I have started planning for summer camp being cancelled.
We’ve been hunkered down since March 13, when Kick’s school closed and my job sent everybody to work from home. Mr. A has worked from home for years, but usually he travels to meet with co-workers or for office obligations; all of that, several trips’ worth, has been forbidden.
We hoped Kick’s school closing would be short-lived; it’s a large school, 400 elementary kids, but a neighborhood one, the kind where everybody comes from the same 12 blocks. Nobody anybody knew was sick, then. So I held out for April 1 which has, of course, come and gone. Then May 1, which won’t matter now: school’s closed, everything’s closed.
I then set my sights on summer camp being our return to normalcy. She signed up back in February. She would swim, and skate, and play games and make crafts and most importantly, hang out with her friends. But our neighborhood festivals into June and July have all been cancelled, and now I’m starting to think summer camp won’t happen either.
She hasn’t asked about it, and we are careful to talk about how lucky we are: A secure home, Mom and Dad’s work that continues, plenty of options to play, video calls with friends. (As if children ever know any lives but their own.) Mr. A and I talk at night, lesson plans, dividing the day, enriching and distracting, and every once in a while ask each other: How does this END?
The mouthbreathing astroturfing protesters wanting to “open” the “economy” are, of course, ridiculous and racist and dumb, but the question they raise is one that has no answer.
I am so angry at everyone who voted for this man. For the party that made him happen because it was either him or lose power. I am so angry at anyone who thought this kind of chaos was acceptable so they could put others in their place. None of this had to happen.
The problems it has exposed — the absurdity of American health care, crushing debts and expenses, the frayed and small and mean thing we dare call a safety net — are precisely why we all should have voted against the GOP in the first place and always should have.
I would like to say that’s how this ends but that’s NOVEMBER, it cannot possibly, except it can, and even then: To re-hire all the people Trump’s people fired, to make the Senate function, to scare every ex-Nixon bagman back into his hole, to make Stephen Miller build his own catapult and launch himself into the sun, to undo the bans and gag rules and rebuild any kind of trust.
Months. Years, lost to this, and even if there’s a vaccine fucking Fox News will convince 2/3 of Americans not to take it. States are already reorganizing into safe areas and danger zones; I was JOKING the other day about a Midwestern non-aggression pact that would only include Indiana if they BEHAVED, and then within 12 hours everyone sane was like “what if we just pretended we could be our own country” and did it.
None of this had to happen. We made it happen, and we are trying to figure out how to live in it, and the only hope I have, besides the forlorn one of my kid in a pool, is that we remember that this is always how it is, that we are always the ones who make the world. We should think harder about how we do it.
A.
Here’s the whole damn album. It epitomizes the West Coast cool Jazz of that era. It’s a genuine classic:
