What Do We Have, If Not Time?
Day five of self-induced seclusion: starting to look like all the other days of seclusion.
I sleep in – way in. Shane and I both get up around 10:00. Dylan sleeps in until well past lunchtime. We’ve talked to him about that, but he doesn’t seem to care that we’d like him to get up in the morning.
We eat. We are fortunate to have enough food to last us a month. None of us want to cook, except Bill, who has made chili, steaks, tacos and stew. We’re always happy when Bill cooks, but we complain about it anyway.
We play board games: Monopoly, Uno, Stratego. I beg to play Labyrinth and Zootopia but no one will play those with me. They say they take too long. What do we have, if not time?
Yesterday, Dylan figured out a way to play online games with people in other areas. It didn’t work well, but it did work. We’ve mastered FaceTime and Skype, and are learning WhatsApp. This will come in handy when the kids actually get to travel overseas – although Dylan’s trip to study in Italy has finally been canceled.
We do stuff on the computer. Dylan is still choosing classes for fall, which is great fun for me. Shane is preparing to be an election judge when the primaries roll around – although the primaries in our state have now been postponed until June.
Shane has lots of time to do his online training. He’s also got some school work he can do. But he doesn’t do it. He plays video games and watches YouTube and puts stuff on Instagram.
We walk the dog. He gets two or three walks a day now, since everyone wants to go outside.
We watch some TV. I don’t know why we don’t watch movies or read more books. We got several dozen of each at the library, just in case.
We talk. We spend time together at meals, during games. It’s the best part of the whole pandemic. If there is a good part of a pandemic.
I go to bed around midnight. I dream that I stumble into large crowds, anxiously trying to get away from the sweating, spitting bodies.
I wake up in the middle of the night, every night, and can’t get back to sleep for an hour or more. I toss and turn and think about coronavirus. It’s why I sleep until 10:00.
Every day looks like every other day. Doctors, dentists, oil changes and orthodonture: all canceled. We don’t even get takeout from our local restaurants. We just stay home. We avoid the large crowds that I dream about, but I still dream about them.
Down the street is a park with basketball courts, baseball fields, picnic tables and a playground. I’d love to say that it’s deserted, that our efforts are worthwhile – but in real life, every day those parks are packed with people, playing ball and sliding and swinging and running. No two people stay six feet apart.
I want to run screaming into the park, “Go home! Go home!” but I know they won’t listen to me. Apparently they won’t listen to anyone.
I stay home. I wait. I pray a lot. I hope. And then I wait some more.
Our park is the same. It is making me insane. I just stopped going there, I go walk in the neighborhood, that way I can cross the street at least and I don’t have the mental stress of seeing the crowd at the BB court.
It’s really sad. At this point, you’d think everyone would know but some people just refuse to listen to common sense. I don’t know how to accept that. But I guess I have no choice.