This week a good friend asked what I miss the most about normal life. I miss restaurants, hosting friends, pushing babysitter curfews, getting lost in stores. Most of all I miss having plans and taking them for granted -- knowing that something’s coming up that breaks routine, often with people I feel lucky to call friends. I’ve developed a surprisingly masochistic habit of watching events pass by on my Google Calendar, refusing to delete them even though they’ve long since been cancelled.
My kids know they’re missing important things, but fortunately still lack a good sense of time and are blissfully unaware of what was supposed to happen when. If my 4th grader knew he’d have a baseball game this weekend, he’d throw a fit. If my kindergartener knew how many birthday parties would have happened by now, he’d cry. Maybe as you get older it’s not just that your sense of time sharpens, but that you become able (or inclined) to visit that parallel life-- the one that reminds you of where you would be, what you would be doing, and who you’d be with if things were different (or, in this case, if you didn’t worry that those things would put those you love on a ventilator).
I ask myself almost daily why I don’t delete cancelled events from my calendar. They make me sad, but I think they also serve as a reminder that our pandemic routines are not our real routines. Rather, they’re breaks from our real lives that are filled with things we can confidently look forward to. And as I imagine myself in my parallel life -- at a party, a concert, a reunion -- there are optimistic undertones to the sadness I feel, in that I know I’ll be back in that real life soon. I just can’t mark the date in the calendar.
No comments:
Post a Comment