Day 48
Here we are again. Dinner has been prepared, consumed, cleaned up. I am in my bed, eating a salted caramel chocolate chip cookie bar and listening to Nighttime Sleep Rain to drown out (pun intended) the sounds of my family in the next room. Tonight is just another night in our pandemic reality. Family. All the time.
It’s weird to think back to pre-March 13, when on any average weeknight dinner would be consumed in three or more sittings/stages. Pre-basketball practice, post ballet rehearsal, pre-drum lesson, post musical rehearsal. Pre-board meeting, post late work night.
Now, we eat at 7. Somehow that’s where we have settled. The kids are getting up late, and so meals are shifted later in the day. Breakfast at 10:30. A snacky lunch at 3. Dinner at 7. That’s where we’ve sort of landed. It’s working, I guess. There’s no need to change it up.
Often, during the day, I jot down ideas of what I might want to include here, in this space. I note a statistic or news headline, an observation from the day, a pattern, something new. Today I didn’t note anything. It was a slower day. Which is odd, really, because I had four Zoom meetings for work, and the final deadline for the magazine I edit is fast approaching. But the day felt slower, quieter. It was miserable out, and the kids mostly stayed in their rooms. I stepped away from my computer between meetings and sat on my living room floor with printed pages of the magazine and my green pen. It felt like such a luxury to have the paper in my hands. Forever a routine experience as a magazine editor, this time it is a splurge. A last proof before final sign off that required a permission-granted trip to the office to print the pages in color on 11x17 paper. A trip taken by my colleague — the magazine’s designer — who then delivered a copy to my son in the driveway. A small gesture that left me nearly giddy. To see the pages! To feel them! To put pen to paper! Oh the things I took for granted before.
The kids are hanging in. We all are hanging in. We are handling the oddities of our everyday life with humor and expressed frustrations. I break into embarrassing dances. We speak in made-up accents. There is loud music and loud TV and lots of time sprawling on the couch. I wonder, when school is over and we are likely still restricted to our homes, if the days will feel different. Hopefully, at the very least, the days will be brightened by nicer weather. Tomorrow is May 1. I still am wearing flannel pajamas to bed and wool socks during the days, with very few exceptions. Winter, let go already!
Today:
Massachusetts continues to see record increases in cases. New Jersey, also.
The news is much the same. Lots more articles focusing on projections of the real death toll. Likely tens of thousands more than the current “official” toll, which, as of now, is nearly 62,000 in the U.S.
Bodies are piling up in a refrigerated truck in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to an article in today’s New York Times that includes this passage: “At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes — more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate. And though the daily toll has recently slowed, hundreds of bodies are still emerging each day from private homes and hospitals.”
Some days I forget to brush my teeth till midday.
I have mostly worn “comfy clothes,” as they are called in our house. Read: no buttons, clasps, zippers (except in the case of a zip-up hoodie) or any other fasteners. Pull on, pull over, wrap around is my daily wear. And it’s comfy. Sometimes, on particularly cold days, I wrap a scarf around my neck.
Tomorrow is Friday, which means little, really, but we hold on to the idea of it. Friday is supposed to offer some relief and some sense of achievement: We made it through another week. I find myself wondering, what were we congratulating ourselves for, pre-pandemic? Now, when we make it through another week, it feels like cause for celebration. Or, at least, deep gratitude. Tomorrow, as my Friday work day comes to a close, I will pivot to the kitchen to prepare yet another dinner, the 49th of our time staying home to stay safe. It will be yet another day. Just another day. Isn’t that what we all are hoping for now? Isn’t that the ultimate goal?
Stay safe, everyone.