OUR NEW LIFE

Our daughter Sarah is having a hard time toggling between full-time stay-at-home single motherhood and a full-time stay-at-home job. No easy feat. We offered to help as best we could--it seems unwise to have our 8-year-old grandson over at our house in the present circumstances--and Sarah suggested working with him online to relieve her for an hour or so. So of course I volunteered as a part-time Creative Writing teacher.

Luka and I had our first session yesterday. I had all kinds of plans about how I could "teach" him story-writing, but--silly me!--they all went out the window from the moment we got together on Zoom. Luka took off and launched into a terrific story about a young dragon and his pet tiger who lived on a tiny dragon island off the coast of Hawaii and had to defend it from a band of hunters that arrived to invade and kill the dragons. There were ice-dragons as well as fire-dragons, and the ice-dragons were the first line of defense, freezing the water around the island. But the hunters were able to break the ice with their swords and melt it, so the fire-dragons had to follow up and incinerate the enemy with their breath. The End.

I was astonished by Luka's ability not only to dream up the story but write it down in four pages of very cogent prose. No "teaching", then, on my part. We worked for an hour, and all I had to do was sit by and watch. And be royally entertained.

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This morning, a different experience entirely. Ellie and I decided on a shopping expedition. Friends and neighbors have been very kind and helpful, but it gets to a point where you have to venture out yourself to find precisely those things you usually have on hand in the kitchen and always forget to put on a shopping list.

It went like this: our local Gelson's has a senior shopping hour from 7 to 8 each morning, so we were up early, leaving a bewildered Jake to guard the house while we were gone. Left home at 6:45. Easy parking--for a change! We climbed out, suited up with latex gloves and face mask, and joined an already-forming line of similarly protected older folk outside the market, spaced at the regulation distance of 6 feet. Eerie silence.

Eeerie silence in the market, too, as we all went about our business and tried to avoid near misses as we pushed our carts around the aisles. I was relieved to find the wine shelves well stacked; the last time I was in, a week before, the lower, inexpensive shelves were totally depleted. Fine if you want to spend $20 a bottle. I don't. The produce department proved to be well stocked, too, as did, this time, the canned goods and packaged products. Paper goods shelves were sparse. And hand-sanitizer and disinfectant wipes, of course, unavailable.

Ellie and I each had our separate assignments, and met up at the check-out counter with two fully-laden carts. Paid an outrageously expensive bill with a credit card. Stopped by the ATM to replenish our dwindling supply of cash. And drove home again. We'll not need to be out and about again for quite a while.