Today was mostly a lovely start to November. I have learned to go to bed at my usual time on the night of the fall time change, even though no one will wake me up at 5am the morning after. This makes the morning feel luxurious, since you can sleep until you wake up and it will still be early according to the clock.
Cheech and I took a long walk through the quad. The trees there have been good for my sense of perspective all through the pandemic. A few of them were planted before the Civil War, and they have seen worse years than this one. One day all of this will be behind us, the trees assure me. And they are glorious right now, their last leaves lifted up in a golden hosanna.
Cheech thought we should read Jeremiah together (Jamie's thought bubble: You weigh 35 pounds, you goober; you are not a lapdog.)
Then he thought he would attend Mass:
No part of the sentence "so the dog went to virtual Mass" would have made sense in 2019, but here we are.
Sundays are Zoom chat day for my college roommates and me, which has been a pandemic silver lining. All Saints' Day is also known as Bargain Chocolate Day in this household, so the kids and I walked together to CVS to scope out the bargain chocolate offerings. I usually make a point of keeping my work email closed on Sundays, but I accidentally looked at it today and got a piece of unexpected good news: an R&R (with freakishly gentle comments from the reviewers) for paper #2 of the semester. That puts me at 3 R&Rs for my 3 submitted manuscripts, one easy revision, one average revision, one brutal (but mostly finished) revision.
We played a game of Wingspan that involved lots of laughter and a little help from the dog--
--and ordered in calzones for dinner.
But in between the board game and the calzones I talked to Alex over FaceTime. These days he is my calmest kid, the one who takes everything in stride, and he was talking about whether we might be able to make it work for him to come home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or both. I've been assuming that this is just a non-starter -- there doesn't seem to be a safe way to manage a quick trip when we can't count on spending much time outside. And although I might be willing to risk COVID to have my family together, I feel a responsibility to help keep the numbers down instead of helping to drive them up.
I had been telling myself sensible mature things like "All large families find it harder to get everybody together for the holidays as the kids get older" and "It's one Christmas. You can handle one weird Christmas." But the idea that Alex is sad about being away from us for the holidays is like an anvil falling on my fragile good intentions. Part of me just wants to tell him, "Get on a plane! It will probably be fine!'
Scaled up across many sad moms, though, that reaction is pretty much the direct route to things being not-at-all fine.
So here is another pandemic snapshot, I guess: glorious autumn sunshine streaming across an empty quad, the strange new normal of virtual Mass and virtual conversations, dining room table hilarity that morphs into dining room table tears-dripping-into-my-calzone. This is the weirdest year.
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