Half Life

Our local meat market came up with an ingenious idea, when their huge turkeys were languishing un-purchased due to the pared-down Thanksgiving celebrations this year. The butcher cut them in half, and they sold like crazy! This seemed to me the perfect image for our current, really weird holiday season (and don’t kid yourselves, my friends, Christmas will be very similar). I pictured sad, sawed-apart poultry being eaten by half the usual revelers, accompanied perhaps by a half can of cranberry sauce and a mini pumpkin pie. Even the NYC Macy’s parade shrunk to a mere block in length!

We were without four of our five children, and Zoom proved a poor substitute for their companionship around the festive table. Even our traditional after-dinner charades tournament had a distinctly different vibe, as two of the main participants were ages 4 and 6. I must say it was rather restful—usually we play for keeps, arguing over 14-word-long titles of obscure Bollywood movies and the like. But last evening we just played “animal charades” so it was one of the six of us crawling around on the floor, the others wildly guessing, “Elephant? Monkey? Horseshoe crab?” If a winner could be determined, my vote was for Peter, whose turns were a kind of strange interpretive dance (joyful if incomprehensible).

As we near the nine month mark of Pandemic Life, I realize some people have managed to carry babies from conception to full term during this stretch! What do I have to show for March-November 2020? I haven’t even moved the suitcase I’d brought down from the attic for the European trip that was cancelled eons ago! My theory: eventually I WILL use the suitcase, so why on earth put it back in the meantime? Steve yesterday confessed to feeling some anger (not about the dust-covered suitcase in our room, though he’d have every right to be irked). No, he was angry that almost a year of full living had been taken away from him, from all of us. At 71, he told me, he didn’t have any time to waste, and keenly felt the stalling of the children’s theatre company he’s worked so hard to build for 40 years.

I read an article about people living what could be called half-lives, lives in a kind of limbo: folks on the international space station, at a science outpost in Antarctica, etc. While productive, they nevertheless are missing out on vital things like daylight, time with family and friends, etc. Their consensus for maintaining mental health? Change (lower) expectations. Don’t expect a night on Broadway right now; be happy that a colony of Emperor penguins waddled by your hut, so to speak.

I can look at it my half-life this year as still full: full of love, of small achievements,  of laughter. Coronavirus doesn’t have to rob of me all that makes existence sweet. 

After all, not everyone gets to see Peter acting like a cheetah. Or was it… an Emperor penguin?