Incubation

We have been kind of quarantined for over three years now. Ever since Annaka strolled out of Pittsburgh with her brand new liver back in April of 2017, our family has had to take precautions to keep her exposure to germs seriously limited. At first that meant just about what it means now – she’s at home and so are we. We restricted our traveling for essentials and when we came home we washed our hands, closed the curtains, and threw our clothes into the washing machine. 

Over time that protocol relaxed. She could leave the house but we kept some Germ-X in her diaper bag and even used an enclosed stroller for talking walks. If we knew someone ill would be attending a gathering (or might have been ill even in the past few days) we stayed home. At first that hurt some feelings and even caused some pretty intense arguments between the two of us, but over time Annaka’s inner circle ended up on the same page. (Or at least we were all reading the same chapter.)

A year ago she started preschool; a month ago she climbed the Arch.

Ah, the good old days.

Sometimes my wife’s ability to predict the future is annoyingly uncanny. For example, she diagnosed Annaka’s biliary atresia weeks before blood tests confirmed her worst fears at a time in my life when I couldn’t help but think of the A-Team each time she used the term’s initials. I still pity the fool that I once was.

She also predicted that Annaka would need a live liver donation to survive, as opposed to a cadaver, and she also had a weird hunch that Nancy's liver would be the match.

Thus, in mid-January, when she started spending more time on her smartphone researching the spread of COVID-19 and started saying insane-sounding things like, “Two months from now we’ll all be on lockdown,” I didn’t have the luxury of calling her crazy. I just took a deep breath, pretended I didn’t hear her, and squirted another dab of Germ-X into my hands.

And so here we are again. Quarantined.

Here we all are, or, at least those of us lucky enough to be considered nonessential. (And while I have this forum, a sincere thank you to all still working to keep our society afloat. You people are the 101^st Airborne in this biological world war.)

Here we are, biding our time, scrolling through one meme after another. Some of them are pretty crass, but the clever ones help us smile and even keep things in perspective. My favorite so far has a picture of a perturbed-looking Anne Frank, seemingly scolding us from beyond the grave for whining about being quarantined in a house with the Internet, central heating and microwave ovens.

Things could be worse, she seems to be saying. Things were worse, and, unfortunately, things will likely get worse, at least in the short term.

But we will get through this. It won’t be easy. People we know will get sick; some of them will die, and perhaps for as dumb a reason as someone felt the “need” to socialize.

Our economy will struggle. It will be years until things are back to “normal,” as if that is even a word worth keeping in a language that also contains terms like  “unbiased opinion” or “functioning Congress.”

But we will get through this, and speaking of words, a former Unit 40 teacher and Facebook friend posted some helpful words a couple days ago, about the trials and tribulations of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo. He pointed out that during the Wilder’s early years of marriage a hailstorm ruined their first wheat crop, a drought wrecked their second, and then the barn holding what little grain they had burned down. (And in a time before crop insurance and global food distribution, such events often meant starvation or financial ruin.)

They both suffered diphtheria and became deathly ill. After recovering, Almanzo suffered a stroke and would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, which is a serious liability for a farmer even today, but excruciating before the advent of mechanized labor.

Their infant son died two weeks after childbirth, and soon afterwards their daughter Rose accidently burnt down their house.

Pretty rough stuff.

She survived, though. She survived and became one of the most important American authors of the 19^th century.

Like Anne Frank’s story, her story can help keep things in perspective.

In closing and concerning perspective, last year in second grade, my son received the privilege of watching chicks hatch. His class incubated eggs and were thrilled when the baby birds found their way into the open, and so I used that term—incubation—to try to explain to him what our lives would look like in the coming weeks.

We were being incubated, I said, not quarantined. We were trying to keep Annaka safe, trying to keep us all safe. The day would come when we “crack” out of the house and return to the park, play baseball with our friends, swim again in pools. For right now, though, we would need to stay home and grow.

He seemed all right with that idea. After all, he’s been reminding us to wash our hands for over three years.

Quarantine

So apparently this was not the season to give up news for Lent. I’ve just been informed that I will need to stay home for at least two weeks. After discussing the issue with my wife, who, with her science background and willingness to avoid the rabbit hole that is mass media in an effort to separate legitimate information from whatever it was that convinced people to buy thousands of rolls of toilet paper, it turns out we are all going to die.

More on that later, but first I want to use this forum to offer some insight into the pandemic itself, along with its cultural repercussions.

For starters, no one needs that much toilet paper. Toilet paper is really not that hard to make; it’s paper. The truck with the toilet paper will be back with more toilet paper. And besides that, it’s a fairly modern invention, anyway, so even if you do get into a situation where you really do not have toilet paper in your house, this is not an emergency. Please stop buying all of the toilet paper.

Secondly, “I can’t believe they cancelled the tournament! What’s the big deal? It’s only killing old people,” is not that strong of an argument. Old people are not mice. Besides that, we are not actually living in a world without sports. Sports are still here; pick up a basketball and go dribble off your feet. Public viewing of sports will return. This “cancelling-of-sporting-events-thing” has been a real litmus test for our priorities, and I don’t think we want to see the lab results.

Finally, putting the momentary brake on large gatherings of people—the practice known as social distancing, which, as an introvert, I have been perfecting for decades now—only works as a strategy if you actually stay home. This is easy for me to say, of course; my wife and I are both teachers and our kids are too young to have actual jobs. We will basically stay put for a couple weeks, with them in the house playing video games and LEGOs while I’m outside in the yard slowly moving sticks from one pile of sticks to another pile of sticks.

However, some amount of “moving about the cabin” is necessary for most people at this point. Treating the absence from school and/or work as some kind of bonus spring break, though, and shuffling yourself and your family from one public place to another, not only defeats the purpose, it could make the problem worse. Social distancing is not about stopping the outbreak; it’s about slowing it down to the point where our health infrastructure, which is already redlining it this time of year even under ideal circumstances, isn’t overwhelmed to the point like it is in some parts of the world, where some doctors have to make choices they ought never need to make outside of a war zone.

Speaking of war zones, the British author C.S. Lewis lived through more than one, first as a soldier during World War I and then again as a civilian during Nazi attacks decades later. After World War II, contemplating the new reality of the atomic age, trying to come to terms, as all survivors were, of now living on a planet where hundreds of thousands of people could be destroyed in moments, he had this to say:

“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’”

In other words? We really are, all of us, going to die someday.

Granted, if you’re young and healthy now, it’s very unlikely you will die of COVID-19, or of the flu, or of any of the other viral infections lurking around every corner.

 Health is relative, however, and health is finite.

C.S. Lewis understood that, and he wrestled with it, just as humans will always wrestle with their own mortality. But he also understood, as clearly as he understood that the sun would rise in the morning and illuminate his day, that God was sovereign. He understood that Jesus was real, as a human and historical figure, but also as God incarnate. He understood that Christ offered the gift of not only a life more abundant here and now, but of a life more abundant starting now, and for all eternity.

We are about halfway through Lent, and regardless of where you are spiritually, and especially if you are feeling anxiety, consider giving up a few moments of your day reading God’s word, which Psalm 119 calls “A lamp for my feet and a light for my path.” Moving forward, we could all use more light in our lives.

Travel 2.0

This year I gave up news for Lent, which seems to have been good timing since so little is going on right now. However, it does mean I have to reflect inward even more so than usual, which brings us to today’s topic.

About five years ago I wrote the most controversial guest column of my entire guest columnist career. Even more provocative than abortion or taxes, this subject inspired people to approach me in public and say things like, “Thank you for writing that column; it totally captured what I’ve been trying to tell my parents for years,” and “That article was dumb, and, by extension, so are you.”

The column in question was from the spring of 2015 and it broached what was apparently the very sensitive topic of traveling youth sports. In it I suggested—only half-jokingly—that I hoped my daughter didn’t take after her mother when it came to her athletic skills, knowing that if she did my life as a person who enjoys staying home on the occasional weekend to do things like nothing would effectively be over.

The point I tried to make—after emphasizing that how people parent their own kid was not really any of my business as long as no one toilet-papered my house—was that traveling youth sports, taken to the extreme, is an enormous commitment. It is a commitment of money but more importantly time.

Some people agreed with me; many people did not, and life continued.

The birthright, of course, of all children, is to someday force their parents to eat their words, and trust me, I. Am. Bloated.

 Because at the time—five years ago—I had one daughter playing summer league softball a couple nights a week, a couple months out of the year.

She liked softball, but then she also liked basketball. And she’s also a swimmer, and so she’s on the swim team. And her brother is on the swim team, too, both in the summer and the winter, and he plays basketball and baseball, sometimes on the same night, and for about ten Saturdays in early fall he chases a soccer ball around a soccer field.

Their little sister is only four, but she will be playing t-ball this summer and will likely follow in their pruney footsteps before long by also joining the swim team. (And, if there was a sport for household furniture climbing, she would, indeed, be on that team, as well.)

So what, in Effingham, happened? What happened to the idea that my kids would avoid this America apostasy that deifies sports in general and idolizes youth sports in particular?

Part of it is just physics—inertia, specifically, coupled with momentum. After all, once you commit to one sport it’s easier to commit to another. Once you’ve purchased the equipment, it seems foolish not to use it again. Gravity, too, plays a part. Once a friend is on a team, the pull to that team only grows stronger.

Part of it is just leisure. We don’t have to grow our own food or chase random animals off our property, so we can just sit and watch children chase a ball out of bounds. Our kids, too, have leisure time, so we believe we must fill it up, and playing a healthy game of basketball is certainly better than video games, right? It’s certainly better than smoking drugs or doing beer.

The number one reason, however, that we have joined the calendar-stacked decadence that is nightly practices followed by weekend contests can be summed up with one simple idea:

I am annoying.

This is not shocking, of course, but some context is in order.

            What drew us to travel basketball initially—and I use the term “travel” loosely, as the furthest we’ve actually travelled is Mt. Zion—were the coaches, both of whom we knew well enough to know that they were also good people. They were, and are, reasonable adults that understand that sports is simply one part of life, and that how competitors—players and coaches alike—conduct themselves is much more important than the final score. The swim coaches, too, are good people who can inspire both children to burn more calories in a single hour than we can in an entire week.

These thoughtful adults, along with my son’s baseball and basketball coaches, along with their teachers and their youth group leaders, are all part of an increasingly important circle of influence. As kids grow up and begin the lifelong process of creating a self beyond their parents, we’ve learned that they will need to hear solid advice from adults with whom they do not share an address.

Why is that so important? Because, as mentioned, sometimes parents really are annoying. Sometimes we’re just a bit—extra, is the word?—and sometimes, because it’s constant, the message itself can lose its potency.

I can tell my kid to hustle to the car all Sunday morning and we’ll still sneak in three songs into the service. His coach would likely get him there in time to greet the preacher.

In closing, coaches are not surrogate parents, and it would be inappropriate to expect them to be. (As a teacher for over twenty years, the last message I want to send is that it’s OK to let other grownups do the difficult job of actual parenting.) However, it does help to have reinforcements. It is absolutely helpful to have multiple adults in a child’s life reinforcing the basics: “Hustle, work hard and listen; show up early and leave late; clean up your own mess; own your own choices.”

And equally important, according to everyone I talk to nowadays:

“Wash your dirty hands.”