It's Just What They Know Now

She’s been wanting to play for a few years now but this is actually the first time that I managed to not miss the deadline for winter basketball sign ups. Two games in as a starting forward and she still hasn’t made a field goal yet but she hustles, plays really tough defense, rebounds well and has a hand full of steals a game. At half time neither team was in double digits yet so nobody else is making a lot of baskets either.

Both of those games have come against the other town squad, travel to other towns on hold for the time being. Her hustle has been extra impressive not just because all that she’s played for the past few years has been softball, a fairly stagnant sport at her age level, but also because they are required to wear masks while running the floor. I don’t know for sure how much that effects their breathing, I’m required to wear one at the hospital that I work at for my entire eight hours but don’t spend any of that time running, but there are definitely other downsides. After practice this week there was a really close call when she came pretty close to taking a bite of spaghetti with that mask still on. I was distracted and she’s a bit of a ding dong but it also shows how used to wearing it she has already become. I know plenty of idiots that would use the word “indoctrinated” to describe this but I prefer “adaptive”. This is just what they know now. It’s how life is and you deal with it.

It’s not easy of course and nobody likes it. I certainly don’t mean to minimize the tragedy and disruption that the virus has caused. I’m trying to be pragmatic and positive because I’m fairly certain that just running away from society altogether isn’t a viable option. I also haven’t completely ruled it out.

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As optimistic as we might have been over the summer it seems that this thing isn’t going away anytime soon. The Omnicron variant seems to not attack the lungs, the thing that made Delta so deadly, but also doesn’t seem to care if you’re vaccinated or not. There’s talk that this might be OK, that we are just adding more antibodies to fight against whatever might be next, but I’m still glad that to this point we’ve managed to avoid any cooties. It often feels like a waiting game, an inevitability like a bill that will eventually come due.

We’ll continue to try and find a balance between caution and fear, a balance that for everyone seems to be different and may be useless to anything except our own consciences. Last week we finally saw the new Spider Man, long after the surprises had been leaked but after the theaters were super crowded. We got there early enough to play some air hockey and eat our popcorn before everybody else showed up and then when the lights went out we put our masks back on, settled in, and enjoyed an awesome movie on a big screen with much better sound than we have at home.

She didn’t complain, didn’t think that we were being weird, she was just happy to be there. My daughter is ten years old so twenty percent of her life has been spent like this. It’s just what they know now.