This time last year…. Our first week of quarantine…

Never has the popular term “reaching out” made more sense to me. As a former English teacher and self-appointed grammarian, I notice such things as language and usage. Dorky, but I do. For example, it’s been hard for me to swallow the rampant use of “due to.” “Due to” is an adjective, used to modify nouns, whereas “because of” is an adverb, used to modify verbs. One cannot substitute for the other. The Chicago Manual of Style suggests using “due to” when you can replace it with “attributable to” or “caused by”–but not when you could use “because of.” So, for example, this current disaster can be “due to” Coronavirus, because virus is a noun. But “We are cancelling all life as you know it due to the pandemic,” is not correct because cancelling is a verb. A very big verb.

The same with “reaching out,” a phrase which has spread a little like….well, wrong analogy. But I have noticed its growth in usage–in letters and phone calls, as it became the thing to say, deeming it a strange thing to say. “Hi Jenny, just reaching out to see … “ “Dear Mrs. Burk, thank you for reaching out…” and even, “Dear Homeowner, I am reaching out to tell you about our recent promotion….”  The connotation threw me. What–are we all buried under rubble? Trapped in a hole? Rediscovering the use of our arms which have been paralyzed until now? Why such a physical, gesture-like metaphor when, in context, one simply means, I called you. I wrote you. I emailed you. I barely had to reach at all. Why not just say, “Thank you for calling me”? or “Thanks for contacting me”? These being a more accurate depiction of the social transaction.

I took the term’s spread (again, apologies for this metaphor) as a sign that, in our age of social media and all the electronic ways we can “connect,” we are more isolated than ever. Heck, you’d think the CDC invented “social distancing.” Give a population of teenagers each an iPhone and you’ve had social distancing for years. Together in the same room or restaurant and a million miles away. Give the modern family its ipads, laptops, tablets, cell phones and “smart” TVs and we have social distancing right in our own living rooms. Shoulder to shoulder and miles apart. Do you know, I have been texted from an upstairs bedroom to ask what’s for dinner? More pathetic: I have texted back.

This week, though I am not buried in rubble or fallen down a well, “reaching out” makes sense. Willingly apart and soon completely quarantined, I spend a fair bit of the day texting, emailing, calling, trying to make contact from the Planet Yoga Pants. I want to assure myself of the deep, lifelong and buried connections I trust I have. Like the dog fence I keep digging up in the side yard where I am transplanting bulbs. Ellie and I spent Week One of quarantine in the garden, thinning a daffodil bed by separating bulbs, pulling them apart, and planting them far apart. About six feet apart… Daffodils propagate and anything that–well… “spreads” these days, is suspect. The only thing I want to spread is butter. On my toast. But with the flowers–each time I found a new home and dug, up would pop the little yellow wire that keeps our doggie in. It’s still there. It’s always been there. He’s been on house arrest a lot longer than we. What I most want to sow these days, is connection. So I make phone calls, send cards, actually read and respond to emails–reaching out, from where I am: in.

Everybody and her brother has a word on this virus. Even my auto parts store has taken the time to email about their Coronavirus precautions. Excellent. I can buy spark plugs with peace of mind, but I can’t go to church or school or, as of yesterday, even to a park or green space. The other day I got a well-composed email, on fancy letterhead e-stationery, from my jewelry store. A jewelry store! How did they even get my email address? And more relevant: WHY? Did they think I am so desperate I might just bust out of here to drive over and buy a bracelet? Or are they just as lonely and isolated as the rest of us and contacting their customer base was cozy reassurance? As humans, we have a deep primordial need to speak out about our handwashing procedures.

I also find myself chatty with random recipients of my phone calls to pay bills, cancel appointments, and conduct household business I might otherwise blow through quickly, impersonally. Thus far I’ve chatted it up with the Jumpology rep who’s freezing our account for 90 days and is in Colorado in a ski resort town that is bereft of its entire livelihood. I know how many children the Chase Visa lady has at home. I know her sister-in-law might homeschool her brood. I know the school closure dates in every state I happened to have called to pay a bill.  It’s no different than making conversation on a train ride or flight to pass the time. Okay, it’s a little different. Today we exchange information and an unspoken agreement to be one, though we are separate. We pass more than time. We “reach out” in my new understanding of the term. And I have found folks ever happy to engage. Giving the expiration and security digits of my credit card is quickly followed by “So, how’s it going in your world?” And then we exchange news, draw comparisons, close the gap. Used to be each person on the planet was separated by six degrees. Now I am separated from those closest to me by six physical feet. I have another term for you: Perfect strangers. Strangers have never been more perfect.

So will the technology I have so railed against finally have its day? Will the very social media that has fractured and anesthetized our real relationships now come back ’round to repair them? At our house we are certainly “utilizing” every media platform out there (another modern term I hold in contempt. Use, people–just use.)  Will takes his weekly music lesson on Google Duo. His teachers sent him a “We miss you!” video on Youtube. Ellie attends GMU class each morning in a bathrobe via Blackboard Collaborate. And Bill conducted the first ever “Creator Live!” broadcasting at regular service times and is gearing up to do the same this week. Family I haven’t been with for eight years “zoom” into my kitchen from theirs and joke about going to virtual work each day not having to wear pants in their new, from-the-waist-up workplace. Sophie is heard laughing (finally!) in a group chat and Ellie stayed up half the night pinging old friends on Instagram.

Yet ironically, now that we’ve pulled out every electronic stop to stay connected, the teens who were raised with it in their bottle milk are going unfed. Perhaps it is their fear and sadness that is feeding a hunger for real, authentic connection and contact. Perhaps in times of real crisis their ersatz modes do not communicate. Perhaps they now see: that every post, pop, twit, tweet, chirp and peep has been silently robbing them of all that is real in life. I got an oxymoron for you, girl on her phone: “feed.”  I know that though my girl is “all caught up,” she’s starving. They really do want to be with, around, next to, near one another. The uncompromising insistence of prepositions. /pre-pə-ˈzi-shən/ (n.) : “A functional word used to express spatial and temporal relationships…”

Sophie recently made the local news attending a pretty creative and inspiring 18th birthday party for a friend. She asked my permission, as we have really tried to stay home completely for 14 days.  I pictured her on a back patio or deck with a small group of girls pestered and worried to six-feet distances by an overly attentive mom. Instead, they kept the quarantine completely intact by staying in their cars and driving by the girl’s house in a grand parade, circling round her cul-de-sac for a second pass, horns blaring, banners waving, windows down, birthday singing. Birthday girl standing on her front lawn in happy tears as if 50 of BFFs had just jumped out of a cake in front of her. New normal, new joy.

Still, she came home miserable. Sat in her car in our driveway letting the reality, the finality of the end of her senior year sink in. Every app, every platform, every social medium falls short of a simple trip to Cook-Out or a sleepover or an illicit midday run to Dunkin’. They didn’t know it before Corona but they sure do now: the ring around the essential, like a crown around the sun. It’s the essence they are reaching for, yearning for physical presence, for the assurance that we are all still here, still real and not sucked into some live stream Mike Tevee-style or a cruelly captured participant in the Truman Show. Just a tile in somebody’s feed, reduced to “likes” and “loves” and single-tap responses to what used to be the depth and magnitude of life.

From where I sit, technology has made its connections and even this quickly reached its end. Of what it can do. So today she comes out of her room for the first time since our Governor closed school through the end of the year. She is going to “see” friends. I respond gently, knowing her heart is broken (I heard it break), but also knowing that this will blow all our efforts to quarantine. Daughter? Where? What?  How? The usual interrogation, praying I am coming off post-pandemic moderate. She explains. The stress is on the verb “See.” They are going out, each girl in her own car, and park in a circle in any public lot the police won’t come and chase them from. They won’t get out of their cars. They promise. It’s just to see each other.

In pioneering times, of course, people circled the wagons in much the same way: front to end, like a giant wood dog chasing its tail, ostensibly around some warm crackling bonfire and all the jovial dancing and merry-making they picture in history books, but really it was for protection–against the night, against the wild animals or other predators–against the unknown. So, too, this little caravan of SUVs and family cars, ringed in the far end of the high school parking lot, a sunny but cold day. They have each climbed up onto the roof of their vehicles, bringing blankets, snacks, a speaker or two. And they are sitting, whole car lengths and widths apart, talking, laughing, seeing each other. Maybe they are commiserating and crying together. They are reaching out, speaking in complete sentences, sharing the grammar of connection. Reclaiming amidst all the cancelled, closed, and discontinued events in their lives, and against the unknown of their new days, reclaiming what is real.