Sacrifice

In the minutes leading up to the moment when everything changed, I was asking one of our fifth graders about his last basketball game, the one scheduled for that coming Saturday. "Aw," he complained, "They cancelled it because of the Coronavirus." This was a shame indeed because his team had gone undefeated and only had the mild formality of playing a team they had already beat to have a perfect record. Instead all they got was that lousy asterisk*.
It was later that day when word came down that not only was Saturday's basketball cancelled, but so was the rest of school. As the staff rushed around preparing work for students they assumed they would see in a couple weeks, there was little thought of how we would eventually come back together again. It was, by most accounts at the time, going to be a prolonged Spring Break.*
We went home after that, having reminded as many parents as we could that there would be no school for two weeks. Happily, most of them were able to make sense of this pronouncement and we set about imagining how we might deal with the inevitable loss of school days. By Monday of the following week, our return date had been pushed back to May.*
Now there was talk around our district and across our state about the possibility that "normal" was still quite a ways away and field trips and year-end activities like proms and commencements might have to be postponed, altered, or eliminated altogether. All those championship games took a backseat to public health.*
Somewhere down near the midpoint of California, our son was completing his coursework. He had received an email saying that his June commencement was on hold until further notice. A few days later he received another email from his university telling him that his diploma was in the mail. The family joke that erupted out of this was that a courier would drive past his house and toss his sheepskin on the lawn in a bio-hazard bag. A honk and a wave. Congratulations!*
Birthday celebrations are being held online. Easter egg hunts were conducted in living rooms. My wife insists we are beginning to detect facial expressions from the eyes poking out above masks. People who have not picked up their guitar in years are taking lessons from Al Gore's Internet. *
Hopefully these things that we have maintained or shifted to new platforms will make up for the months that have straight up disappeared. There will be more undefeated seasons. There will be more commencements. But not like these.*
*everything changed