Pandemic Pause
March – September 2020
The last six months have been as strange for us as for everyone. When we were enjoying the Open House weekend back in March, the coronavirus was a distant storm cloud. It was a worrying news item, but not a part of our everyday consciousness. Less than two weeks later, on March 19, the California governor announced lock down measures. It felt as if the whole world had hit the pause button, and nothing has been the same since.
We have to preface our thoughts with the acknowledgment that God has blessed us in many ways, and we have not faced the extreme hardships so many people have endured due to the pandemic and resulting disruptions. This blog post and those that follow offer some reflections, but not they are not meant to be complaints.
March and April were very strange months. Bob’s school extended its spring break, so for the first few weeks of the slow down he was on vacation. Meanwhile, Meredith worked remotely most days and went into the office just twice a week. Her assistant was working entirely remotely, and did so for several months, so Meredith had to do all the office tasks as well as her regular work. She became intimately familiar with the Pitney Bowes postage meter, a machine she has always disliked. When Bob did return to work later in the spring, he taught entirely remotely. Many students were missing in action, because the school district had decided as a policy matter that no student’s grades could be lowered from what they were in mid-March. Consequently, no assignments were required to be done for the rest of the spring semester; everything was extra credit. The remote platforms the teachers used were a mishmash and often did not work well.
We canceled our planned spring break trip; we had planned to see our children in Washington and Ohio. Of course, opera and theater performances were canceled, and Meredith’s rowing club suspended all in person activities, both rowing and social.
One of the hardest things for us was the closing of the churches. We always attend Sunday Mass, and Meredith often goes to Mass on Wednesday mornings before work. In the immediate aftermath of the lock down, we streamed the Masses which Bishop Baron was posting online through the Word on Fire website, and soon afterwards our parish started posting videos of both daily and Sunday Masses. Although Masses at church resumed a few months ago, our parish continues to offer its video Masses online, both Sunday and daily, for the benefit of those who cannot attend in person for health reasons.
During our “binary confinement” we have broken out the corn hole game, and we play it in the backyard from time to time.
We were saddened not to go out for a nice brunch on Easter Sunday. For the last couple of years we have enjoyed the Easter Brunch offered at the Abbey, so when we received an email from the Hornblower Cruise company, which runs that site, saying that they were offering Easter brunch in a “to go” box, we signed up. We drove down to Hillcrest to pick up our box and took a walk in the neighborhood as well.
Meredith took up jigsaw puzzles, to have something to do at home other than TV and reading. In honor of the Washington kids we didn’t get to see in March, she put together a puzzle of Whidbey Island.
Bob soon joined her in putting the puzzles together. We now have the card table set up permanently in the living room – why not, we are not having company over! – to hold the current puzzle in progress.