I’m ready for a new season. Ready to move past this pandemic. Or this version of the pandemic. The novel Coronavirus and whatnot. Doesn’t seem so novel to me. More irritating than anything else. And deadly.
I’m ready for something else. I’ve spent nearly a year indoors. With my family. Don’t get me wrong. I love my boys. And my wife. And I’m grateful to have spent so much time with them. But Samson is 5. And Solomon is 7. Have you spent a year cooped up with a 5 year-old and a 7 year-old? Working from home. Doing school from home. Everything from home. I’m not sure how to describe the experience. It has been something else. Part of me is ready for something else.
We are sending the boys back to school in a few weeks. They’ve been doing virtual school all year. Kindergarten and 1st Grade. Don’t get me wrong. Their teachers have been great. I’m no fan of staring at a screen all day, but the boys are learning all sorts of school things. Solomon and Samson’s reading and math skills are remarkable. Social skills? I don’t know. But I don’t know how much better that will be in school. Masks and social distance and whatnot. I think virtual schooling has been fine. But the boys need to get out of the house. Get away from their mom and dad. Move through the world a little. Masked and socially distanced.
Man, this has been a strange year.
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I can’t believe it has been a year. Seems like only yesterday that Rudy Gobert was licking microphones. The NBA was cancelling games. Penn State decided to move to virtual learning. I remember a phone call I had with my comrades at Happy Valley Improv. We discussed whether or not to cancel our classes.
“We could just delay the classes two weeks?” Somebody asked.
At the time, I remember thinking that was reasonable. Surely we’d be able to get back together in two weeks.
And then a month passed. And another and another. And here we are. February of 2021 and the pandemic rages.
But folks are getting vaccinated now. That was part of our thinking in sending the boys back to school. Teachers are starting to get their shots. So it feels a little kinder sending our kids to back to the classroom. Hopefully the numbers drop. And maybe we can begin to move past this moment. Get out of the house. Back into the world. See other people. I’m so sick of virtual meetings. Remote classrooms. Zoom. I write about it every week. But it doesn’t become any less true. I’d like to place a pipe bomb in my computer. Watch it go up in flames. Like this past year.
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I can’t say what happens next. The virus. The seething political tensions in this country. The pent up trauma of a year indoors. All sorts of little hits and losses along the way. I clench my teeth and keep doing my thing. Not much else to do. I’ll be curious to see what it’s like to come out of this season. Process what has happened. Step into something else.
Will I ever be able to walk through a store without a mask? Sit in a restaurant without feeling strange? Pass a coughing stranger without wincing a little? Step foot in a classroom and sit down next to a student without a second thought? I have to think the answer to those questions is yes. But I also have to think it will be an adjustment.
Nothing more to say this week. I’m starting to imagine moving past this year of the pandemic. And maybe that is wishful thinking. But it seems to me, at least, that things will start changing as folks get vaccinated. That seems like a good thing to me. And our boys are going back to school. About a year after they were first sent home because of the novel Coronavirus. Not to be confused with the navel Coronavirus.
And you know what? Our boys stayed home from school for most of February last year because they were sick. We thought it was a horrible flu at the time. A terrible cough. Intense fever. Exhaustion. All of us got it. Samson and Solomon were down for weeks. In retrospect, it may have been that we caught some early cases of the novel Coronavirus. Or we had a bug. Who knows? What I do know is this. I want people to be healthy. And I want some social interaction. And I want a nice long break from Zoom meetings.
That, my friends, is all. I’m ready for something else.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 