327 Days of March 2020
March 12, 2020
This new Covid-thing is blowing up all over the East Coast, and a Cambridge hotel is ground zero for our region. We are a few miles, as the seagull flies, from Cambridge, and a few of our town’s residents are among those infected. My 3 kids attend 3 different schools in town. I have a graduating senior, a sophomore, and a 4th grader!
“Hey, kids, you aren’t going to school tomorrow. It looks like we’ll be having a 2-week break!” Jubilation ensues. I order pizza! There is dancing.
February 1, 2021
We wear masks when we go to buy more masks. Our groceries and home goods arrive in a box on the porch weekly. Every so often, we drive to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy drive-thru, and it’s like a special road trip. There are weeks we go nowhere in our car. I keep forgetting how to adjust the windshield wipers, so there is cursing whenever it rains or snows. Grocery stores run out of our food items often, so we evolve.
“Hey, kids, I bought Jeff Bezo’s chocolate-sandwich cookies because there seems to be a shortage of Oreos. Please moderate.” The last glimmer in their eyes slowly fades. We are sick of pizza. Minecraft is waiting.
I haven’t written much about the last 327 days since we committed to being home to stop the spread and protect our family and the families of our community. But suffice to say — life changed. My wife and I both work from home every day. My oldest child dropped out of school in May so didn’t graduate high school. My middle child hasn’t once entered the halls of the town high school as a junior. All of his classes including P.E. are online. My youngest is now being homeschooled, because IEP services were abysmal, and depression was setting in.
Most people I know personally have made similar choices to Stay the Fuck Home, especially those located near Boston or major cities.* We see one another on Facebook. We are all hug-starved and awkward. When we get together for Zooms or Google video calls, we all stumble over our words. We’ve forgotten how to people.
Life right now is a ship at sea with no shore on the horizon, and no rudder. We float from distraction to distraction — digesting entire Netflix series in days, building farms in Stardew Valley, playing video games until we are sick of playing video games. No book goes unread. No new show goes un-tested. We are hungry and starving at the same time.
The extroverts suffer the most, I think. When you are used to being fed on the energy of others, like a social vampire, becoming house-bound dries you up inside until you are just a cask of neuroses and need. You fill those empty spaces with Pop Tarts, video games, a new hobby, but your skin is paper-thin. Tears are about to escape at all times, so you read more Facebook or bake new foods, furiously build your Stardew Valley farm.
And everyone around us is suffering, so it’s hard to complain. Unlike so many in this world, I have the privilege/luck/wherewithal to say “I’m healthy. I have a steady job. My kids are OK.”
For now, this is enough. And it’s so not even close to enough.