Blue-Footed Musings

I am grateful to all the previous generations of human beings that caught and subsequently softened the common cold viruses into the mild diseases that they are now. Novel viruses are a bitch, as we are all learning now. Being first isn’t always best. When it comes to viruses, you want one that’s old and worn down.

Our day started a little earlier that usual, because my husband had to go to the school to return some books and also to pick up the stuff our kids had left there. It’s sad that the kids didn’t get to go back this year. It’s particularly sad for Marshall. That school was such a huge part of his life for so many years, and he didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to it. Most likely Livia will return, if not for 4th grade then for 5th, but Marshall will most likely never set foot in the building again. No time is a good time for pandemic, and all the kids have missed out because of it, but I think the situation is toughest for the kids in transitional phases, the ones who had just started school and the ones just about to finish.

Tonight I finished the book I’ve been reading for a while, Greenglass House by Kate Milford. The pace at the beginning of the story was painfully slow, but after a while I realized that part of the problem was that I was being painfully slow to read it. I was only reading a few pages each night before bed. You can read a book that way, but it takes forever, and it’s hard to become invested in it. If you want to enjoy a book, and particularly if you want to enjoy more than just a few books per year, you have to set aside time for reading. You have to turn off the TV, and the computer, and stop playing piano or whatever else it is you do when you’re not reading, and pick up a book. And read and read and read. Anyone who really loves reading knows that. Sometimes they just forget.

Some of my book orders came today. I will have to wait to look at them, though, because they’ve gone to quarantine, as most things have to do when they arrive. We also finally got the pulse oximeter that my husband ordered a while back. I’m glad that we have it, but I hope we will never need it. Excepting the arrival of those packages, the day was completely unremarkable. I suppose that’s a good thing, even though it’s dull.

I did almost nothing today. Doing nothing is starting to become the norm for me on Sunday. Some people might say that was a good thing, calling it a “day of rest,” but you only need a day of rest if you worked your butt off during the rest of the week. TBH, I haven’t been working my butt off. My butt’s still all there, and then some.

All their lives, my children have been told to stay away from the road. Roads are never safe places for children. Ours is a main road, with fast and nearly constant traffic, so it’s worse than some. But, it’s safe enough to walk along, if you’re paying attention, and my children are old enough to learn that. So, when they begged me to take them on the road for a couple of short walks, I did.

The first time was a great novelty for them. They especially liked crossing the road. It is a wide road, and long, but its size can’t be appreciated from any single point on the edges of it. Not until you’re out in the middle of it can you experience its vastness. And in that brief moment, you get a feeling of being somewhere you do not belong, a frisson of danger. Even I still get a tiny thrill from it.

Now the novelty of walking along the road is starting to wear off for them, and I’m glad. I don’t particularly like walking on the road, and I particularly dislike having the children with me. It’s safe enough, like I said, for walkers paying attention. My kids do not always pay attention, and I have to keep reminding them to stay behind me and/or to my left. Though I could probably learn to tune out the traffic, our safety also requires me to pay attention to all of the cars, just in case their drivers aren’t paying attention to us. I don’t like having to maintain that level of vigilance.

It was time for my kids to learn some basic road safety, so it’s good that I’ve taught them. But, all things considered, the road is probably riskier for us than the virus is. And let’s be honest: the virus isn’t going to disappear any more than the road is. As a country, we’ve had two chances to get the pandemic under control. We failed the first, and we seem to be failing the second. With no vaccine on the horizon, the virus is going to run its course. I am going to have to adjust to living with the constant risk that it presents, just as I’ve learned to accept the risks of the road.

I am in the process of acquiring masks for the family. Once we get them, we will have the option of going to public places, including the local walking trails. Then I will have to decide if that’s a risk I can adjust to. I hope I can. If I can’t, it’s going to be a long year ahead, even vaster in the middle than when viewed from any point along the edges of it. But, unlike the road, there will be no thrill in the crossing of it.

I still get weekly e-mails from a particular cruise line. Even in the middle of this pandemic, the company is trying to convince me to willingly confine myself and my family on a ship that could become floating death trap. And to pay for the privilege!

I have no intention of cruising any time soon, but I clicked on one of the e-mails today, because I was curious about the details. Sailing dates start in November. How could anyone look out on the world today and have enough optimism to commit to a November cruise?

I couldn’t. Here I am, looking at the large boxes in my dining room that are filled with brand-new dishes, wondering when I’ll ever get to use them, and if I’ll even need such a large set. I had bought the dishes for Thanksgiving, a November holiday, with great optimism. That was before we knew about the coronavirus. Now I think it’s likely that Thanksgiving will be cancelled. Easter was. Then Mother’s Day. Father’s Day will be cancelled. My son’s birthday, which we had been thinking of traveling for, will have to be celebrated at home, in self-isolation. How far does this pandemic spread into our future? How many holidays and events will it cancel?

It’s almost as if I jinxed myself by buying dishes called “Calamityware.” When the company jokingly advertised their dishes with the slogan “Things could be worse,” I laughed. Then I bought the dishes, and now things are worse, so maybe it wasn’t so funny after all.

I’m not serious about being jinxed, though. At the time I bought those dishes, I needed the reminder that things could be worse. I still need it now. Things can always be worse, but as long as we’re alive there is hope. Maybe not for cruises, maybe not for Thanksgiving, but farther out. There is light somewhere ahead. We just have to keep sailing forward until we see it.

But not on a cruise ship, because that would be crazy.

We can’t watch the pandemic unfolding in real-time. Coronavirus starts with one person, then spreads exponentially, but we can’t witness the individual catching or spreading it. We don’t even know it has happened until critically ill patients start hitting the hospital. It takes days for a person to become symptomatic, days more to feel sick enough to go to the hospital, then weeks to recover, or to die. It takes several more weeks for hospitals to be overwhelmed and months for the death toll to reach the kind of numbers that make a nation weep. But every single day over the course of those months, individual tragedies are unfolding. We just can’t see them until after the fact.

The people running our government made stupid decisions at the beginning of the pandemic because they couldn’t understand the arc of the future, not even after having seen it happen elsewhere. They are making stupid decisions today for the same reason. Their thoughts, when they finally have them, are too little and their actions too late. All of us, but especially our leaders, must come to terms with the lag time inherent to a pandemic and learn to think weeks, months, and years in advance.

It’s always been pretty common for people to use the word “well” in e-mails, as in “I hope you are well.” Under ordinary circumstances it’s just polite filler and it doesn’t really mean anything. Wellness used to be the norm, and we assumed it would continue to be. It’s not a safe assumption these days, though, and that has changed my usage and interpretation of the word. Not only have I started including it in my e-mails more often, but I actually mean it. And when I read it in e-mails that are sent to me, I feel like it’s sincere. The pandemic has given the word back its meaning.

Marshall can ride a bike. He can also fall down on his way to the bike and scrape his hands and knees, then fall off the bike and hurt himself again. That’s how things go some days.

It’s good that he can ride a bike, though. Summer is coming up, and the kids will need things to do, more this summer than usual, because they won’t have day camp. So we are thinking about buying new bikes for them, as well as for ourselves. That way we can take trips together on the bike path.

As for me, I remember how to ride a bike. No problem. Alas, my muscles don’t remember being in shape. They will not like bicycling.