by Peggy Robin
If you’re working from home, or you’ve been laid off, or you
have rearranged your life to fit the shelter-in-place new world, it’s easy to
lose the distinction between the weekend and the regular old Monday-to-Friday
drill. But when you start losing track of the days of the work week, then you
know you’re in trouble….a sensation that’s been perfectly summed up by a
current internet meme:
The fuzziness of the days is not helped by reading the
virtual Washington Post either. It’s the version that pops up on your
computer, as opposed to the one that lands with a thud on your doorstep – or
maybe in your bushes --wrapped up in an bright orange or dull gray plastic
wrapper. Prime example of a WaPo time-slide was the recent story about how
apartment dwellers are dealing with the news that someone in their building has
tested positive for coronavirus. If you take your Post online, it was Monday,
April 20 when you read about it. But if you get your WaPo in the form of black,
smearable ink on newsprint, then you didn’t know a thing about it until you
unfolded the paper on the morning of Wednesday, April 22, and saw the story on the
front page. (I like using this article as my example, because it happens to be
about a topic that was first discussed on the Cleveland Park Listserv way back
on March 28 – and the Listserv was featured prominently as a source of some of
the arguments described in the article.)
If you’re confused by the strange flow of days, how are your
children handling it? Do they miss their formerly timed-to-the-minute
schedules? The lives of Cleveland Park children have long been reputed to be
planned out like precision drills, each day packed with lessons, enrichment
programs, sports practices, music lessons, play rehearsals, chess club, not to
mention running up new records at Minecraft, while translating Japanese haiku
in Latin, as they’re shuttled between activities in giant SUVs. Now that they’re no longer
out of the house for seven to ten hours of the school day, how are they
spending all that unruly, free-form time? Are they learning to flow with the
circadian rhythms of nature? Or are they just getting squirrelly? Or do you
wonder how this bizarre episode in history has filtered into their subconscious
and will drive them in unknown ways for the rest of their lives?
You may not find out until one day, far into the future,
your child writes what turns out the be the great American novel of Coronavirus
era.
In the meantime, speaking of children and literature, here’s
a repurposed children’s classic to produce a rueful smile of the day (which, by
the way, is still Thursday):
“Alexander and the Day That Blended Into Every Other Day
Like Some Kafkaesque Nightmare with No Merciful End In Sight”
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The “Stay In” column (formerly known as the “Get Out!”
events column) is published on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is
Local on Thursdays. Or is it Fridays?
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