Fewer things seem normal. Governors in early-hit states like Jay Inslee of Washington, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsome of California, Larry Hogan of Maryland have chosen to avoid overwhelming hospitals, as happened in northern Italy, by acting early to radically restrict people’s movement, slow the virus’s spread. To avert a public-health calamity, we’re entering an economic maelstrom.
Reality has dawned on sectors of the nation that have heretofore ignored it, including at Fox News and the Oval Office. The president alternated Tuesday between sober statements and harsh tweets. Of course, he said: he’s known all along this was a pandemic. (For two months he’s seen Covid-19 through a political rather than a public-health lens: downplaying it, calling it a hoax, comparing it to the flu, delaying action in the interests of public relations, caring intensely about keeping the numbers low and thus hindering early testing that would have precipitated earlier response and saved lives, sparking dismay among health officials who wanted to act faster but couldn’t piss off the peevish president — in short, violating every tenet of sound public-health emergency response.) U.S. officials said they’re considering spending $1 trillion to goose an economy that has shuddered to a near-stop. After Monday’s calamitous fall, the stock market bumped up.
Tuesday’s walk, south through Prospect Park, sees more Brooklynites with masks and gloves, fewer cars, acres of parking on the commercial stretch of Vanderbilt between the park and Atlantic Avenue. Bars are closed, restaurants open only for take-out orders. New York’s governor and mayor are debating whether to emulate Northern California’s shelter-in-place order, but in the meantime I can walk the three or so miles between my three families: my apartment; the house of her mother (Co-Parent), where our 12-year-old daughter (The Kid) is staying for her first middle school-less week; and the apartment of my girlfriend (The Girlfriend), where one child lives in the second bedroom with their partner and her second child is parked in the living room after being required to leave his New Jersey dorm. So far the youth seem unperturbed: online school hasn’t ramped up, it’s like Spring Break, they have games and videos for 14 lifetimes of lockdowns.
The Kid seems unchanged. I texted yesterday’s blog to her and the Co-Parent, and she sent a one-word response: “Father”
That word often precedes annoyed responses. I waited.
The Kid: “You need to write blog posts about MEEEEEE”
I waited.
The Kid: “I am important”
Co-Parent [chiming in]: “Good gravy.”
Me: “Daughter. How much more solipsistic can you BEEEEEE?”
The Kid: “Solipsistic?”
Me: [Texts link to Oxford Dictionary definition of solipsism, “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.”]
The Kid: “I understand that things other than me exist. I just think they are irrelevant”
Me: “That’s functionally no different.”
The Kid: “Irrelevance and lack of existence are different”
I left it alone.
The morning rain has abated; it’s overcast and in the 50s. No one wears gloves except the mask-wearers. I leave the quiet streets and enter the park, sunny-Sunday busy with a stream of runners, bikers, power walkers, perambulators. The lawns are filled with disc throwers, ball kickers, but only one picnic: six college-aged women sporting six unnatural hair colors, looking grand on their blanket atop a hill. Many of the exercisers come in family units, with way more dads than usual. As a rule, younger kids seem happy: My parents are around all the time now! Teenaged kids seem unhappy: My parents are around all the time now!
Some of the conversations are typical. On Vanderbilt, near the top of the park:
Mom [exasperated, to one of her two boys, 8 and 6]: “Oh, I’m very confident you can do it. I’m confident you have the capacity.”
6-year-old: [Inaudible]
8-year-old: “Mom, he can’t do it.”
Mom [ignoring the 8-year-old]: “I’m not confident you have the desire to try to do it. But I know that you can.”
6-year-old: “Mawwwwmmm!”
In the park, two women in their early 40s walk north, one in floppy beach hat, school-marm glasses, the other in baseball cap, school-marm glasses.
Beach hat: “That’s so great! And it’s so great that it doesn’t involve any screens!”
Baseball cap: “Oh, he does it on a screen. It’s on his iPad. It’s all set up with the grid and everything.”
Beach hat: “Oh.”
Baseball cap [defensive]: “OK, but here’s why I think it’s good for him…”
Some of the conversations reflect the moment.
Scene 1: Man [in his mid-30s, buffed like a personal trainer, in workout gear and a sheen of sweat, talking earnestly on his phone]: “Look, my meditation practice works for me. But if you’re busting at the seams, saying you’ve just gotta get out of there — I mean, I’ve told you what I can tell you.”
Scene 2: Woman [in her 30s, pushing a stroller, to a man in his 30s]: “I think we’ve got to get her out of there.”
Man: [inaudible]
Woman [voice rising]: “If she doesn’t have visitors for — what? Two weeks? More? — I don’t think she’s going to make it!”
I continue south, pick up The Kid. She declined to leave the house early to meet me midway, so I tell her we’ll walk somewhere else.
“But I want to walk in the park.”
“I’ve already walked in the park. You decided to wait, to do the thing you wanted to do more and put off the thing you wanted to do less. When you do that, sometimes you lose choices.”
“But I needed to finish watching my video!”
“That’s what I’m saying. You chose to do that. Now you don’t have a choice about where to walk.”
“But it was an educational video!”
“I’m sure. What was it called?”
“DrawingWiffWaffles.”
“Waffles? Why do you need to draw waffles? Or are you using the waffles themselves to draw? Is that with or without syrup?”
“Dad. It’s not about drawing waffles, and it’s not about drawing with waffles. Waffles is an artist. She has a YouTube channel, and she shows you how to draw characters. She’s really good.”
“And the channel is called Drawing With Waffles?”
“Not ‘with.’ DrawingWiffWaffles. The ‘with’ has two f’s. It’s all one word.”
“That sounds annoying.”
“You say that about everything!”
“I say that everything is annoying? That’s certainly not true.”
“Dad. You say that about so many things. You say it all the time!”
“Well, only about annoying things.”
We walk east along Church Street, cross Ocean, Flushing, Bedford, Nostrand, to a small street featuring a row house where The Girlfriend last week had a purchase offer accepted. (Was it only last week?) Whether the sale goes through seems impossible to predict. (She has to sell her house in southern California; the owner wants to move his family to South Carolina. Are real estate markets frozen? Will banks be giving mortgages? Whatever answers seem right today will surely change by next week.) The “For Sale” sign remains up. The neighbor’s cherry tree has burst into blossom, making the whole block seem cheerful. I take pictures, text them to The Girlfriend.
The Kid says a friend is drawing pictures of characters The Kid created for a story called “Spumoni.” My daughter wrote 70 pages last year; she likes the characters and the situations and the narrative arc, but she wrote it so long ago that now she hates the writing, has started over: “My writing’s changed a lot in the last year.”
“That’s good to realize. It’s also good to realize that you don’t have to throw the whole thing out — that parts are worth saving. You can revisit ideas through your whole life.”
“Yeah. But I wish I was good at more than just one thing. Like my friend is good at writing and drawing. My drawing’s terrible.”
“I don’t think your drawing’s terrible. But you have to be willing to be bad at something for a while to get good at it. Think about your writing from last year. Think about your writing from when you were 9, or 6.”
[Theatrical shudder] “Anyway, it’s too late for me to start now.”
“That’s the silliest thing you’ve said all day. Should I say something fatherly about that?”
“Please don’t.”
An ice cream truck’s siren song tinkles a block ahead. Two days ago I’d prohibited her from visiting an ice cream truck, but it turned out the Co-Parent had let her buy one if she promised to wash her hands upon her return. Hearing that, I let her get her usual: chocolate soft-serve in a cup. The seller wears gloves — did they always do that?
I text the Co-Parent that the kid is walking the last few blocks herself, while I head south to The Girlfriend’s house. I text a picture of the kid eating ice cream.
“Sigh,” Co-Parent texts back. “I know I caved a couple days ago, but we are in a new world each day.” Pause. “Scared.”
“I hear you,” I write. “I agree. No more food trucks.”
“No more anything,” she writes.
“Check,” I write.
No comments:
Post a Comment