Well, it's taken a national calamity to get me blogging again. As a historian, I know that accounts of what it's been like to live through the Covid-19 pandemic are going to help tell the full story of this time. And I've been trying to put pen to paper and record my thoughts, but I've been too sporadic and unmotivated at the end of the day. And then I remembered this old thing! So here goes nothing.
So, what's it like to live through this Covid-19 pandemic? Let me see if I can reconstruct my timeline. We started hearing about this novel coronavirus showing up in China in January. I can't remember when cases started showing up in Washington State and California, maybe early February. A bunch of cruise ship passengers from a cruise out of Japan started getting sick and all of the passengers had to be quarantined. By the middle of February, people in Italy and Iran started to get sick. It hit a nursing home in Seattle really hard and at the end of February or the beginning of March, and then there was the day (March 11) that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they tested positive for Covid-19, and the NBA canceled its season when several players tested positive. After that, things seemed to suddenly get real. The boys were out of school on Friday, March 13, for a teacher workday, and over the weekend, the superintendent made the decision to close schools until after spring break (April 15). We had to go to the school to pick up their laptops. They would be off Monday through Wednesday, March 16-18, and then they would begin online learning on March 19. The teachers prepared 10 days worth of review lessons that they posted to Schoology.
Meanwhile, restaurants, malls, movie theaters, bars, churches, parks--basically everything is closed. Grocery stores and pharmacies and Targets/Walmarts are open, but other than that, we are basically sheltering in place. We saw this happen in China and Hong Kong and Italy--the idea of "social distancing" and "flattening the curve." I can't say that I really thought about what it must be like when I read about it happening in those places. It completely tanked the stock market and has severely slowed the gears of the economy. The House and Senate are desperately trying to pass legislation to alleviate the fallout--cash payments to individuals, loans and bailouts to businesses, increased unemployment insurance, free healthcare, etc. etc. etc. As always, the devil is in the details.
Yesterday, March 23, Virginia's governor announced that schools in Virginia would close for the rest of the school year. Even though I think we all kind of expected that this would be the case, it still seemed to catch everyone off guard, kind of like a punch in the gut. Until now, I guess there was a small part of us that thought, maybe, maybe we could still salvage something of "normal" for our kids. But maybe it's better to rip off that bandaid and get on with figuring things out.
As for my own situation, I am now telecommuting full time. Fortunately, our office had started a telecommuting pilot program in November, so the transition has not been too bad. Our office had three laptops that we shared among eight staff members. Last week, we weren't sure if we would all be telecommuting, or taking turns as skeletal staff in the office, or if we'd just have pandemic leave and only work once in a while, trading around the available laptops. Our IT people managed to pull together enough laptops for almost all of us to work from home, so for the foreseeable future, Ed and I both are juggling work and kids.
The boys are adjusting pretty well. They enjoyed their three days off last week. Seth was still playing outside with a few neighborhood kids. I took William fishing several times--to the tidal basin and Georgetown Waterfront. Thank goodness the weather was gorgeous! They seem to be fine with doing their schoolwork online. It doesn't take them much time at all. We are trying to stick to the no-screentime-on-school-days regimen, which is really, really tough and requires much more of me. We've been doing some game playing (we LOVE Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza), baking (Seth and I are figuring out how to make homemade bread), lots of walking and riding bikes, making fires in the chiminea, puzzles. And we are making one exception to the screen time rule. After dinner, we started watching The Mandalorian. I fear that all of these diversions will quickly lose their charm, and we will all be at each other's throats in no time.
William got really sad today because I let the boys know that we will most likely not be able to go to Florida for our spring break. We're supposed to go to Anna Maria Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida for the week. We rented a house with a private pool about a block from the beach. I booked a fly fishing guide for William. We were really, really looking forward to it. And we were thinking that since we were planning to drive anyway, and the house and pool are private, and the beach is just a block away, and we can bring our own food and eat at home or order takeout, and we can just as easily social distance there as here--that maybe, just maybe, we could still go. But as I'm reading about traveling right now, it just isn't a good idea. No one wants tourists right now, using up valuable resources like groceries and toilet paper and God forbid hospital supplies if they get sick while they're there. We can hopefully get a credit and do it all again next year. And there's a slight possibility we can rent a yurt in Virginia for a few days instead so William can get his fishing on and we wouldn't be putting anyone out. But I don't want to promise anything this far out. We just have to take a "wait and see" position.
But man, breaking that news was hard. I think it really hit William what this all means. There have definitely been some really nice things about this togetherness, this slowing down, this culture shock of not having the social outlets and the "business" that we are all so used to. I know that if I can remain positive and calm and empathetic and creative, the boys will follow my lead. I know there will be moments when I crack, but I just hope I can hold it together in their presence. They need to not see the panic I sometimes feel welling up inside of me.
And then I start to think of the kids and the wives and the husbands who feel trapped, who no longer have the refuge of school or the office or the house to themselves during the day. How many people will suffer horribly during this time? And it breaks my heart. That's when I start to cry--when I think about the unbearable stress that so many people are dealing with out there. This is all unprecedented and who knows what we will be on the other side. I can't do much more than pray for people right now. Make donations where I can. Spend as much money as I can to help the economy. Look out for neighbors and others in my community. And good Lord--reach out to my friends and family, as often as I can.
I started this blog 13 years ago, and at the time, I really was working it out. I'm not sure if I realized then that I'd probably always be working it out, but as it turns out, that was a really good title for my blog.
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