Fight Food

Thud. 

Should have been ready. But I wasn't.

I had put off washing dishes only to get pelted.

As the soft, cylindrical pillow of pretended deliciousness sailed through the air toward my head, I slow-played the trajectory of decision-making that resulted in the purchase of "Throw, Throw Burrito" - a card game-dodge ball mashup that brings new hope for old food fights.

"At least it's not messy," yelled my daughter over the delighted shrieks of her brother, whose 13th birthday presented the occasion for her to give him such a game.

Also ... he was winning.

And devilishly so.

Perhaps all these months of video games honing his hand-eye coordination had trained him to scout the whereabouts of the projectiles while keeping his eyes on his opponents' decks. He's become skilled at simultaneously gathering points and picking off the competition.

I can barely take a card from one pile and discard onto another.

My best strategy is to duck.

The rules seem complicated - you get cards, try to make matches to earn points, and determine which players will get to throw something that looks like a dog's toy at the person across from them when the person on the diagonal matches three cards.

The boy doesn't so much care about winning as he does about getting to bean his father harmlessly, in a three-paces duel without repercussion.

Also, the rules permit him to hide behind his sister.

The whole thing is over in two lightning rounds, and the hardest part is wrestling the dodge burrito away from the jaws of the family retriever.

Twenty minutes of heart-racing fun spilled from the dining room into the kitchen, bouncing off the cabinets, we even managed to avoid breaking any of the dishes piled up next to the sink.

Even if there was breakage, anything that shatters pre-washed has to count as a win.

Quarantine hasn't changed us much. Made us softer in some places and sturdier in others. But it's made us see things what's important a little differently.

Honestly, like so much of the year of our "Good Lord, 2020," I couldn't have imagined that some of the best moments would be so snugly wrapped up with the worst ones. And how guilty pleasures seemed so much more redeeming.

It is my most sincere hope that the memories we take with us into the hereafter will be seasoned with at least a hint of silly.

Sure, we can't really go back to normal, but who needs regular when your neighbors introduce you to a thing called "walking taco" whereby you add beef, cheese, lettuce, guacamole, sour cream, and salsa to a snack-size bag of pulverized corn chips and call it dinner?

Is there any other way to respond than offering melon-ball-sized dollops of ice cream, thimbles-full of chocolate sauce, and whipped cream to a crumbled up bag of sandwich cookies?

I think not.

Turning avocados into guacamole has to be the moral of this story.

Also … no need to wash dishes.

Barn doors

The words tumbled out of my mouth the way all the worst words usually do: Horses galloping out as the barn doors are swinging shut.

Yet again, without pausing for thought, I had unleashed a stampede of torment and just stood there, gaping slack-jawed at my own stupidity.

My son had a friend over for his first st at-arm's-length get-together in months. And currently they were so far apart they weren't even talking. I could have expected this. Even before pandemic times, most of their squabbles would start out just for argument's sake and carry into a real argument, followed by a period of long, active silence. Until they would shrug shoulders and the friend would go home.

Still friends.

"Just go apologize. Your birthday is in a few days. Do you really want to harbor bad feelings for the only kid available for playdates during a pandemic?"

The birthday boy froze and stomped away in anger and embarrassment. His, friend – had he heard me – would have felt justifiably insulted.

A neighbor had quietly extracted herself from the chaos my filterless thoughts created between our two houses.

My daughter leaped into action, telling me in no uncertain terms that words like those directed at her, would have brought tears.

"Oh my god, mom! It's amazing how in three short sentences, you have managed to knock down just about everyone who had been standing. Like you were bowling to hurt feelings."

She was right. It was an awful thing to say, no matter how I meant it.

Pandemic or not.

It's just me ... projecting my own fears onto the biggest screen I could find, and proceeding to foist this terrible scene onto everyone in my vicinity.

It doesn't matter that I miss people. I miss the kids' friends. And their noise. I miss sleepovers and pool parties and sending the kids to the store for ice cream just to hear the sound of silence for the time it takes to get there and back.

It's been hardest to get used to silence. 

And as we continue to cloister away, I worry that these old friendships will go the way of the school year, and summer camps, and sports events.

Into the void.

I apologized. Who am I to tell my son not to be angry? Not to take care of himself? Not to trust that he will work it out with his friend?

As they have for just about a decade.

As they would with or without me.

I apologized for not trusting the process.

But I guess that's the point. How can we trust a process I helped put into place?

A process that, in my own home, I designed?

Don't we always have to question our own motives, maybe even more than we question the motives of others'?

Challenging what you know to be true has been the full sum of my learning curve. At least for me, it's always been the things I didn't think to question, which turn out to be the most questionable of the so-called known facts.

Of course, he would apologize. This is not their first rodeo. Horseplay leads to an argument, which leads to the silent treatment, which leads to a reckoning. And around the ring, it goes.

Still friends.

The horses have to get out of the barn. Maybe they have to run with their terrible thoughts, and we have to see them shake off all our worst thoughts like tiny particles of dust against the light of day.

Time out

Outside.

A golden patch of lawn crunches underfoot. Its short, thick blades crackle and break, looking like the freshly strewn straw of a gardener bent on greenery replacement.

I am no such gardener. There aren't any seeds hidden from the heat or the-hunt-and-peck hunger of the visiting catbirds and cardinals. 

Any water that douses this spot has been chlorinated and displaced by the kick-splashes of the resident Quaranteens. 

That's how they think of themselves these days: Children of Isolation. 

I had dragged my chair to the patch of blonde grass when the sun moved over. As I sat there kicking my feet so that the desiccated lawn itched the dry skin of my soles. I try to feel the fortune of space and a pool and a yard full of weeds. 

But summer has arrived early and cemented us in place.

Not being able to move is exhausting. 

This lethargy, heralded by a new and unsettling spring fever, continues its slow burn under separate, unequal magnifying forces.

We can't sustain anything but anxiety and dread.

Time has a way of dulling other senses.

Not thinking about it is the only release.

We manage to breathe a little easier. But just a little. Filling our lungs before dipping below the surface and bobbing up. The water is still cold but it is not unpleasant after a dunking first shock.

I'm not in the pool. I'm just remembering the sensation. Like taking a deep breath and inviting a bitter stream of cigarettes smoke to fill my lungs.

The rush of relaxation that followed is the real memory it conjures. The weightlessness of the deadly air that escapes.

They have trouble picturing me - their mom - as ever being a smoker. 

“It seems that you should have been smarter than that,” says the older one as the younger one nods in agreement.

I think about telling him the stories about children who would follow trucks that belched a pesticide fog into the air to save them from mosquito-bourne illnesses.

Nothing about the olden days seems sensible now that we have all this time and space for reflective dread.

Though … I still wish I could give them little pieces of my childhood. The ones that were private and empty of adults keeping guard.

Our children aren't really much different than we were, I think.

Blue-lipped and determined, they sluice between the deep end and the shallows until night falls, and the first wave of mosquitoes set down to feast on the adults. We swat at our ankles absently as we keep a more careful watch over the fill level of each other's Quarantini glasses. The events taking place in the pool attract our attention only when voices get louder than ours.

Screams only irritating because of their exaggeration.

The real dangers are always silent. Always the thing you didn't even know to worry about.

My golden grass looks gray in this light.

I swing at the air and slap at my ankles, announcing to the splashers the golden hour has passed. It's time to go inside.

Don't look away

My children never want to talk about politics. They don't like being in the same room with it, let alone the same car. Especially not in the car, where they can only wriggle around under the protective hold of a seatbelt wishing for a room of their own to which they might retreat. 

They'd rather turn up the radio if they can't climb into the trunk.

They are privileged. They wrongly believe they are colorblind. 

But the murder of George Floyd and the civil protests his killing sparked nationwide have opened their eyes to police brutality and racist injustice as a coupled pair. 

They can't just unsee it.

As the cameras roll and spill into their media feeds, they witness a police response they wouldn't expect from a person in uniform; a person who might even resemble their friendly, neighborhood DARE officer.

 And though they are used to hearing and saying all the surgically specific rejoinders to the sounding of general alarms, they can't muster a "not all ..." that usually begins every defensive statement. 

In this case, they are wondering why are there so many?

Who can believe that All Lives Matter if we can't even say the words Black Lives Matter? 

As videos roll, they see more and more police outfitted in riot gear release clouds of tear gas and rounds of projectiles into noisy but otherwise peaceful crowds. They see the unprovoked use of force as patience grows thin. 

A man in uniform punches a woman sending her sprawling to the ground. An officer spits on a protestor sitting directly in front of him. A journalist is tackled by police and battered with a shield. Police ransack a medical area, slashing water bottles and scattering supplies. We watch the footage of police unloading bricks under the cover of darkness. We see them lobbing flashbangs, or using tear gas against citizens who had gathered peacefully. 

We stop thinking about broken windows.

It doesn't look like a bad cop movie; it just looks like bad cops. 

It's not all, certainly, but it sure seems like there is a united front, with few who are willing to stand against the abusers in their ranks, even with the application of public pressure.

Police brutality is not new. Abuse of power doesn't even seem particularly rare. My kids have heard me talk about my own experiences as a suburban youth, which involved a dubious traffic stop, unnecessary verbal abuse, and racial profiling in which I intervened.

I grew out of the unwanted attention -- youth being another way to profile criminal potential. 

Maybe they didn't believe that kind of stuff happens in modern-day times. 

Maybe it's because the extent of policing they see in their community is sparse and mainly in the schoolroom, so they don't have the same fear.

We have the privilege to look away. 

It's the video in our pockets that has begun to show how misguided it is to look away or to justify any lack

of transparency. Not when that one bad cop faces no criminal penalty -- no transparent sanction in line with the gravity of abuse of power. 

What they see now is how good cops ignore the bad ones and how difficult it is to hold such fierce and furious power in check. They are also seeing how much harm comes from just looking the other way. 

It's not just a handful of bad cops. It's the system that doesn't root them out that should concern us the most. 

We have to stop looking the other way.