Documenting the Quarantine ed. 1

I have nothing patently interesting to say about life and love in the time of #coronavirus, but I am nothing if not a journalist so I am going to scribble some bloggy thoughts here and again.

We are all four plus the dog on quarantine in Massachusetts. I have glimpsed line graphs and spiked plottings and the confirmed cases and odds do not look favorable, even though numbers are colors to me. Generally whenever asked for statistical analyses or precision of any kind, my answers are usually a resistant lot of, “I mean, probably like so many or whatever” or “A baker’s dozen” or “A butt-ton.” I question most modes and customs, resisting them because I am a pain in the astronaut, but eventually I listen to the authorities who Know Things and I simmer down. Right now I am simmering down and it looks like this:

My e-mail inbox has been chock full o’ corporate branded messages that use phrases such as “We have been monitoring the situation closely” and “taking every precaution” but I did see Chipotle began offering free delivery and this was big news. I mean, what’s next, no charge for extra guacamole?! Let’s not get covidcraycray….

I have spoken to various friends and family on the phone lately and mostly I am in a state of irritation when they lament their cruise cancellations and the hassles of their work going online. So basically my disposition is the same. I have no capacity as usual for complainsgivings. I have tolerance only for great feats of human courage and radical acts that amuse me. I’m the same taciturn gal, just wearing yoga pants with more frequency.

Yesterday we took the offspring and dog to the DeCordova Sculpture Garden. Our dog freaked out at all of the sculptures and regarded them all with great suspicion, because you know what’s scarier than a whole case of resin sculptures that look exactly like multiple tiers of Jell-O molds? I know! The horror. HOLLLLD MEEEEE.

It was a lovely day in the sun, though, breathing the air that was free for breathing, before we made our way home to entertain ideas of doing Little House on the Prairie-type things. Wouldn’t that be charming and quaint? Playing board games and calling each other Maw and Paw and hustling up some supper? We fancied that for a moment and then I promptly took a QuarantiNap and Lovey Loverpants and I watched “Atlanta” on Hulu and ate whatever tortilla chips were lying around.

I think this is the chief difference between being a family with older kids and wee babes: there’s a lovely laissez fair spirit now, but I also miss the times of order and routines from the days when they—ahem, mostly I—needed structure and command. I long for days outlined by stickered calendars and behavior charts, snack packs and felt loveys all in a row. Now that we are a family with tweens, a.k.a. kids who can be interrupted from FaceTiming 18 hours a day to walk the dog, the quarantine presents a weird limbo. We’re all drumming up our little projects and social channels but it’s difficult to lasso us all into one solid collective of human life. We normally do this by leaving our home, but now that the quarantine is in full effect, we will have to find ways to come together without developing homicidal tendencies.

I am working to bring all of my classes online, and by working I mean that I have contemplated two minute dance parties for all of my courses and have not explored any other modalities that will empower my students to be good and competent citizens. I have one more week to figure this all out. Today I have a glistening stovetop to show for my efforts. Because you know what they say about teaching English composition. You can’t do it with a clear head if your stovetop is in disarray.

On Watching Girlhood Fade

I believe in patent leather shoes. Cartoon band-aids. Sleepaway camp. The long, coast after you shed your training wheels and before your first lesson in driver’s ed. 

I have been an agent of Girlhood, splashing around in the 3 ft. level of the pool, fully immersed in the game, crying out and suddenly realizing no one was matching my Marco with a Polo. I glimpsed Girlhood riding off on the horizon for other girls. I was clinging to it, playing school in the basements of my friends, passing notes and trading secrets in our own little huddle.

I remember when everyone’s bathing suits started to change, the filling out and filling in and the tuck and the plunge and I was no kind of ready. My growth spurt was never up, it was only out.

Now, I am watching The Girlchild who lives with me board the growth spurt train. I add an extra bathing suit for her to the online Target cart. She will need two for sleepaway camp. She favorites one; I explain the plunging neckline and how it may not be the most comfortable for her. As if comfort were a major theme of becoming a young woman. I tell her this - all this - will not necessarily be comfortable, but it will be manageable, and I mean it.

She has questions about herself and there is acrylic paint all over her legs. Her dreams are so big and she swings between one and the other and oh, yes, her eyes alight at that other possibility there covered in paint. I am willing her dreams to be as outsized as she will allow them. I am willing her a future unrestricted by jeans size or the number of followers or likes. I will wrestle the world’s measuring stick with my own bare hands if I must. I will hide it from even myself.

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The other night we were riding the subway home The Girlchild and I. In my wisdom, I had told her to bring a book in case we were waiting at the station for awhile.

A woman sitting across from us was YELL-INGG. I trusted that I would get to hear EVERY-THINGGG that “Bro” kept calling her about even after he (allegedly) hung up and called back. The YELL-ING lady kept repeating it wasn’t her problem (it was) and she was trying already (allegedly), trying to get her $*#!ng card to work but nothing would $*#!ng work 

Meanwhile on the other side of the car the guy with the ear buds and the tattoos lamented on his phone that he couldn’t find Anybody EN-KNEE-BUH-DEE on Facebook anymore.

The Girlchild was reading and thumbing the same page of Percy Jackson. She said it was her first time reading the book, though she had listened to the audio version already. She admitted she was glad which she had, since she knew how to pronounce the brother’s name properly, Chiaron, pronounced “KEER-an.”

It strikes me now that this is one way we navigate the transition of our lives, the transferring from the girlhood train to the one that only women are fit to ride. We look and we listen and we absorb; the world presents itself as a text. It is a mercy and a gift that we then get to write our own chapters, though sometimes casting a different set of characters in a completely distinct setting than the one chosen for us.

I had felt fearful, even as near as the beginning of summer, for The Girlchild to turn the page. Fearful of what she might discover about the cruel world, about her incompetent parents, about her unadulterated self. I am reminded once more that we are reading and writing this text together, riding a rumbling subway, absorbing the input, synthesizing what all will become the story of how this momentum continues, with a denouement that is well beyond our sightline.

I still believe in the sanctity of Girlhood, and she still exists in peeks these days like the fireflies that the Girlchild spent so many summer nights chasing after. (And I hope she always does.)

But how do you order the cotton candy?

My quasi-cousin Kore and I met up at an impossibly chic taqueria on Sunday and I’m still puzzled how the Minivan Mafia let me get away with this one, how I didn’t get fined (yet?) for wearing Not Nearly Enough Black, and how it appeared I was the only one whose skull was completely blown to bits over this cotton candy novelty served apres dinner.

This cotton candy? Arrived in a big bountiful arrangement. The same big bouquet shape you’re used to seeing at the fair. Only it was placed on tables around us like a fetching centerpiece. Now, I’m not so daft and irrelevant that I’m unaware that cotton candy for growns is a HUGE thing in foodie places like Vegas, etc. I mean I might own some mom jeans but I know my way around a Sephora counter and I know that contouring is a thing I need and a boy brow is a thing I shouldn’t attempt at home. I am current in most of the ways that matter. But the cotton candy was a surprise at this urbane eatery what with its neo-gothic stained glass windows and wrought-iron sectionings.

Here’s the rub. We couldn’t figure out how to order it. It wasn’t on the menu. Maybe there was a secret password or you had to know a guy, a cottony confectionary kind of guy to order. Kore and I aren’t delicate lilacs afraid to assert ourselves or ask difficult questions like FLOOFER SUGAR, WE CAN HAZ SOME? But! Hark! Just as we asked for the check, a bloom of blue cotton candy was placed in our midst. Unbidden but definitely not unwanted. We pulled at wads and tasted an unexpected fruity flavor. This was not your sad clown cotton candy in a bag that you begged your dad to get you at the Ice Capades mostly because everyone else had some. Kore was the first to make the discovery: this cotton candy was sprinkled in Pop Rocks. For the love of Screech and Lisa Turtle, what a pair. Delicious and frivolous. Suddenly our table with a couple of cackling hens was transformed into the table that was having the most fun party for two, and I totally hope it made everyone who didn’t yet know the cotton candy secret insanely jealous.

I’ve thought about that cotton candy in the days since and I realize it’s less about the spectacle of it, and more about the moment that it arrived. You guys, I swear I heard windchimes when they set it down in front of us. Kore and I had been fine to wrap up our meal without ever solving the mystery of the cotton candy, perhaps investigating further on another cotton candy research junket (as one does). But then the restaurant said, Oh. No. Don’t leave yet. You haven’t tried this blue treat of ours. Your stay here isn’t complete until we set a bouquet of sugary goodness before you.

Even though the Pop Rocks as sprinkles was a new concept for me, I have sat at this table before. The one where I’ve been given the enviable thing without having to ask for it. The one where I’m sitting with someone who accepts me and yet challenges me to pass on the baloney when it comes around. The table where I didn’t make the reservation, where I probably didn’t even abide by the dress code of the place, but was treated kindly. And given the dessert chaser.

I keep returning to the moment, because it was all so fresh for me: the reward no one deserves but which the restauranteur wants its patrons to have; the feasting eyes from other tables; the wondering, the menu scoping. I am going to be spending some more time in this moment where we realize we are getting something we very much wanted and didn’t know how to ask for, and being glad and present for when someone who just wants to delight in our delight says, Oh, why. Here you go.

I think this is the magic we don’t have nearly enough of in our world, and for which we should strive to create more for the people we love and others we may not even know. Because these are the moments where our expectations are suspended and our childish hopes met. Show me the folks who are mad about that. Then sprinkle them with a generous portion of Pop Rocks and see what happens.