On the Brink
April 5th, 2020
And so it is three weeks later. April 5th. A Sunday. Palm Sunday. And the world is unrecognizable from when I last sat and wrote.
That last entry barely perceiving the full stop we had just taken. A friend still in the house sleeping over? The next day, Saturday March 14th, I would take my oldest son and one of his buddies to a Stick & Puck hockey session at the Columbia Ice Rink just days before it closed. Sensing it could be the last time, I wanted him to have one more afternoon on the ice before...what? Before the unimaginable. Before the world changed.
Such a peculiar place to stand, on the brink of a cataclysmic shift. Sensing it, perhaps, the way birds know an earthquake or tsunami is approaching. A combination of animal instinct and intellectual understanding converging to tell me that Saturday, March 14th, was a Maundy Thursday in our lives. A series of Last Suppers. The last friend to spend the night. A last exhausting and exhilarating 90 minute session on the ice that left my sixteen year old so tired he could barely walk down the stairs for dinner. The illusion that whatever lay on the other side of the brink would bring with it time. Relaxation. Netflix and knitting. Long walks. Yes, there have been long walks. But not peaceful meandering walks because there's nothing else to do and the sun is shining. Instead somewhat maniacal walks even on days when the clouds are so low my glasses cloud in a fine mist of moisture and the wind so brisk I have to wear multiple layers, a hat, gloves. Walks every day with the dogs, sometimes as far as 3.5 miles (3.0 miles longer than the dogs have ever walked in their lifetimes, they would add!) to give some sense of separation from the long work day and the looming work evening.
Is it Monday or Thursday or Saturday? The days blend and blur into a series of teleconferences and urgent calls for information, navigating VPN malfunctions and SharePoint freezes and everyone learning the etiquette of audio meetings with fifty or more people. Managing virtual teams of people who were pulled together as 100% telework went into effect. Learning how to work together in circumstances as far from ideal as imaginable. And all of it occurring surrounded by the fear and uncertainty that blankets the entire world right now. Our own corner of privilege allowing us the stress of newly empty shelves in grocery stores: no toilet paper, no paper towels, intermittent meat products, and days and days with no milk.
Not static, however, this avalanche of strangeness. Today, three weeks later, I had a full day off for the first time. The grocery was stocked with chicken, meat, and milk. I ventured to Dick's for curbside pick-up of a soccer net for the backyard. Witnessed store front after store front with makeshift "closed" signs in their windows. Restaurants with "we're open for carry-out" written in large letters in black sharpie next to their phone numbers. Wondering how many of them will be open in a month? Two months? Three? 10 million people filed for unemployment in the last two weeks alone. And the number will rise.
Our house silent. Except for my own litany of phone calls throughout the day, and the sometimes loud shouts of excitement throughout the night as my sons, the resident night owls, do what they do best and game all night with their friends. Virtual school will start in a week. Sort of...I drag them out of the house every few days for a walk, each time opening a new chapter in the discussion of why we're leaving the house when there is virus all around? Why we aren't staying in the safety of our homes? When will this end? When do I think school might start again, for real? In the brick buildings where the more important moments of their lives play out against a backdrop of friends and teachers and the rhythm of being a teenager in America.
There is no soccer season. There is no spring hockey, no hockey try outs. There are no play dates. There are no sleep overs. There is just the three of us, cocooned in our house with the two dogs. Venturing out occasionally for fresh air in a startling spring where the sounds of traffic, on the streets and in the skies, are strangely muted. Where even in the craziness of work there is still time to notice, on morning runs or afternoon walks, which ducks are in the far pond and how many deer are in the woods. Time to see the daily progression of bud to bloom on the trees. Time to watch the woods greening themselves in anticipation of summer. And time to wonder with each recognition of forward progress, with the inevitable passing of time, where we will find ourselves in another three weeks? What May will bring, and if by June we will begin a slow move toward the new normal? Standing here, still in transition, in the liminal space, the in-between, not in the past of a month ago that feels like another lifetime, or in the future three months from now that is unimaginable, but in this space of waiting, today, standing in the center of disruption without knowing when or how it resolves.
