Dear pandemic diary
I’ve told this story before, maybe here, maybe to you in person. My parents were visiting when Nora and Gabe were little, and one afternoon my mom offered to drive Nora to a ballet lesson last minute when J and I both had conflicts. She’d have to take my Subaru Outback (my dad was out and about in their car) which was a stick shift. She’s learned that method, of course, when she was young, but hadn’t done it in years.
I wasn’t home, but J said he watched from the doorstep as my mom gathered 4-year-old Nora - in her ballet clothes and probably some shameful-looking-almost-bun (the kind we did best) - wrangled her into the carseat and threw the car into (hopefully) 1st gear before bucking out of the driveway. J called out to her to ask if she was sure she could get there alright - all she had was the address - and she yelled back out the open window that she would. And she did.
J told me later he wished he could be more like this: able to get things done in the moment without too much fuss. Without worrying he’d do it wrong. I thought this was a heartfelt, high compliment.
There’s another memory I have that relates the same feeling (and again, I’ve probably told you about it before). Whenever I’d be talking to my dad about this or that humorous or surprisingly interesting event - taking the kids to the dentist, for instance - he’d interrupt me and yell, “WRITE IT!” As in - “write that story as a piece to be published!” And sometimes I’d be like, “maybe,” because that is, actually, the kind of writing I do.
And other times I’d be like, “No. I’m telling you about what the guy at the grocery store said to me because I’m pretty bored and it was mildly intriguing and I’m not going to write this one, let me finish talking, dad.”
But that phrase has become a secret-joke-type call to action for me and my brother. We use it to mean “DO IT,” like when my brother is describing an awesome new idea he might try at his bar in DC. “Write it!” I tell him. There’s nothing to write, but he gets what I mean.
The reason, I think, that J latched onto my mom’s haphazard brand of getting-it-done that afternoon is that he isn’t like that, exactly, and I mean this as a high, heartfelt compliment. He does his homework before the main event, and he prepares before he delivers. He is a careful architect of his life, and I don’t mean to say that he is never impulsive or in the moment - he is - but I admire his patience.
I lack his patience, too. I’m prone to plenty of hand-wringing, don’t get me wrong, but, of the two of us, I’d also be much more apt to get in a car I don’t know how to drive and get someone to an address I’ve never visited before. The suddenness of such requests doesn’t stress me out. But wondering what might happen tomorrow often does. J and I are opposites in this regard and I’m grateful for it because when I say things like, “what if life never goes back to normal?” he tells me “it will” and when he says things like “I don’t know how to complete this multi-faceted task,” I say, “just do it.”
This has been an unforgettable time in the way that certain times are, where I can feel the meaning seeping into my soul at a pace that’s kind of painful, and over the past few weeks especially - witnessing unthinkable tragedy and righteous uprising in our country - extremely painful . I don’t have the right words or experience to give any semblance of due justice to this topic in this format, so I will listen. I’ll speak up in real life. We attended a local protest and I talked with friends and it is never enough, nor will it ever be enough because it is a practice that we need to keep practicing.
A week ago we said goodbye to distance learning by seeing actual people, both in the form of Nora’s drive-by sixth-grade graduation as she heads to middle school (what?!) and a car parade of teachers to end the year, complete with decorations and shouting and faces we’ve been missing so very badly. These events were exactly what I needed but also not what we’d expected all those months ago, in another lifetime when we went places as a symbol of celebration and as a means for fun. I was so grateful to the school community, so deeply emotional about the whole thing, that it felt like I couldn’t find the words to sufficiently express myself, despite the fact that I normally have no trouble saying (too many) words.
Then it was over. And Nora came inside and cleaned out the binders they’d returned from her classroom, full of poems and short stories, and wondered aloud what middle school would bring and happily flipped through her yearbook and messaged her friends. And Gabe proclaimed it SUMMER, FINALLY! And Aidy went upstairs and talked to her dolls and turned her room into a daycare center, retreating fully into her imagination, which she’s been doing the whole time, because quarantine for her? No sweat (she asked me just the other day what I liked better: “Virus? Or regular world?” Before I could answer she told me, “I like both.”)
I got a little weepy and then I got additionally weepy and then I cried on and off for 48 hours straight.
Yes, because I was emotional that school was over - I always am - but also because this whole thing been such a seemingly endless bout of get-the-car-in-gear/”write-it!” doing and with the end of school came a lull that I wasn’t sure how to handle.
Over the past several weeks I was able to put aside that fantasy so many of us harbor about what our put-together life might look like and gallop through this pandemic one. Monday mornings I’d plug my computer into the kitchen outlet, put my laptop on top of the big pasta pot so everyone could see it as they ate breakfast and play the slideshow of submitted student photos emailed weekly by our school’s principal. We’d scream out the names of the kids we knew. Our weekdays were a rough assembly of ungraceful tasks with J was working more than ever and onsite at the lab part of every day and me at home doing - I’m not sure what you’d call it exactly. Getting by? Running a mini co-working space for unruly clients who didn’t see the point in getting their clothes on? We lost and found device chargers like it was our job, Gabe took all the blocks, art materials and random objects he could carry and turned the house into his own personal maker space (which seemed frustrating and then innovative and then frustrating again) and the kids were relatively quiet during important Zoom meetings, and that includes whispering instead of yelling during fights. We discussed the difference between videos where the people on the other end of the call can see and hear you, and ones where they can only hear you, and ones where you might actually be recorded and put on the air, so please don’t talk during those. I lost Aidy every time I decided to try and get some work done and always found her in a corner of the house making a doctor’s office where she “had a new patient” and couldn’t possibly get back to rules about vowels. My children paced the floor between school assignments eating cereal out of the box like no one ever fed them, and believe me, I fed them. Constantly. Also, when you eat cereal like that while walking around carelessly, it gets all over the floor.
My emotional turmoil at the end of all that was, I think, due to both a let-down and a reckoning after such a busy, confounding, meaningful and - in our country as a whole - collectively crucial time.
I mean, I keep telling the kids (Nora and Gabe especially, who I think will remember) that we are living through history! But it feels like the methods we are employing to make this alleged period of history work are less poignant than what happened during other historic periods you read about in school. I’m shouting about how this is “once in a lifetime” while the children are watching me put the computer on top of the pot on the kitchen range again after emptying the dishwasher for the 300th time that week and they’re like, “Ok, mom, this does seem like a super important time,” and rolling their eyes.
But, as my dad so often, honestly sort of annoyingly, reminded me, the stories worthy of recording aren’t always the obvious ones.
I keep thinking about the phases of this strange, eventful year, and how, at this point, we’re actually used to parts of this new reality even as we try to grasp entirely new concepts and hard truths; that doing the right thing is often adopting small, deliberate actions as part of your daily life, for as long as that’s useful. That major shifts are often built from minor adjustments.
Take, for instance, the mundane, constant, reflexive giving of space, an action now taken regularly where we live and, to me, one of the most notable and endearing.
Stepping off the sidewalk and arcing in a semi-circle when I see an oncoming neighbor during a walk or run, allowing them to remain safe six feet or preferably more from where my feet land. Or when a neighbor makes the first move, and does this for me. The sidestep in the grocery store and awkward smile behind our masks. The excited approach when I see someone I know, but before the hug - now a seeming relic - we stop two arms lengths away. A new symbol of affection.
This small but consistent measure seems so minor in the grand scheme of impossible situations. But we do it again and again, and in that repetition, I am told, there is critical effect. We do it again and again and what happens is it works.
