Pandemic, Day 471

Coronavirus! That's certainly a term I did not know about when I started this blog 10 years ago, or when I stopped posting about 2 years ago. But now coronavirus--otherwise known by its fancy name, COVID-19--is everywhere, literally, and it is blowing up routines left and right.

Today is Tues, March 24. The kids have been out of school for a week and a half. I've been working from home for the same amount of time. Everything is cancelled. No soccer, no basketball, no dance, no swimming. No in-person playdates! Only virtual ones now. Times are definitely weird.

How have we been coping? It's been a mixed bag so far. The forced isolation/social distancing (a subject about which many, many sci-fi movies will be made in the next decade) has required us to basically stay at home and entertain each other, which means there are lots of movie nights (fun!) and also a lot of screaming fights (less fun!). But all things considered, I think the kids have been doing well, and I think Natalia and I have been doing ok, too.

The kids have managed to stay connected with their friends largely through FaceTime. This has been a lifesaver. Sometimes they have group chats with a bunch of friends; sometimes they watch a movie alone, together. Celia and Lucia have also managed to create a variant of "hide and seek" that they play on their individual playdates.

This week has been, more or less, a "school from home" week. This has been challenging because I have to work while I still have a job, and Natalia has been scrambling to figure out how to teach first grade from the dining room table. But we (mainly her, if I am being fair) have been making it work.

I've been holed up in my tiny-but-beautiful-because-it's-mine office on the second floor, and today, while I was editing a podcast, Lucia sat next to me and wrote in her daily journal. Then she read a couple of books (The Day the Crayons Quit was one of them, I believe), and drew a couple pictures before heading back downstairs. It was a nice little stretch--both of us working, one (her) being more productive than the other (me)--and it also made me feel like I had contributed to the day's schooling of my children, which I generally feel like I am missing out on as I try to maintain as normal of a workday as possible.

Let me tell you about my new office. It's mine! It's also slowly taking shape. I have a small desk, just large enough for my laptop and a few stray pieces of paper. On the wall in front of me I have placed a photo I took at the Boston Marathon a few years ago. It's not my favorite photo, but it's printed and framed, and it fills the space nicely. On one wall I have a triptych of shots from Fenway that I took ages ago--maybe 2004? 2005?--which looked much better to me then than they do to me now, but again, they are framed and I took them. On the other wall I have a lithograph caricature of my Uncle Peter from his time at WNYC. It's a portrait I love, both for the subject and the way it was done, and it brings me joy whenever I look at it.

My office also has a window. This is lovely, and I've spent many, many billable hours so far just looking out that window. I've observed birds call to each other and then bomb across the brook that flows by our home. I've watched people who I have never seen before walk past our house--everyone is taking walks now that everything is cancelled--and I've watched my own kids bicycle by on a trip around the block. It's nice to have a window.

The rear/back wall of my office is still sort of a mess, however, but I intend to fix that up when my new shelves come this week. Once the shelves go up I'll be able to arrange some of my photo books, old cameras, and random pictures so that they can finally begin to gather dust, which is the entire point of having shelves in a small office.

So, anyway, Lucia joined me in my office today, and I think she'll be working with me again tomorrow morning. She seemed to enjoy it.

I have been less connected to the day-to-day "school at home" work of my other two children. I do know that Celia has been journaling and doing some math games/activities. Andres, too, has been journaling (everyone is, and I'm actually the last one to get started on my own accounting of things), but the middle school teachers have been more lax about sending home work, so he's been spending a lot of time reading in his pajamas. Occasionally he will sidle up next to me when I'm reading the news and say, "Whatcha lookin' at, father?" and I'll try to pretend I was looking at sports scores or the weather, because the reality of talking about global warming and pandemics and widespread economic collapse with your 12-year old son is just too depressing.

However, just because I have not been helping out with the kids' "school at home" education does not mean that I do not have feelings about it. I do! Plenty! But what it really boils down to is this: Why are we even doing this? School is closed. Nothing is normal. Let's not pretend school can go on as usual when teachers are not with their kids, parents are frazzled, nobody is on a schedule, and there's widespread panic about using GoogleDocs and Zoom. I'd rather the district say, "You know what--we're done until we're back. Enjoy family time. Take walks. Do informal science. Read a lot. Remember art? Do a lot of that. Write letters to family members. Stay healthy." Sure, that's more work for parents--but reading all these emails from teachers and trying to get your kid to actually do some schoolwork during this time is already a lot of work for parents. I'm not sure what skills they are even practicing anyway.

All of this is to say that it has been a long almost two weeks. (It hasn't really been 471 days as my title suggests--but it sure as hell feels like 471 days, which makes me worry about the next few weeks or months.) The kids miss their friends. Natalia misses being at school. I guess I miss being at work, though somehow I've had more meetings (all virtual, of course) in the past couple weeks than I have had in months. But if I am being honest--and I may as well be, since very few people read this blog--this self-quarantine/isolation/social distancing thing is even beginning to get to me down. And I'm a big fan of self-isolation even when there isn't a pandemic! Everything is on hold. We are just waiting for things to get back to normal, but everyone knows that between now and then, the numbers will spike and things will get worse before they get better. It's unsettling to be on this side of the wave.

Thus ends my rant on this Tuesday evening. Tomorrow is Wednesday. It will be exactly the same as today. And on we will go, for at least a few weeks more.