When my daughter, Alana, was 2½, we decided to take a five-week cross-country road trip.
We prepared her for weeks by talking about “The Big Trip,” stocking up on her favorite foods and buying a boom box so we could play her music CDs, since our old car only had a radio. As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, Alana asked for popcorn, then Roger Tincknell’s “The Bear Missed the Train.”
“OK,” she said when the song was over. “Let’s go home.” We had made it from Northampton to Holyoke.
As I marked my first week of yoga-by-Zoom and entertainment by live-streamed musicians twanging guitars in their kitchens, I’m was feeling like my daughter, cramped in that car seat, traveling farther and farther from the reliable anchors of her day.
Of course, we didn’t go home. We kept going. “Can we go to the Y playground?” Alana asked. And when I said we couldn’t, she asked, “What about Jackson Street?”
In terms of this isolation, it feels like we’re barely past the New York border, just a couple of hours into a long haul. And like Alana, I’m quickly discovering that the allure of change is not as great as the reality. Sure, who wouldn’t want to stay home in their pajamas and binge-watch a series, or have their days unfold like an empty canvas on which you can write or paint all day?
But, ultimately we’re social animals, even those of us like me, who lean introvert. When I hike in the woods every day (a habit I developed way before hiking was one of the few options for entertainment, back when I had a dog) I find myself, like a dog, salivating at everyone who passes by. Someone to say hello to — a human connection, even if it has to be at a 6-foot distance. This feels more real to me than hearing disembodied yoga instructions and seeing my friends in little squares on a Zoom screen.
And while an occasional at-home movie, or free artsy live-stream, or evening of YouTube surfing is a lovely digression, making this a nightly habit has begun to feel annoying. Too much screen time. I’d rather read a book, or sing to my own playlist. Actually, I’d rather go out — to my writing group, or my choir, or to see real musicians, or even to a tense political meeting.
Then there’s the danger of getting too “coronusional,” a word comedian Benji Lovitt, defines as the belief that you’ll use your quarantine time to get everything done that you’ve put off for your entire adult life. I’m limiting this to only one goal for now: deep-cleaning my house, a decision spurred by choosing not to have my house cleaner come for a while, though I’m committed to paying her. Somehow this feels more gratifying than watching YouTube — maybe because I can look out the windows while I clean them.
Eventually Alana fell into the rhythm of the trip. And we made sure to satisfy her as much as we could. We stopped several times a day to look for playgrounds. At night, whether we were camping, staying with friends, or at some lonely motel, we let Alana stay up as late as she wanted to get her ya-yas out. Once, when there were reported sightings of a bear and we were picking up every single Cheerio she’d dropped near the tent, she freaked. “The bear won’t come, will it?”
“Bears don’t like Cheerios,” I told her. A hopeful lie.
“Can we go to the Y playground tomorrow?”
As we get a little farther along on this road, I’m grudgingly making peace with not doing yoga with other humans in a real studio and not going out for coffee afterward (my equivalent of the Y playground). And while I’m feeling the mental equivalent of being stuck in a car seat for 5,000 miles, I’m making the best of it, calling and messaging my friends more often, even friends I’m not usually in touch with.
Amazing how prescribed distancing makes us feel that pull for connection that we often take for granted. And in staying home, I’m connecting to a greater humanity, all of the people I don’t know whose lives I might save.
So when Trump said he wanted to reopen by Easter, I wanted to tell him to stop being a 2-year-old. We’re not there yet. Deal with it.
D. Dina Friedman is a local writer and activist. She is the author of two YA novels, “Escaping Into the Night” and “Playing Dad’s Song,” and one book of poetry, “Wolf in the Suitcase.”