I'll be honest, I've struggled over the past week to find something else to put here. I didn't want to write about this, especially not right after telling you about my uncle, but sometimes terrible things pile up in your life and it's no good ignoring them. Another person important to me has passed away and, while they all hit hard, there's a certain sharpness to this one.
I could use a shortcut to describe his relationship to me by simply saying he was the father of one of my best friends, but that's insufficient. Said best friend was my best man at our wedding, for example, and his father did the poetry reading for us; the Wife and I might have met him by way of the friend, but over the years he became important enough to both of us that it was inconceivable that he would not be a part of that day. A short story about that, because that's just how I deal with this sort of thing: he was late to the wedding (he was late to most things; he joked that his friends called him "T-FAL", not after the cookware, but as an acronym for "That F#$%er's Always Late"), late enough that we had to juggle the schedule and do his reading at the reception instead of during the ceremony, and before reading the poem he quipped, "I told the bride that the secret to preparing for a wedding was to realize that something would go wrong, that it was inevitable, so it was best to just accept that as fact and not get too wrapped up in making everthing perfect. Little did I know that the thing that would go wrong with hers was going to be me!" He was hardly the only thing to go wrong that day, but he was certainly the most memorable.
I mentioned before that I tend to process these things by remembering stories. That's not too unusual, I suppose, but I'm often able to encapsulate my feelings about someone in an anecdote or two. Maybe that reveals the shallowness of my connection with the people in my life who have passed, but for me it's a useful trick, a way of anchoring their essense in my mind. By remembering it, I can almost feel their presense.
Only, I can't do it this time. My efforts to come up with that singular story have failed. Some people just refuse to be summed up, either because of who they are or how tightly they are threaded through your life. Sometimes, like now, it's both.
He passed away the day before Thanksgiving, which is a horrifying association to have to carry on with, but weirdly he was already associated with Thanksgiving for me. Way back in my college days I was far from home and much too poor to fly home for just a long weekend. I expected to stay on campus and do whatever there was to do with everybody gone (eat sad cafeteria food and watch TV in my room, surely), but instead my friend gathered up me and all the other "turkey-day orphans" (as we called ourselves) and carted us to his dad's where a house full of bachelors feasted and watched football and generally enjoyed one of the genuinely carefree days of our lives. No worries, no responsibilities, it was a near-perfect version of the day. So good, the same group of guys made a point of repeating the tradition for years until we started marrying off.
Those were times that old men spend their waning years trying to recapture, and if that isn't a metaphor for losing a dear friend, I don't know what is.
He was a man of contradictions. Fastidious in a few aspects of his life, messy in the rest. As generous a soul as I've ever met, yet capable of incredible depths of (mostly righteous) anger. Chronically late to everything, but gone much, much too soon.
Something a little different today, I'm going to tell a little story about myself instead of one of the kids. Indulge me.
I imagine we all have favorites among our extended families. It's natural; you spend more time with some, they're there for significant moments, you just click with them better, whatever. Growing up, I had a favorite aunt and a favorite uncle and it just so happened that they were married, so that was convenient. I promise that it wasn't solely because they had a pool and me and all my cousins spent nearly 100% of our summers in their backyard, though it didn't hurt.
I had a difficult couple years when I was a kid. I don't talk about it much here (that's not really what this is for), but there was a point where it became obvious to anybody paying any attention that my home environment was pushing me to a breaking point (to be honest, by the time anybody seemed to notice that point was in the rearview mirror, but still) and my family came up with a stop-gap solution: send me to stay with my aunt and uncle across town for a week for a breather of sorts, something to relieve some of the pressure. I suppose for my dad and step-mother, it was a chance to work on their relationship without the distraction of having a kid around (I don't actually know what their thinking was and don't care too much), but for me it was a literal lifeline. I don't say that hyperbolically; to this day, I believe that week saved my life.
Dozens of little things happened that week, many of which are burned indelibly in my mind. My love for science fiction began that week, for example, but that's not today's story. Instead, it's about the time I went into the kitchen and found my uncle elbow-deep in a turkey.
I should pause here to mention two things: 1) my uncle loved to cook and was very good at it--Thanksgivings were always held at their house for two reasons: they had a table big enough to seat ten (twelve if everybody squeezed in, so that was most of the adults; us kids got card tables scattered around the rest of the house) and so he could cook--and 2) it wasn't Thanksgiving. It wasn't even a Thursday.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Getting friendly with this turkey," he said, rubbing seasoning inside its cavity. My love of a good quip didn't come from nowhere.
"You're making a turkey?" I asked, incredulous. "A full turkey? For today?"
"Sure. Why not?"
"It's not even Thanksgiving or anything."
"So what? What's wrong with celebrating today? Today's a good day. Life's too short to wait to celebrate only on holidays. Besides, I like turkey."
I tried to give him a look that suggested I thought he was ever so slightly mad, but my face betrayed me. It wouldn't stop grinning. I couldn't have told you why, not then. "You're crazy," I said.
"Crazy like a fox," he winked. "A fox that's going to eat well tonight."
I think of moments like that now and again, those little throw-away moments that stick with you. They're not big, cornerstone moments, but they shape you nonetheless. That wasn't the only such pearl of wisdom he gave to me over the years, but it's the one I'm thinking about now.
My favorite uncle died today. He would want me to celebrate anyway, but I can't. Not today; it was not a good day. But I will soon, for him. Life's too short.
In the time soup that we've all been living in for the past...well, however long it's been. A month? A year? Twenty minutes? I don't know; like everybody else, I've lost the ability to measure the passage of time, everything is either "now" or "in the past". The concept of "the future" has become fuzzy enough to not even seem real any more.
Then we went and had a presidential election here in the US and let's just say that it's a consequential one. We're all keenly interested in the results, but they've been slow to come as, thanks to our completely ridiculous system, we're all waiting around to see if the guy who got literally millions more votes in the election is going to be the one to actually win it. Unlike last time. When the person who got millions more votes lost the election. Because the system is ridiculous. I'm sorry, I've gone around in a circle. Let me start again.
The election happened and the result has taken days to tally and a I noticed a really weird thing happening: I was becoming cognizant of the passage of time again. One day felt distinct from the next. Granted, it was because they were agonizing, but still, for the first time in possibly forever (or maybe just a few months; seriously, I just can't tell any more) the days were different. It felt strangely normal.
That, of course, was a trap. Getting even a whiff of normalcy only made me thirst for more and I suddenly and keenly wanted back some of those meager luxuries we've all lost since the start of this pandemic: movies, restaurants, gatherings with family and friends. Things that I think most of us never imagined we'd ever have to go without, at least not for any extended period of time. I got days back, why not some of those?
Then I saw yesterday's numbers. A record-breaking number of infections. A record that had been set just the day before. And I know today's number will set a new record, and even worse I dread that in a month we'll look back and dream about infection numbers this low. Because that's how exponential growth works.
And all the sudden, I'm ready to sink myself into the time soup again. Sure, it's mind-numbing, but maybe that's the point.
Ugh. That's bleak. Let me leave you with a joke the Boy told me yesterday: Q -- When does a chicken eat its lunch? A -- Twelve o'Cluck.
Ba-dum-dum-skshhh
The Boy is eight now, so I thought I'd tell a little story about him. He recently had a math test to take. We're all still living remotely, so he and I share a table in the spare room during the day, him at school on one side, me at work on the other. The last time I was this annoyed with an office mate it was a guy who sat two feet to my left, right next to my ear, who brought in his breakfast every day and ate it at this desk with his mouth open. Now, as then, I resist the urge to do violence, those some days just barely.
Anyway, math test. One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching a bunch of little kids online, I suspect, is trying to give them directions regarding how to access things on their computers. I spent years doing essentially the same thing as a job, and while I spoke mostly to technically-impared adults who thought the CD tray was a cup holder (confession: that's an old tech support joke, I never really talked to somebody who thought that, but nearly so), the stroke-inducing frustration was similar. The Boy, however, is pretty savvy, so when his teacher explained how to access the test the first time, he found it and got started.
She was still trying to direct the last couple of students to the test when he finished it. Not only had he finished, he'd discovered that one of the answers was wrong. He informed me of this by first yelling at his computer when it was marked incorrect, then by pouting at the severe injustice of it all, and I was skeptical at first, telling him that he should just wait until the teacher was free and then he could go over the question with her and she'd show him where he'd gone wrong.
"No," he said, "I made a mistake on this one because I was going too fast, but the test says I got two wrong and I only got one wrong. My answer for this one is actually right."
That he recognized and admitted one error gave me a pause, so I went over to double-check his work on the contested question and, sure enough, he was right: the test was wrong. We reviewed the one he'd actually gotten wrong and he admitted that he didn't even finish reading the question; he got to a point where he thought he knew the answer and skipped ahead. Lesson learned there. And the incorrect question? Well, I tried to turn that into a lesson, too.
This one actually goes back to a class I took in college, one of the best lessons I've ever been taught and, quite frankly, one I'd wished I'd been taught much sooner. It was the first day of a professional writing class and the professor handed out five articles, all written by award-winning professionals (a couple had won Pulitzers, he made a point of telling us) and published in leading periodicals, for us to critque. "The assignment is simple," he told us. "Four of those articles are written well and one is garbage. The assignment for next class is tell me which one it is and what's wrong with it."
We were all taken aback. We, a bunch of teen-agers, were supposed to judge the published work of a respected professional as trash? Who the hell were we to say such a thing? Yet, the next class we all sat down and he asked us which one was the bad article and, to a person, we had all picked the same piece. Given permission to see ourselves as their peers, to understand that even the so-called experts weren't above critique, it was easy to see who'd turned crap work in to his editor. The professor then told us that, years ago when he first tried teaching this lesson, he just gave out the articles and asked the students to critique them, thinking they would recognize the trash piece and point it out, but they never did. Instead, intimidated by the status of the author, everybody bent over backwards to connect the dots of his disjointed logic and emphasize even the smallest examples of good writing, ignoring the dumpster fire of the rest. The lesson he originally intended (even the best have bad days, so don't be too hard on yourself) morphed into something more fundamental, and far more important (you've got a brain in your head, don't be afraid to use it).
So I remembered what he'd told us that day and tried to paraphrase it for the Boy. "Even teachers make mistakes and if you see a place where they get something wrong, and you can prove that you're right, then go ahead and say so, because you're plenty smart, too."
"Yeah," he said. "But I did mess up on that other one."
Well, nothing wrong with a healthy bit of humility, too.
It's admittedly a dour philosophy that's expressed right up there in the title, but this past ten days or so has put in the work to make it feel true and I can't help but recognize its efforts. Just when I was feeling brave enough to express the slightest amount of hope, the smallest glimmer of optimism, we get a one-two punch of a record-breaking heatwave coupled with a day-long power outage. That was a bit unpleasant, but it got genuinely strange when we realized that, few hours in, the kids were starting to get concerned. It was the uncertainty I suppose, not knowing why the power was out (it ended up being some failure up the street that took out about a one-mile strip of the city and we just happened to be right in the middle of it), when it would be back, what might happen if it stayed out for an extended period, they just didn't know how to process any of it.
They'd experienced power outages before, but not one this long. Even so, their tension was out-of-proportion. I suppose it could be attributed to the pandemic. Day by day, bit by bit, the state of things chips away at all of our resolve and, when something genuinely stressful happens, we might find ourselves unexpectedly fragile. But it was all right in the end: we talked about it with them, told them what we knew and what we planned to do (as the sun was setting, for example, we would break out the candles and the wind-up radio/lantern, things like that) and it seemed to help.
The only mistake we made is that one of us must have said something to the effect of, "I wish it would cool off," or something similar. Because that was the day the wildfire started.
At first it was just a thin plume of dark smoke rising about the hills off in the distance, but around here, any little fire can run out of control in the blink of an eye, and that's exactly what happened: a couple days later and it went from a couple of acres to several thousand and we could see several fires burning just outside of the city limits from our front door.
You might be wondering what that has to do with things cooling down. The smoke has been so thick that it's blocking out the sun. In fact, it's done so effectively that a week that was originally forcast to be in the 100s has been, instead, in the 80s. The air quality has been in the two-packs-a-day level of unhealthful and we've essentially locked ourselves indoors for the duration: I go out twice a day to walk the dog and the Wife and I have made a couple trips to the grocery store, but that's it. The kids haven't stepped outside this month (that might be a slight exaggeration, but if so, only by a day or two). For the first time in recent memory, I check the weather app on my phone to see which way they predict the wind will blow, hoping for a northerly direction, fearful of a southerly breeze.
The good news is that the efforts of our local fire fighters have been effective and the fires, while they got right up to the edge of the city, never quite made it in. So assuming that the house doesn't catch fire and we lose everything we own and that one day our entire house will smell like something other than a campfire, the worst part of all this is the preview into my "golden years" when I turn into one of those guys who watches the Weather Channel for fun.
One of the strangest things about this year (and let's face it, almost all of it has been strange) is realizing the parts that you're likely to look back on with, if not nostalgia, maybe at least some small bit of fondness. I know it sounds crazy to say that--I've reread that sentence three times now and it still looks like a foreign language for all the sense it makes--but I can't shake the idea.
Over the summer months, for example, our local school district hyped their "Meals for Youth" program which is basically a social outreach program by which the district gives out free food for students when school is not in session, recognizing that many of them don't have enough to eat at home most days and often the school lunch is the only nutrious meal they get (and I don't want to get started on how profoundly sad that is). With the entire family at home and stuck in the house, which now and again led to levels of boredom that saw the kids chewing on the walls, we would often venture out to the nearest campus to pick up a school lunch, not because they were particularly good (though they usually came with a chocolate milk, which was universally approved of) or because we needed the food, but to get out of the house, even if only for fifteen minutes, and to provide some variety in their lunch options (Can you get sick of PB&J? I don't know, but we were on a path to finding out.).
So, all summer long, that was something we did. It became a part of our routine. We got to know the lunch workers by sight and they'd comment if we missed a day for one reason or another. But, when the school year started, the normal program resumed and free food for everybody was suspended; back to paying for lunches for us (we did not qualify for either the free or reduced programs) and by that time the kids were bored of school food, so we stopped going. Then this week, for whatever reason, they resumed the free-for-all program, so I jokingly suggested that we go over every now and again for the chocolate milk. To my surprise, everybody was into it. The Boy was onboard for a steady supply of brown moo juice, the Girl admitted that the lunch offering was actually OK "once in a while," and the Wife observed that she missed the daily walk to the school.
I was stuck by the latter observation. It seemed like such a strange thing to miss, the daily chore of finding time between her meetings or mine to see which of us could walk them over, haranguing the Boy to get his shoes on (his personal best for that process is eight minutes), trudging out into the summer heat; it was a generally unpleasant activity. And yet.
I realized a bit sheepishly that I kind of missed it, too. What has the world come to that we might miss what was, by nearly any measure, a chore? But I think we all know the answer to that: a world where a thing that was merely "unpleasant" was, in the grand scheme of things, still pretty good. It makes me wonder what else we're going to look back on fondly. I shudder to think. On the bright side, in order to ever look back on this hellscape of a year we'll have to actually get through it. I guess that's something to look forward to.
The weight of the times have been pressing down on us all. I'm sure that goes without saying, but I think it's worthwhile to remind ourselves, as adults, that the weight is being felt by our kids, too. We've been trying to shield the Boy and the Girl from the full psychological force of living in the midst of a pandemic, but some of it is just going to leak through.
Some ways are relatively mundane. When the Boy sees a commercial for something that he'd like to do but knows we can't, he laments the virus. School starts for both of them this week and will be fully online, at least to start, and they both know exactly why. It's a pervasive part of reality for all of us, including them, and we just can't keep all of it off them. Still, I fear that what gets through does more damage than we know.
Case in point: in the wee hours of the morning, the Girl came into our room. She was sweating, her throat was burning, and her stomach hurt. As she reported these symptoms to the Wife, I could hear the fear in her voice and I knew what was on her mind, because it was the first thing that popped into mine, too: what if it's covid?
I'll pause here to say that it's almost certainly not covid. It's nearly 12 hours later as I type this and she's back to normal. The sweating? It's been hot as blazes around here lately and, last night, I tried opening windows and turning off the A/C to keep the house cool overnight for the first time in a week, but it wasn't enough so it got too warm and the Girl has always been susceptible to overheating. The dry throat: same thing, just simple dehydration, probably brought on from sweating all night long. The stomach ache? A light dinner was most likely behind that; she was hungry. Everything she was experiencing was normal and innocent, but in times like this, where everybody is on edge, it brought on a near panic.
I think we all know that what we're going through right now is going to have lasting effects. Things will change, both in society at large and in us individually. When this is all over, we'll all have some degree of shellshock, wandering out of our homes, disoriented, like the end of some apocalyptic movie. But first, we have to get there, and in order for that to happen, we're going to have to take care of each other. Even those who you already think you're protecting. Maybe especially them.
The only way the weight doesn't crush some of us is if all of us help hold it up.
For some reason, the Boy has been planning out his future. I don't know where it's coming from, but it's certainly amusing. One example is his plans for his future career. Or, I guess I should say, careers. At present, he's planning to have at least four jobs.
How does he plan to squeeze all of that in? "I don't know. I'll figure it out. If I have to, I won't do one of them. But not donut taste tester. I definitely want to do that."
Godspeed, little dude. Godspeed.
It seems strange to say it, but the summer is coming to an end. I say it feels strange because, apart from being hot, it hasn't felt much like summer. We've taken no family road trips, the kids have attended no camps, there's been none of the things that usually accompany a summer. No swimming lessons, no summer sports, no beach outings. Not even a trip to visit the grandparents, something that used to happen at least once a month and we haven't been able to do for longer than I can remember (was the last time March? February? something like that). Like most everybody else across the country, we're still hunkering down at home and, whereas it used to be just the days that were running together, now it seems the seasons themselves are doing it.
The kids have settled into it easier than we have. The Wife and I have been working to establish a kind of schedule with the Boy so he doesn't spend all day every day on his tablet playing games and watching Minecraft videos and I suppose we've succeeded as I noticed the other day that he's started adhering to it on his own. Every morning, for example, he has an hour of reading time and, lately, we haven't needed to remind him about it; he just turns up on the couch at the appointed hour, book in hand, and starts reading. To be honest, I've been a mixture of pround and weirded out by it. I mean, I'd love to be able to say that he's turning into a well-behaved kid*, but every other night I have threaten to ground him just to get him to eat his vegetables, so I'm not ready to go quite that far yet.
(* This is a joke, of course; he's quite well-behaved in general, but he's completely, stubbornly infuriating in a few ways.)
The Girl comes out of her room periodically to eat, but otherwise we rarely see her. I'm told this is normal for teenagers, so it's not that worrisome yet.
We got word the other day that the kids will be starting this school year with distance learning, much like they ended the last one and, despite being filled with rage over the fact that we haven't managed to get this situation under control in this country yet (despite it seeming like everybody else in the world somehow managed it), we agree that it's the best option for right now. I think we would have opted out if given the choice and I think we would have demanded the option if it weren't offered, so I applaud the school district's willingness to make the hard choice in a situation that provides no good ones. The best they had was less-bad options, and I think they took the least-bad one available.
There have been rumblings among other parents in the area, and I get it: if the Wife and I needed to go physically back to work (instead of being able to work remotely) I don't know what we'd do either. But, even as I type this, I'm watching some baseball on TV and I'm reminded that the MLB, with all its resources and all its planning and its relatively few people to wrangle, had an outbreak almost as soon as the new season opened and I just can't imagine the disaster that it would be to try to have a better result with a poorly funded school system that's trying to wrangle a whole mess of little kids. Somebody joked that, first day of school in one that reopens, somebody is going to send their first-grader to school with a Paw Patrol mask and he's going to come home with a Spider-man one because he traded with a friend at lunch and the whole school is going to be shut down the next day and I laughed, but mostly because that seems so, so very likely.
Even so, I'm not looking forward to resuming my duties as parttime grade school teacher while also trying to keep up with my fulltime job, but that's OK. I don't look forward to flossing either, but I do it. Though, to flossing's credit, I understand it. I have no idea what they're doing with math these days.
Last year, after reading several of the "classic" (read: old) young adult books that every pre-teen has read for the past 50 years or so, the Girl expressed a kind of longing for the idyllic summer vacations described therein. I think I've waxed on about those sorts of summers, I had several of them growing up and remember them as being mostly boring. I tried to explain that to her and she accepted it intellectually, but I think she still thought she might like to give it a try, at least once.
Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for.
The kids are home for summer. No camps, no vacation trips, no nothing. The state isn't officially back in a lockdown, but effectively it is. Sure, we're free to go out, but where would we go, exactly? I mean, we find a thing or two to do here and there, usually nature walks and that sort of thing: outdoors, apart from other people, what is (as far as we know as of this writing) safe. But those outings are far and few between, and at least Monday through Friday, Mom and Dad have got work to do, so we're all stuck inside 23 hours a day (we try to get out and walk around the neighborhood once a day to at least see the sun and get some vitamin D).
Part of me wondered if the kids would go nuts being cooped up all day, but so far they're holding up. The Girl stays in her room, wandering down for meals when she gets hungry. From what we can gather, she spends her time reading, watching videos online, and working on a book. I admit I typed that last bit with a little grin on my face. Yes, the Girl has taken up writing as a hobby.
I'm not sure what exactly she's writing about. I suspect it's fanfic (and let's be honest, many an author's career started that way), but I don't care that much because it means she and I can gab away about techniques and tropes, plot strategies and character development, all those old bones that writers, both amateur and professional, have gnawed on for generations. It's been inspiring.
The Boy, meanwhile, is entering a new phase, though one that's probably normal for his age: he's getting obsessive about things that would have once been passing fancies. For example, as I write this, he's a few feet away playing a game on his tablet and holding a toy that goes to a different game, one played on the PlayStation. Without going into needless detail, the game lets you build a customized character to use in the game (provided you buy the special figure first, because it's not enough that you had to pay for the game, now you have to buy accessories, too) and once he learned about this ability, it's the only thing he cared about for a couple weeks. He studied the character designs, planned his optimum combinations, and chattered on and on to anybody who'd listen about what he was going to do when he got one (that is, when he wasn't harassing the Wife or me to actually get him one). Now that he has one and he's made his character, he carries the figure around with him whether he's playing the game or not. Indeed, he doesn't seem all that interested in playing the game. I think he just wanted to make the character.
When he's not explaining some point of minutiae about one of his obsessions (yes, there's more than one), he's also, like his sister, on his tablet playing games and watching videos. We pry it away from him a few times a day and make him do something non-electronic, which he resists a bit, though he's becoming more accepting of it (the wonders of consistency), but it still strikes me that the key difference between summers when I was a kid and now is the internet. Will it keep them entertained enough that they don't turn to chewing on the walls out of boredom, or will they eventually squeeze all the amusement value out of it? My memories of long, bored summers were of having nothing to do. Will their's be of running out of content?
What am I saying? It's the internet. You can't run out of content.
A few holidays have passed recently and they haven't been easy to celebrate, at least not in the usual ways, but like everybody else, we've been doing our best.
Mother's Day, for example, was a few weeks ago. One year, we annoyed the kids by dragging them around town, visiting every nursery in a five-mile radius to shop for new flowers and plants that we took back home and stuck in the ground to see which of them would actually survive to see June (we are not good gardeners). We enjoyed their misery so much we did it again the next year and the year after that. This year...actually, we hit some of the same notes. We visited a nursery and we planted, anyway.
The nursery had only reopened a couple days before, and only under strict conditions: they only allowed a few people in at a time, you had to keep your distance from the other shoppers and wear a mask and, as I've noticed other times when I've been shopping under the current conditions (mostly for groceries), it was vaguely uncomfortable. We were constantly aware of the implied risk of what we were doing and felt unconscious (and self-imposed) pressure to not dawdle. We'd left the kids at home and, really, half the point of the holiday was the dawdling and watching them act like it was torture, so it wasn't nearly as nice.
We broke another part of the tradition by actually having a plan instead of just selecting a handful of victims at random. I'd had an idea about planting a vertical herb garden. Our new pack patio is a nice to lounge, complete with seating in the shade and a bubbling fountain, but there's not a lot of space for planting. Then one day, watching the sun beat down on the fence, I had a flash of inspiration: planting boxes mounted up and down the fence. I didn't go with planting boxes because that seemed like a lot of work, but a couple vinyl rain gutters mounted to some simple crossbars was easy as falling off a log. After drilling a few holes for drainage and filling them with potting soil, voila: vertical planters for a simple herb garden.
So, for Mother's Day, we actually managed to maintain a weird little tradition, and against the odds, it might end up being the most successful version of it yet. Apart from torturing the kids. That part (the best part) was a complete flop.
A couple days later it was the Girl's birthday (she barely missed being a Mother's Day baby). Obviously a party was out of the question. Even our family tradition of the birthday celebrant getting to pick a place for the family to go out to dinner that night was a no-go. So what could we do to make it special for her?
We decided to go with a homebound theme for the day. The Girl, officially becoming a teenager this year, has two primary hobbies: watching YouTube and doing it in her room, far from her family. You know, teenager stuff. Amusingly, of all of us, she's been dealing with the isolation of the lockdown the best, since it's not so much different from her preferred way of living. So our gifts to her leaned into that: we got her a gigantic beanbag (actually stuffed with shredded memory foam instead of beads) and a decent set of headphones for music or videos as well as an armload of books and art supplies (two other hobbies she loves and does far away from her family, in her room). She still got to decide what we had for dinner that night (burgers from a place around the corner, ordered online and picked up for takeout) as well as breakfast that morning (donuts) and she texted and video chatted with a bunch of her friends throughout the day. All things considered, it went quite well.
Last we have Memorial Day, which just passed. We don't have any traditions for this day, not particularly. I suppose just normal three-day-weekend stuff, most of which was out. But the county did open the local hiking trails for the first time in months that weekend so we picked one that we figured wouldn't be too popular, masked up, and went for a hike in the foothills. It was more crowded than we'd expected, but most people were responsible and it was good to work out our legs and escape our four walls (though the Boy pissed and moaned most of the way up the hill about how tired he was, despite being the youngest and arguable the fittest of us all). We did manage a BBQ (well, BBQ-style ribs, but we did them low-and-slow in the oven) and I guess that counts as keeping with a tradition, albeit the most stereotypical one. Let's call that one a push.
On balance, despite the unusual conditions this year, we've been managing to hold the line against complete disruption, injecting normalcy when we can. Maybe not the absolute best we can do, but not too bad either. It's a weird world right now. Whatever we can do to make it seem a little normal helps.
The pandemic and subsequent quarantine has forced a lot of change on everybody, some big and some small. You probably know about the big ones--they're probably happening to you, too--so let's talk about the little ones. Like:
Baseball With no live sports available, the sports channels have been rerunning classic games to fill their broadcast hours. I've watched several old baseball games and they've been great. Not only has it been fun to see the teams I remember from when I was a kid, but the games are also edited to tighten them up. Nothing too serious, just removing the idle moments between pitches, stuff like that, but it makes a huge difference. If, once baseball resumes, they gave us the option to watch the game live or this version the next day, I honestly don't know what I'd choose.
Sugar Cubes Along with a lot of staples, sugar has been hard to find at the store some weeks. Not too long ago, I came to those shelves, knowing we were down to about a cup of the stuff at home, and all I found was sugar substitute (don't care for the aftertaste and, if I have too much, gives me headaches) and a box of sugar cubes. Well, since 90% of the sugar we use around the house is for coffee, I figured why not, so I grabbed that last box. Worst case, I figured, was that I break out the mortar and pestle and crush them down, but they're wonderful. Just enough for a cup, never oversweetened, perfectly well-suited to the task, and you get to ask yourself, "One lump or two," in a bad British accent. It's all gold.
Walks As part of our work-from-home routine, the Wife and I have maintained part of our old routine: our commute. Now, I admit that statement doesn't make a lot of sense, but it works like this: every morning, around the time either of us would normally be in the car driving to work, we instead go for a walk around the neighborhood for roughly the same amount of time (twenty minutes or so), first her then me (that way one of us is always home with the kids). It's not much of a discovery to say that walks are nice (of course they are), but apart from the more usual benefits of a nice morning stroll, it creates a nice transition from "home" and "work" that's important when both are in the same space.
Fear has been an underlying factor in most everything we do these days. Frankly, it's exhausting and, all things being equal, I think I could do without it. But here's the thing: it's distressingly familiar. It is something I've been living with for more than a decade. You'd think I'd be better at it by now.
Anybody who's been reading along all this time (and I'm sorry if that's you, but you've got nobody to blame but yourself) knows that for years after my cancer treatment, I jumped at every twinge and passing ache that came along, worried that each was a sign that the cancer had returned. I gathered, from reading and talking to others in my situation, that this was normal and that it would get better over time. Until then, the advice I was given again and again, was to count my blessings. "You're here today, you're well today. It will get better, but until it does, just worry about today. Tomorrow can take care of itself." And it did get better. It now takes either an unusually bad day or a specific ache or pain to trigger that kind of reaction, but the pandemic has resurrected that reaction, only now, of course, for the disease. It might be coughs and fatigue instead of aches and pains, but the reaction is all too familiar.
There are some differences now. For one, I'm not the only one doing it. Everybody seems to be at least a little aware of the common symptoms of COVID-19 and, as they are plenty vague, seems on edge more or less all the time. We joke about it, but I know that kind of humor too well. You have to laugh at the darkness to keep it at bay.
But if having most everybody in the same boat as me might make it seem better, the second difference makes it much, much worse, and that's the contagious nature of a pandemic. If I had a recurrence of cancer, that would be terrible and it would upset me quite a bit, but it would only be me. I wouldn't have to worry about passing it on to the kids or the Wife or strangers I pass in the street.
I used to worry mostly about the kids getting it. I don't mean to imply that it's not my worst fear in all this, because it certainly is; I mean to say that most of my time worrying about what might happen was spent on that scenario. I reasoned that, as they were young and in good health, that even if they got it, they'd probably be fine. Then I heard an interview with a father in New York. He and his wife both came down with it at about the same time and they had a young child to take care of. The kid seemed to be resistent to the disease, but the parents were wrecks and it was all they could do move from one room to the next. The extent of their ability to care for their kid went as far as making sure it wasn't in immediate danger of dying; anything beyond that required too much energy.
I spent the next week nearly petrified by the idea that the Wife and I might both be stricken at the same time. We had already talked about what we'd do if one person in the family showed signs of having it: there are enough rooms in the house that we could effectively quarantine an infected person. We should be able to quarantine more than one, if we're careful about movements to and from the bathrooom, but whenever we talked about it, we assumed that one of us, her or me, would be well enough to keep the house running. If we were both flattened by it?
The Girl would have to take over. Now, to be perfectly clear, I have no doubt in my mind that the Girl could, in fact, take over and keep her and her brother alive and well for weeks if necessary. She's perfectly capable, that's not the concern. What scared me was the idea of putting that kind of obligation on her shoulders, that pressure. Enough of her childhood is already being upended by all this, it would break my heart to have to ask her to grow up that much that quickly as well.
Then I realized that, in this "nightmare scenario" of mine, all that happens is we get sick and the kids have to feed themselves for a few days until we're well again, which is actually a best-case scenarios. In the top five at least. There are so, so many stories coming out of this that are so, so much worse.
So, for now, I'm trying to not think about it. No best-case or worst-case scenarios, no "what ifs" or anything like that. That's all worrying about tomorrow. We're here today, we're well today. Tomorrow can take care of itself.
A lot of the stress I've been talking about for the past few days relates to things that are immediate: shortages, isolation, home schooling and working remotely at the same time. But there's one that's weighing on me just as much, but it's about the future, specifically: how is this period in history going to affect the kids in the longterm? Mentally, socially, even physically, there's just no way of knowing.
I mentioned earlier that I'd experienced periods of "food anxiety" before (that's still a funny euphemism to me in that it's perfectly apt and yet so sanitized). One such time was while growing up; for a lot of my youth, we were poor. But here's the funny thing about being poor when you're a kid: you don't really know it. Sure, you know that your family doesn't have a lot of money, that most of your friends have more stuff than you do, but you don't really have a sense of the scale of the problem, of the scope. You're a kid, what do you know about finances?
When I went away to college, I met enough people who came from different enough socio-economic backgrounds that I started to understand, for the first time, how poor we'd been. Not destitute, maybe (which I would soon realize is what I'd considered "poor" while growing up), but poor nonetheless. I think the "a-ha moment" was when I was recounting to a couple friends the times when my mom would go shopping and come home with one bag of groceries and one 20-lbs bag of potatoes and somehow, that was supposed to be enough to feed seven people for a week. I was telling them about potato soup and how we'd sometimes have it for dinner three or four nights in a row. If we were lucky, maybe there'd be a few saltines to break up and toss in the broth, and the look of horror on their faces told me that maybe I shouldn't mention the "lucky" weeks when we had money for Crisco and could subsist on skillet potatoes and onions instead.
After that, I started to look back on my childhood with different eyes and it became clear that things I'd always considered to be normal were, in fact, hardships, and they had shaped my thinking and my life in a variety of ways. I had relationships with things like food and money that weren't necessarily healthy, relationships I'd need to work to fix. I think I've mostly done that, but I'm also aware that I'm not done yet.
Even though growing up poor had lasting effects on me as a person, it didn't make me unhappy. Like I said, I was mostly ignorant about it; that was just how it was. That's a kid's superpower: supreme adaptability. Humans might be good at it as a species, but it's children who are the true masters. As such, I'm not really worried about how the Boy and Girl are going to cope with the current conditions. We're trying to protect them from the worst of the doom and gloom and, while they know it's serious, they don't really know how bad it is or might still get.
Instead, it's the lasting effects that are on my mind. And they're mostly unknowable, so there's not really anything to do about it. That, of course, does not make it easier. I don't know how to protect them from the unknown, but I'm still compelled to try. Ever tilting at windmills, that's me.
So the Wife and I are both working out of the house during the pandemic and that's been...interesting. I was already telecommuting a couple days a week, so there was no real adjustment to speak of for me (apart from having the entire family around while I'm doing it, of course), but this is new for her and there have been some choppy waters for her to navigate. Our jobs are totally different, of course, and not all jobs are suited to being done remotely. Mine's a no-brainer--being in the office or being at my kitchen table makes no difference to my productivity, all I really need is my laptop and somewhere to sit--but she's trying to manage a team without being able to get them together as a team, and that's tricky. I don't envy her.
What's interesting, however, is the degree to which she's been successful. Before all this, I doubt her job would have ever been considered as one that could be done remotely, at least not for an extended period of time (maybe now and then, when necessary), and I don't think once this is all over with that they'll decide she should keep on doing it from home, but that surely won't be true of everybody. Employers everywhere are about to learn which jobs can be done remotely and I'm betting it's going to be far more than they'd previously believed, including several they wouldn't have even considered before. There's a chance that this whole ordeal is going to change the way a lot of companies do business, and that's exciting for me as somebody who's lobbied for years to normalize telecommuting.
The funny thing is, telecommuting is better for companies, they just don't like the idea. Most businesses lease their office space by the square foot and that means, in a very real sense, they pay a monthly cost to give each employee a place to sit. But what will they do once they see just how much of that square footage isn't really needed? When companies find that they can be just as productive in offices with half the space, when they see the potential effect to their bottom lines, will they get over their trepidation about remote work?
As an added bonus, fewer people commuting every day is better for the environment and it saves those employees time and money. Everybody wins. All we need is for businesses to learn the lessons sitting right in front of them and change their thinking...oh wait, yeah, I see where I went wrong. Oh well, it was a nice idea.
Recent world events have churned up a whole mess of unease and it seems foolish to pretend otherwise. I'm generally against doing anything as ambitious as, you know, planning out things, but I thought I'd spend the next few days rambling about some of them. Today it's food.
Now, here's a thing to know before I get going: I've experienced what they call "food anxiety" these days at various times in my life. Sometimes I didn't know exactly where my next meal was coming from, but more often I just didn't have access to enough calories to reach that whole "daily recommended amount" you always hear about. The number of times that I've gone into the kitchen to only find a half-sleeve of saltines and a jar of pickles (always pickles, why do I have pickles, I don't even like pickles), I can't even tell you. That might make me more prone to food-based anxiety.
Having said that, there's something else at play now, something I haven't experienced before. In the past when I haven't had enough to eat, it's been because I didn't have enough money. That's probably the most common reason, here in the U.S. anyway. But now, as people get more and more worried about the future, as uncertainty about what's gonig to happen next is on the rise, hoarding has started to change the game. Despite having enough food in the house to feed the family for a while, when I walk the aisles in the grocery store and see empty or mostly empty shelves, I'll give foods I might otherwise pass right by a second look, just because it's there. Being in a store that's experiencing a shortage produces anxiety, not because you can't get something you need today, but because you're worried you won't be able to get it when you do need it tomorrow. It's like food anxiety, only future cast.
It gets a little more stressful under the current situation. Take my neighborhood grocery store: food comes in every day, just not a full store's worth. Today it will be bread and eggs, tomorrow frozen foods and produce, and the next milk and fresh meat. One way to avoid feeling anxious about the ability to get what you need is to check in at the store regularly, and since I'm working from home now, that's totally a thing I could do. Except every venture out of the house is another chance of bringing the disease back in with me, endangering the kids and the Wife, so going to the store daily is reckless to say the least. You have to ration your trips out, knowing that, if at some point in the future you need X or Y and you're not lucky enough to have picked the day that it was delivered, you're going to have to make a difficult choice to either go without it and hope for the best on the next scheduled trip or start stalking the store waiting for the delivery of the needed item, increasing your risk of infection. Neither option is great, and so you can end up sitting on a mountain of food and still experience food anxiety. It's wild.
It's not all bad on the food front, however. Our school district has kept producing meals for students, so kids who might otherwise go hungry during this whole ordeal are still assured of at least some food every day. Food as kindness is particularly poignant in the current environment.
In fact, let me leave with a small story: I was standing in line at the grocery store the other day. It was a good day, a shipment of eggs had just come in and I had a carton in my basket. In the next line over, a woman lamented that she'd gotten there too late to get some of her own and the person behind her, having two cartons (which was the limit allowed) offered her one. "I don't actually need both, just figured I should grab them while I could, so feel free to take one of mine." They were going to buy more eggs than they needed out of future-cast food anxiety, but that anxiety wasn't enough to deprive them of their basic humanity, and in a world that feels like it's slowly turning upside-down, that was a nice thing to see.
Last week, the majority of my office shifted to working remotely. That wasn't much of an adjustment for me, I work from home a day or two most weeks anyway. Then the kids' schools closed and they shifted to remote learning, and that was more of an adjustment. Now the entire state has asked everybody who possibly can to stay at home as much as they can and now the Wife is also working from home. We're all here. In the house. Together. All the time.
Fun.
It's not that bad so far, but it's only just begun. The house is big enough for all of us to have our own space, but it's still just a house and there are four of us. It's only a matter of time before we're stepping on each other's toes. Until then, we'll just press on and hope that the structure and routines we're establishing now will save us. And if not, I'll just have to hope the kids end up on my side. Especially the Boy. He's small, but he's dangerous.
The kids' schools have closed, but their teachers have been working their tails off. Both of the kids have been given work schedules and assignments and, to be honest, that all came together much quicker than I thought it would. I was pleased. Then some realities settled in.
First, there's the Girl. She has work to do for every class and it's probably enough to keep the average student busy for the next couple of weeks. I suspect she could finish everything by end of tomorrow if she wanted. Even pacing herself, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she told me she was done later this week. The joys of having a gifted child.
It would be bad enough with just one, but despite his other infuriating qualities, the Boy is also an uncommonly good student. Today we worked through what is meant to be a day's worth of assignments; it took him a little less than an hour, and that's only because he wanted to do his art project twice. I'm really not sure how I'm going to keep them both engaged with learning activities and do my job at the same time. Not all day, anyway.
We've been trying to stick to something like a schedule. At the appointed hour, "school" starts and they turn off whatever device is occupying their attention and get to work. The Girl--the more self-sufficient of the two--is trying to keep to her actual class schedule. For example, her first period is Band, so every morning she starts off with 30 minutes of practice. It's actually kind of nice. Similarly, she has PE right before lunch, so before we eat, we go out and walk a mile or so around the neighborhood. So far, that's been good.
The problem is there's just not enough school work to keep them busy all day long. That's OK in one way: even when school is in, they're not actually in class all day. There are breaks, recesses, stuff like that, plus their normal school day usually ends in the early afternoon, at which time they go to an afterschool program. As such, I'm OK letting the goof off for a few minutes here and there throughout the day and "release" them from school and let them entertain themselves shortly after lunch and still feel like we're sticking to a semi-normal schedule. The difficulty is keeping them going even that long. It's only been two days, but they've both run through the day's work before lunch easily in each. I fully expect that to continue.
I'm trying to keep them doing things that engage their brains even when their work is done, but I can only do so much. One of the "downsides" (and I'm hesitant to call anything about my situation a downside) of being able to work just as effectively at home as I can in the office is that I'm expected to be just as effective at home as I am in the office. I can't really do that if I'm answering the question, "What should I do now?" every five minutes.
I can't imagine doing it for 30 copies of the Boy all day, every day. As soon as we're allowed to touch people again, I'm going to have to give the Boy's teacher a hug. Well, not me personally. By proxy. But it's the thought that counts, right?
At first, I was going to lead off with a joke about how I've been practicing "social distancing" for decades now, but unfortunately I'm slow to market and that joke's already been played out. Then I spent, let me see, where's that calendar...one day?! It's only been a day? Hoo boy. OK: then I spent one day home alone with the kids and realized I was in trouble.
COVID-19 has shut down the kids' schools for at least the next couple of weeks. After those two weeks comes Spring Break, so they're basically home for three weeks. Three whole weeks.
Me and the kids, locked in our house together for 21 days.
There's no way we all survive.
In a lot of ways, we're lucky. Not only can I easily work from home, my company actually instituted a "if you can, work from home" policy the same day they announced the school closures, so I was already going to be here. Apart from the potentially irreparable damage to my sanity, we don't have to suffer to be home with them. The kids will have school work to do, which theoretically should keep them busy, but therein lies the rub: the Boy does great in school, but he isn't exactly the sort to knuckle down and focus on something for hours at a stretch unsupervised. Not a knock on him specifically, more of a commentary on seven-year-old boys generally, but the long and the short of it is I'm probably going to have to spend an unknown portion of my day keeping him on track. Not work I'm particularly suited to (esepcially not when I'm trying to do my actual job): he's easily distracted and I'm short-tempered. It's a recipe for disaster.
And the worst part? In light of the global pandemic raging right now, I can't even bring myself to complain about our situation. We are well situated to weather this storm and can only pray for the rest of the community. This is where I'd usually close with a joke, and all I can think to say is: take care of yourself and do what's right for those around you.
Boy, that felt weird.
So I might have mentioned it earlier, but I'm too lazy to go check for sure, so at risk of repeating myself I'll briefly say that a little while ago the Boy surprised us by announcing that he wanted to play in Little League this year and we signed him up. He'd never played before and it doesn't appear that any of his friends are playing, so who can say for sure why. And it doesn't relate to this story, so enough about that. What's important right now is that baseball is trying to kill him. Or maybe it's baseballs in specific, not the game itself.
Case in point: in the very first practice, he was at third base ready to take a ground ball when it took a funny hop and smacked him right in the throat. And I mean it was a bullseye, hit him right in his little Adam's apple. He had to sit out for a minute, but bless him, he shook it off and got back out there.
So OK, one freak accident, no big deal. The very next practice, he got stung by a bee. This one wasn't directly caused by a baseball, but it did happen while he was chasing down a ball hit to the outfield and he went to the grass to pick it up and, apparently, landed on the poor bee. His third practice was uneventful somehow, but in the fourth he took a throw off the biceps on his glove hand.
I'm not making predictions, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if his first trip down to first came by way of a Hit-By-Pitch. Hey, getting on base is getting on base.
Oh, and despite all this, he has expressed a few times how much he loves playing baseball, so while he's had a rocky start, it looks like the Boy is a gamer. Let's just hope he survives long enough to get good enough to reliably get his glove up.
The Boy has a few bad habits. You might have heard me mention one or two of them, right here even. Now and again, anyway. I'm sure I don't go on too much about it. Do I?
Well, here's a new one to put on the list: "OK, I'll stop."
Now, the phrase itself isn't so bad, it's all the stuff that typically comes before it. You might have guessed, because you're clever, that he's saying it in response to being told to stop doing something. He's a boy and that's pretty typical; if he's not currently doing something he shouldn't be then he's plotting to start something soon. And that would be fine, if that were the entire story. Boy misbehaves, boy is told to stop, boy agrees to stop, that would be a perfectly normal story. I'd be OK with that story.
Not the Boy, though. His version of the story goes like this: boy misbehaves, boy is told to stop, boy completely ignores his parents, parents say it again more firmly, boy agrees to stop. "OK, I'll stop." Sometimes there are extra rounds of he ignores/we get more firm, but even when there aren't, it's infuriating. "OK, I'll stop." It's his way of saying, "Apparently I have pushed this too far so now I'll behave myself before I cross the line."
And y'know what? If that only happened now and again, OK fine. All kids do that, I guess. No, this happens all the time and, some days, every time. It's as if he's actively trying to wear down our defenses, exhaust us to the point of not giving a crap. I mean, all kids do that, push things to the line, if only to find out where the line is, but most of them do it incidentally, haphazardly. When he does it, he's observing, probing, studying. It's like he's got a long-term strategy. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he's graphed out data points, complete with charts and footnotes and whatnot.
I'm not saying we're raising an evil genius, but I'm not saying we're not either.
They're not terrible, of course. Vacations, that is. I mean, obviously, right? That title is what the kids call "click bait," which now that I think about it isn't how that term works, since that title isn't clickable, making it the world's worst click bait. I might be overexplaining this. OK, back on track. Vacations aren't terrible, it's the end of vacations that are terrible.
Funny thing is, not always. I've been on great vacations, fun trips full of brave adventure, new vistas and great memories, and after you've done that for a while, you're kind of ready for it to be over. They're perfect things in and of themselves, but they can only be perfect if they complete the full cycle of beginning-middle-end. One can argue that the ending is what makes them perfect.
But there's another type of vacation, the type that's taken on the semi-obnoxious name "stay-cation" which, as the name implies, is a vacation in which you just stay home. The kids were just on winter break and we hadn't planned a prolonged road trip this year, so we all enjoyed a two-week stay-cation. We puttered around our area, visited the grandparents for Christmas, did a bit of this and a bit of that. One day it was walking down to the theater to catch a matinee, another is was the arcade and a round of minigolf. It was delightful inasmuch as, with a few exceptions, every morning we woke up and just decided what to do. It was a life of leisure and it was pretty great.
And then it was over, and that was terrible. Because the thing about a life of leisure is that it doesn't have to end to be great. Indeed, not ending would make it better. Call me lazy (I sure do), but the neverending life of leisure is the dream, and getting a taste of it only to have it snatched away? Yeah, terrible.
But also great. We had a great vacation is what I'm trying to tell you.
Quick one here, because it has a similar theme to the previous post re: parades. This was our first New Year's in the new house and new town and we were entertained to learn that it has the tradition of hosting a block party along about a quarter-mile stretch of its main street (the very same one the Girl paraded down so recently). So we wandered down shortly after it began and found a nice little party already getting into swing. There was a stage set up with a local band doing disco covers (because why not), a giant ball atop a 15' pedestal, and a half-dozen beer gardens scattered around the blocked off section of the street. The kids had fun while we were there and asked if we could go back closer to midnight for the countdown and ball lighting and, not expecting them to stay awake, we said sure. But stay awake they did, so go back we did, and it was fun, standing out in the middle of the street with a few hundred of our neighbors, the kids in their PJs and jackets, listening to music that was (it was shocking to realize) 40-50 years old, shouting out a countdown to the stroke of midnight and cheering when the objectively cheesey ball was lit and 2020 officially began and ohmygod I am becoming a townie.