It’s Halloween.
It’s Halloween and my kids are nearing the end of their trick-or-treating careers. At 12 and 14, they no longer hold my hand, a fairy and a monster, eagerly bouncing along the sidewalk until they dash up to the door and yell out “trick or treat!” sliding over their R’s with childish haste and giggles. Now they are stylized anime characters, precisely recreated superheroes, goth teenagers all in black, too cool to wear a coat, too young to feel the cold.
And, of course, this year, they are none of the above.
Pandemic halloween.
Pandemic halloween means that the social media community groups are throwing shade and insults at each other as they fight about safety, selfishness, and their incessant need to put what they want above what they should, throwing death rates around as if even one death is worth it for a bucket full of candy.
But are we any better?
There is no trick-or-treating for us tonight. Instead, each kid gets a single friend over, girls upstairs in the trash pit formerly known as my daughter’s bedroom to watch some unpronounceable anime something-or-other, boys downstairs in the mancave to watch Nightmare Before Christmas. Michael and I will stay in the living room, cleaning up after pumpkin carving, roasting the seeds and drinking bourbon and arguing about whether or not the boys can have candy downstairs. This isn’t really social distancing or quarantining. This is compromise, compromising on the standards we should maintain in order to give the kids—and us—what we want, some semblance of normal. Because we want to. And because we are so tired of should.
com·pro·mise
/ˈkämprəˌmīz/
an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.
settle a dispute by mutual concession.
accept standards that are lower than is desirable.
Monday is my birthday.
Because I have a full day of work tacked on to a full afternoon/evening of parent-teacher conferences (5 minutes each, lined up in a zoom room, no time to pee or even breathe), Tracy and Krista and I went out to dinner last night. It was the first dinner I’d had fully indoors since that last time at rail at the Mayfair in March, before all the restaurants closed. The girls treated me to the most amazing meal at EnVie, a local bistro in downtown Lansing. It was clean, and professional, and socially distant from all strangers; at capacity, the bistro only seats 60. Under current regulations, there were only 8 tables, capacity at 50%, and only half of those were seated. The food was amazing, the company was incredible, the service was fantastic, the wine was spot on, the cake was to die for, and I felt honored—and incredibly privileged-—to be able to put aside the pandemic for two hours and just be.
But of course, I couldn’t put the pandemic aside. I thought about our server who would only get 5 or 8 tables that night. How could he possibly pay his bills on that income? And the bartender, with no rail...how does he even make minimum wage? The cooks in the back wouldn’t get tipped out much; and how does the place keep the lights on? And then at our own table, we were not 6 feet apart. We are friends, but not necessarily always in each other’s pandemic circles. Is that wine, that cake, worth dying for? Do the risks we take to have these moments inherently put others at risk?
Even my own pandemic circle looks more like the model for caffeine than the model for quarantine. And I wonder—I fear—that these compromises we make might compromise others. That we might be part of the problem.
And Thanksgiving is coming.
Thanksgiving is coming and it is cold outside. There is no chance of staying outside. There is no chance of keeping our loved ones safe. There are too many cousins and too many contacts. Everyone is working. Teachers and construction workers and small business owners, we are all surrounded by people daily, out in public. Numbers are spiking all over the state. The public is focused on want over should. And I want to see my family at Thanksgiving. I want to turn my nose up at green bean casserole and I want to eat too many mashed potatoes. I want things to be normal.
But they are not normal. None of this is normal.
And to carry on like everything is normal is to ignore the very real fact that people are dying. When we compromise safety standards, we compromise public health. And I don’t want to compromise the health of my family, of my parents, who are at risk. So many wants and shoulds all blend together: an uncertainty soup, a quarantine casserole, a Thanksgiving conundrum, a disappointment daughter, a recognition that we probably shouldn’t go to Thanksgiving, even though we want to. We want to.
In a few hours I will go and pick up my kids’ friends, and I will carve pumpkins with the kids in the kitchen, and they will watch movies in the basement while I argue with Michael about candy, and I will sit with this uneasiness for a while longer. I will hope that we haven’t compromised too much. I will hope that this pandemic will eventually go away, even though I know it will not go away anytime soon. I will hope that I’m not a part of the problem. I will acknowledge that I probably am. I will hope that we all stay safe. I will hope that’s enough.
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| Photo by Taylor Foss on Unsplash |
Stay safe out there.
Happy Halloween.
