,” she said.

So there is still progress to be made.

But the point is, we need Three Little Pigs and Gibson’s and Blue Plate Cafe. We need restaurants and coffee shops and jewelry stores and bike sellers and all the rest. We need commerce. We need jobs. But we can’t have a full measure of any of that until we have confidence that the world we occupy is safe.

I went back to the Perkins Restaurant at 7:45 a.m., by the way. To see if anyone had arrived. There was a single customer, Sandra Boyd, sitting at a table by the window, wearing gloves and a mask.

Boyd is 67. She usually comes for the fish fry on Fridays but wanted to be supportive now that the place was open again.

“Usually, at this time of the morning, it would be full of customers,” she said. “I just hope that they all come back.”