Time-Out, GenX

Get home for dinner before the street lights turn on, I reminisced tonight, as the hum of the mercury lights kicked on nearby. Nostalgia is seeping into the quiet corners of my corona lock-down experience. It’s taken a few days for me to identify the subtle flavor in my thoughts…it’s childhood, GenX.

I was a suburban cul-de-sac kid who dimly remembers the patterned bell-bottoms and long gas-lines of late 1970s. My formative childhood spanned the entire decade of the 80s: I proudly sported Keds, neon, and, eventually, Levi’s 501 acid-wash button-fly jeans before blasting off to college in Seattle in 1991 to dive flanneled-head-first into grunge music ecstasy. A textbook case of St. Elmo’s Fire-Singles-Say Anything GenX, Chandler Bing.

Back then, no cell phones, no internet, no email, and certainly no significant college-prep pressure. Before braces, Aqua-Net bangs, and blind teen-devotion to Duran Duran in the late 80s, I remember banding together after school most days with neighborhood kids on our BMX bikes or ten-speeds to chat about Atari, argue over who would end up like Indiana Jones, and flip open-shut-open our paper-flower origami fortune tellers in exchange for a wristful of jelly bracelets or beaded friendship pins for our shoelaces. I spent hours immersed in all-season outdoor fun with friends, siblings, and loyal free-roaming off-leash neighborhood hounds, who happily left their own yards to keep a guardian’s watch over each of us kids as people in their pack. The universal rule for safety back then: make sure you’re home for dinner before the street lights turn on.

This is where the Great Time-Out for the corona virus now is beginning to feel distantly familiar. Not the pandemic physical distancing part, of course. And not the part now flush with electronic social connectivity. Rather, it’s the down-time. My tap-root nostalgia is sprouting from the sudden lull of Game-Off, the mandatory stay-home, and the evaporation of going out for…well…anything. Welcome back, Kotter…to the dinnertime routine of childhood – only this time, you’re the mom.

Without this viral Time-Out, I didn’t think there was enough organic willpower in my entire soul that would have kept me voluntarily so tethered to home, planning and cooking meals for my family day-after-day (especially when added to working full-time and helping my husband, also working, manage home schooling for our first-grader). That’s not to say that I don’t love cooking, or eating, or caring for my family. It’s just that I’m so accustomed to going out for a bite, running out to the store, zipping over to cross off yet another errand on my endless To-Do list. The brakes have screeched to a halt on decades-old routine and the smell of burnt rubber is hanging in the air. This corona virus Time-Out has set me down on the bench, finger wagging in my face, after years of go-go-go. What an unexpected turn of events and here’s my silver lining:

With each passing meal, family board game, and antiquated playtime ritual, I am reacquainting myself, courtesy of my 6-year-old, with how fun it is to Make Believe with action figures while the satisfying smell of simmering supper rolls into the room. I have not been able to discipline myself to slow down this much before now – it’s taken an external, existential pathogen threat, coupled with everyone else in the world being forced to slow down simultaneously.

By comparison, my playtime efforts with my daughter before the corona lock-down was a distracted, multitasking competition at best, and non-existent at worse. What began as an agonizing restriction from the usual mountain of working-mom tasks, has turned into a gift of time. And this gift of time has brought me back to the time before the internet age.

Right now, while the music has stopped, I can hear my thoughts more loudly, more clearly. Dusty projects beckon like old friends, not heavy anchors at the bottom of my task list. I hope I can use this momentary time capsule, with all noise suspended, to reconnect securely to the time before every crack in my daily schedule was grouted with anxiety for what I wasn’t getting done quickly enough. At the moment, cooking, playing, doing projects at an andante tempo feels like putting on an old comfortable T-shirt…and a pair of Flash Dance leg warmers to boot.

I wonder who else from my chill generation is noticing the same.

P.S. And the training continues… another satisfying use of time and social distance.

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