Fun

A friend of mine is always thinking about the future: the fun things he has to look forward to. If he doesn’t have anything coming up, he puts something on the calendar. He plans a trip, or buys concert tickets, or makes reservations at a fancy restaurant weeks out, or he books a couples’ massage. He said having something to look forward to always helped him get through all the mundane workaday humdrum. But now? Like the rest of us, he’s bummed out. There’s nothing fun to look forward to, and there’s no indication of when any of us might have fun again. If there was ever a time to legalize marijuana, these are the days.

All the fun I used to have involved going: going to sporting events, going out to eat, going to parties, going to the movies, going to pickleball, going to the beach, going to museums, going to NYC to see a show. That’s what I did for fun. All that going—turned to staying. Stay home. Sit. Stay. Good dog. But, eventually, if too bored or left alone too long, the dog starts gnawing the table legs and chewing the shoes.

My son, who turns 16 next month, has been a trooper through all this. Tonight, he even offered to wash the pots and pans in the sink. It was a conciliatory gesture: earlier in the day I said mean things to him, and he stewed on it and said meaner things back to me four hours later. Then, like a contagion, that meanness spread, and my son and husband argued in their stupid “Who’s-the-alpha” way, which drives me crazy. And in my attempt to smooth that over, my husband got annoyed with me. Now we’re all hiding in different corners of the house, licking our wounds. But at least I didn’t have to wash the pots.

I once saw a woman wearing a sticker: “In Blessed Silence.” When people tried to speak to her, she would not answer; she merely smiled and pointed at her sticker. I am thinking of making some for the three of us. I’ll do that tomorrow. It will give me something to look forward to.