Not What I Expected

At the beginning of March, my calendar of events started shrinking. Our list of places to go and things to do was quite substantial. We had baseball tickets and museum passes. Memorial Day weekend was going to be spent strapped into some of the best coasters in the world. Adam and I were headed out to LA to spend time with CJ. And those are just the items that came to me off the top of my head.

Many of those early days were spent chafing under disappointment and frustration—a selfish reaction. I wasn’t proud of myself at the time. I knew better. So I tried to distract myself as best I could. My attempts to move my mind in a better direction even spilled into the blog. The ways to beat the boredom were good suggestions, but I admit it, I didn’t take full advantage of my own list.

But even without throwing myself into exploring different avenues of amusement, I stopped being so irked by the inconvenience of dropping all of our travel plans. So much so that when my sister in law asked if I felt comfortable with the idea of getting on a plane, I had no immediate response. It had not occurred to me to start thinking that in those terms.

What a difference three months makes, I guess.

My attention to the reopening efforts hasn’t been full, nor has it been with great excitement. Which feels weird. It’s nice to see businesses starting to open up. Great, really. I just haven’t been chomping at the bit for any one service or business to be made available to me.

Not to say, I was utterly oblivious to the reopenings. Medusa announced their beer garden was opening on the 11th. Adam made the decision to snag a reservation after a brief but frustrated pout session by yours truly. The shenanigans perpetrated by 2020 got me good this week. I was glad he opted to overturn our initial decision to wait a bit before trying to get a table. Our condo is great, but it was clear I needed a change of scene.

I never got overly excited, though. Maybe my brain was trying to manage expectations. Or it could have been that going out to Medusa was still a regular thing in my mind. I might have been low on the excitement because I was subconsciously afraid it would end up feeling weird rather than the way it should.

After my emotional response in March, I expected to be feverishly refreshing my Google news cards for any update on museums, breweries, amusement parks, movie theaters. That fervor would transfer to the outing itself once allowed to reopen. Apparently not.

Friday night was fun. The experience wasn’t really all that unusual. Except for the masks, of course, and the table service in the garden, it was normal. In fact, it was really refreshing to be out among people. Laughter and music filled the air as we sat at our table, chatting away like we usually do.

This wasn’t the piece of our social puzzle I had been waiting for. Gathering sizes. That was the thing I had my eye on.

You might think that there had been some kind of big gathering planned for 2020- a wedding, an anniversary party, or the like. Nope. Nothing like that. I was waiting for the number to go above five in Rhode Island and ten in Massachusetts. Admitting this makes me think of The Grinch during his epiphany moment. But here it is. The most exciting item on the reopening checklists was the ability to go down to my parents’ house for a Sunday afternoon with my family. Or driving up to the lake to sit around a fire with Adam’s.

Odd to think of our respective nuclear family sizes as large. But with those restrictive numbers, it’s hard to feel any other way. Which really was the point of such measures. And I get why they needed to be in place and why new numbers are in place. So, what we have now is still not an ideal situation, and we still need to take precautions, but it’s better than through Zoom. No offense intended. Honestly, Zoom, you were clutch. But I don’t think we will be repeating Easter dinner via your platform any time soon.

Well, gee, haven’t I penned a sappy piece for you all today? I might as well have a blue checked jumper dress on and my hair in pigtails. There’s no place like home.

I can’t help it. The economic impact of COVID is almost always in the news. It’s social and emotional effects are less so. We are still social creatures meant to be in groups. As we pass into this next phase of coping with COVID, I hope to hear and see more put out about the non-financial consequences. I would think these would be more important than the stock market, but I guess that’s silly. Money is the thing that makes the world go round, doesn’t it?

I’ll put down the sap for today. Stay safe and healthy, Nerd Girls.