THE FALL
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My attention drifts from the everyday routines. As does yours, I’m sure.
The next few weeks are so overstuffed with uncertainty and questions. How much difference will the return of several thousand students make to our local covid stats, for instance? And how will our kids cope with school after six months away from it, and with all sorts of new protocols in place? How will our teacher friends cope with crowded classrooms and overheated students? Where will we find ourselves a few weeks from now?
Whether we get another wave of covid in Kingston or not, this is the beginning of a new phase of our struggle to hold things together, and even to get the upper hand. Not since the end of March has there been so much doubt in the air. After months of mostly reassuring news here in Kingston, the future feels decidedly experimental.
It seems to me that we may be more divided in our opinions on how best to move forward than we ever have been, however similar our politics. The potential for discord in the fall is sky-high.
Teachers, I imagine, must be mostly dreading what’s to come. They love their kids, and the idea of seeing them again, but how the hell do they teach effectively in these circumstances, and why is everyone so close together? Many of them, I know, think it’s too much and too soon.
Parents agree with all of that, and worry themselves sick. But there is also the bone-deep feeling that perhaps it is time. That if not now, then when? And there are many parents who need to go back to work so that they don’t lose the house to the bank.
Grandparents are saying goodbye for a while to their grandkids. Just as sleepovers and garden parties were creeping back into the vernacular, it is time to retreat once again to opposite sides of the lawn. I watched my daughter this morning say goodbye to her grandmother, and so loaded did the moment seem that I had to look away, across the deserted expanse of a mall parking lot.
Restauranteurs must be relying heavily on the influx of post-secondary students. Once they’re on the job and behind the bar, they will eye hungrily all those returnees with their OSAP monies and their allowances. This morning, I heard a report from Ottawa that 60% of the restaurants in that city are at risk of closing. If that happens here, our streets will empty and downtown evenings will be a graveyard.
And so we come at this new, cooler season, these paler skies, with our separate and diverse worries. The disease does its best to separate us. And for a few weeks we will hold our collective breath as the school bus pulls away, or the reservation book fills up (or doesn’t), as the colds and flus come (or don’t), and as the numbers rise or fall.
The nearly irresistible temptation will be to sink into our own lives, to fall away from each other, to let the inevitable irritations rise to the top of mind like a fever. The hope, of course, is that we still are able to see each other, and lean on each other, in the fog of stress and worry that September will bring.
