Eating in bed is a weird thing to do, if you think about it. There is a pronounced risk of getting crumbs in the sheets and spilling your coffee, and simply balancing a tray on your lap while you bring fork and knife into action is awkward enough to take a lot of the fun out of two strips of bacon. So where did Axl and Belle get the idea, independently of any suggestion on my part, that what Petra might most appreciate on this year's Mother's Day would be to enjoy breakfast without having to leave the warm embrace of her bed?
Comic strips and cartoon shows, of course. This very Mother's Day saw the venerable *Family Circus* run what I would estimate to be its thousandth iteration of a standard gag concerning Mother's Day breakfasts in bed. The first panel shows the mother lying abed, while, off camera, the children prepare the breakfast with which they plan to surprise her—except, of course, her eyes are open and she is listening to the children saying things like "stop lickin' the spoon" and "don't take the seeds out of the orange juice with your fingers." Then, in the second panel, they enter yelling "surprise" and "we were afraid you'd get out of bed."
This particular strip ran too late to have inspired the children's suggestion that we prepare Petra breakfast in bed this year, of course. But, just as children are estimated to have watched thousands of murders on television by the time they are ten, they are also exposed to innumerable portrayals of the ritual of bringing breakfast to mothers in bed.
It's striking that these portrayals are almost always portrayals of failure. The children's preparations are too loud and spoil the surprise; not knowing their way around the kitchen any better than their amusingly hapless fathers, the meal turns out inedible; in their attempt to observe a holiday that recognizes, among other things, the hard work of mothers during the *rest* of the year, the children and their father leave a horrendous mess in the kitchen that—ha, ha—Mom will of course have to clean up, because, as everyone knows, whoever cooks a meal doesn't have to clean up after it (unless the cook is a mother on days of the week ending in "y").
In other words, from the point of view of the cartoonists and scriptwriters sketching these scenes, Mother's Day breakfast in bed is conceived of as at best irksome and most often a debacle. Nonetheless, generation after generation of children take up the torch of this tradition with the same blithe confidence with which they assemble macaroni necklaces and draw stick-figure portraits of their families, holding hands outside under a bright yellow sun.
Perhaps the children would have suggested Mother's Day breakfast in bed this year no matter what, but I can't help but wonder if the current emergency had them craving this kind of ritual even more than they might have otherwise.
In preparation, earlier in the week Belle casually surveyed Petra concerning her favorite breakfast foods. Both children then helped prepare the eggs with cheese, sausage patty, and avocado toast that had been among the answers. Hearing movement upstairs at one point (and feeling the same concern expressed in that day's *Family Circus*), I dashed off to remind Petra to remain in bed. The children agreed that I would carry the tray up the stairs, to reduce the chances of all of their hard work ending in comic-strip-style catastrophe.
Despite what my long career as a comic-strip reader might have led me to expect, Petra's Mother's Day breakfast in bed turned out be a perfectly delightful quarter hour. I sat leaning against the bed's footboard and took it all in: the children chattering, Petra smiling and chewing gamely, minimal crumbs, no spills.
The children presented their ceremonial drawings. Belle's was a tree—"Mommy likes trees and green"—with heart-shaped foliage. Axl's was a crayon sketch of Malevolence, the Subjugator-class heavy cruiser that is the flagship of General Grievous in *Star Wars: The Clone Wars*. This was seemingly off-topic, but, with "Happy Mother's Day" in a speech bubble emanating from the ship's bridge, it served as a useful reminder that even the worst among us have mothers, who love us despite everything (and no matter if you do botch their breakfast in bed).
I cannot be sure if I ever brought my mother breakfast in bed on Mother's Day. I have some confused memories to that effect, but maybe I'm just remembering reading about it in *Family Circus*.
This year, after Petra was done with breakfast, the children and I drove over to my parents' house with a few items for my mother: a plant Petra had picked out, some homemade cookies, a bag of bagels I'd neglected to hand over after a grocery run a few days earlier.
My mother met us in the garage, and we put everything in her plastic bin, then backed away.
"Happy Mother's Day," I said to her, in the dim garage.
We pantomimed a hug, and then the children and I went back out into the bright yellow sunshine.
The Close Talker was a character on *Seinfeld* in the 1990s, but he was also—like many of the bit parts in that show—a stand-in for a mode of behavior that Jerry Seinfeld had observed out in the world and which rubbed him the wrong way. What was comedic material back then is of course a potentially existential threat now. Keeping our distance from each other seems to be just about the best way to prevent the spread of this damnable virus, with these damnable masks coming in second, but distantly.
Keeping our distance from each other also seems to be increasingly *difficult*, at least for some of us. Within an hour of the monkey wrenching of Wisconsin's regime of emergency statewide closures by its supreme court, pictures appeared on Twitter of crowds coursing through Milwaukee's entertainment district and packing elbow-to-elbow in bars and restaurants. In the pictures I saw, there were no masks in sight.
Some of these people were out for political reasons, taking a stand on the latest front in what seems to be a sort of nationwide staring contest between the "don't tread on me" crowd and the process of natural selection. And no doubt there were in these crowds also a non-zero number of married couples who, even before the virus, had been long past the point of being able to remain civil with each other absent alcohol, menus, and the game visible on a muted flatscreen over the wife's shoulder above the bar.
But a good number of these people probably simply missed each other, just like the rest of us. If there are any benefits to be derived from the current emergency, one of the most important is the opportunity we all now have to consider how rich and free we were once were. It had nothing to do with money—indeed, the acquisition of too much money can sometimes get in the way of the kind of wealth I'm thinking of. Only now do we understand what a true accounting of our most valuable possessions once looked like: greeting friends with a hug or a kiss, sitting for hours talking in bars and coffeeshops, wandering art galleries together, passing joints in the sunshine, and watching the latest Quentin Tarantino movie in the theater on its debut weekend—all free of thoughts about microbes and death. You don't miss your water, etc.
The virus showed us how much we once had in the same fell stroke with which it took it all away, and it is no surprise that even reasonable, well-informed people are starting to chafe in this new poverty. I was unloading groceries from the car a couple of days ago when I had my latest Close Talker experience. This was a neighbor, and not just a neighbor, a friend, someone with whom I have much in common, not like the kind of neighbor you just greet cheerfully and occasionally borrow tools from. He walked over to my car, asked me about our plans for what looked like a beautiful, sunny day, and mused about his own.
Meanwhile, all I could think about was how weirdly close he was standing to me—just three or four feet instead of the mandated six. It is like we all live in a Seinfeld fever dream these days, that character's finicky quirks mutated and medicalized into a matter of life and death.
A fun mental game right now is to imagine how your favorite fictional characters would respond to the pandemic. The other night, I was enjoying picturing Detective Inspector Sean Duffy on social-distancing patrol in the streets of Belfast. Duffy, the star of Adrian McKinty's wonderful *Troubles* series, is a Catholic cop serving in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which means he is hated by both his Protestant coworkers and the IRA.
Having good reasons to check under his car for mercury-tilt-switch bombs every time he goes anywhere, in other words, Duffy wouldn't have much patience with your being too much of a weeny to wear your mask. As he was cuffing you, he'd remind you that Martin Luther said "if the Apocalypse was coming tomorrow, today I would plant a tree" and suggest that maybe you should keep a little perspective.
Now I'm trying to imagine a *Seinfeld* episode set during the lockdown. In some ways, it might not be all that different: the show about nothing transformed into a show about nothing and also going nowhere.
It's easy to imagine Jerry cracked and bleeding from constant handwashing and Elaine working her way through a case of schnapps.
But who would be the mask denier, George or Kramer?
The neighborhood where I live is characterized by a high degree of sociability. Well, it was. For at least ten years, most Fridays had seen a fluctuating group of a dozen or so of us convening at one family's house for a sort of happy hour. Now we see each other only one by one, occasionally: across the street, up on a porch, at the end of the block.
Those Friday evening gatherings were this neighborhood's superpower, the thing that hyper-charged our social networks and quickly made real friends out of people who, under normal circumstances, would have remained only friendly acquaintances for years and years. It is so strange to think about how long it has been since we gathered, but even stranger is to imagine how long it might be until we do so again. What will happen to this neighborhood without its happy hours, its block parties? Will it even feel like a neighborhood anymore?
I've heard it suggested that we stop calling it social distancing and switch to physical. As someone who pays attention to words, when I heard this idea I just about smacked myself on the forehead. Of course. I mean, what is "social" even doing in there anyway? We are not being asked to stop being social, we are only asked to stop doing it in the same room with each other, and we have myriad tools for finding alternatives to that. No one is saying a Zoom meetup is the same as the real thing, but on the plus side—because these tools pay no mind to proximity—many of us are now remotely "socializing" not only with our regular fellow happy-hour denizens down the street but also with people we might not have talked to in years. Just two weeks ago, I Zoomed with one of my oldest friends, someone I first met at the age of four but had last talked to more than a decade ago.
I don't want to give the wrong impression. In situations of extremis, there are always those who relentlessly rise to the occasion and insufferably make the best of things. In this case, that would be the person who, making lemons into lemonade, has responded to the lockdowns by setting up a full calendar of Zoom cooking classes, singing lessons, and check-ins with current friends, old friends, new friends, and their fifth-grade teacher.
I am not that person. The surreality of the current situation, combined with anxiety about where all of this is headed, on top of what I have been gradually forced to acknowledge as a strong tendency toward introversion, all seem to be influencing me increasingly toward *withdrawal*. Although I diligently organized a few Zoom meet-ups in the first weeks of the emergency, lately I have left this up to others and been surprised at how content I am to just be alone with my family in a world no bigger than our house.
At last week's CSA pickup, as I stood in a (spaced out) line that included more than a few friends and neighbors—the very friends and neighbors I really do miss—I had the opportunity to strike up a conversation but not the slightest inclination to actually do so. It was the mask—not only the physical barrier of it but the way it serves to remind of how different everything is, not to mention the psychological discomfort it causes, leaving me sulky and embarrassed like a freshly shaved poodle.
For the 45 minutes it took me to reach the head of the line and receive my box of fresh meat and vegetables, I just stood there, silent, my mask a wall between me and the world.
What jumps out at me, in retrospect, is how normal this walled-off feeling is starting to seem.
