Columnists
Pandemic pen pals
Some mornings when I wake up, even if the sun is shining and the breezes a-blowing, I wonder, “Will it really make any difference if I just stay in bed all day?” I think a lot of people must feel the same way, these days. It often takes about 30 minutes for my mind to dig around for a couple of feel-good-hormones, along with a bit of sis-boom-ba, to get me out of bed. I’ve stopped watching the televised news in the evening, and I don’t really listen to the radio news in the morning. The newspaper is always on the kitchen table but I read the comics first and move quickly to the crossword. Yep, I’m a bit down in the dumps about things. In the face of a second wave of infections, are we ready to open the Province? This morning, from across the breakfast table, LOML tells me Ontario is still experiencing COVID-19 case increases. Damn it, even the comics have a common thread about isolation and masks. Give me a break. I’ll have to have a steaming mug of hilarious to get back on track. Maybe my pen pal will cheer me up today. I’ve got a pen pal now. Someone who feels the same ups and downs and isn’t afraid to write about it and then laugh at me. Sometimes she laughs with me, and she and I compare our mood swings.
Who would have guessed at my age I’d have a “pen pal”? Well, here I am, old enough to know better. I have a pen pal. When I was in Grade Four, at St. John’s School in Weston, our teacher talked to us about pen pals. He told us he was going to correspond with a friend, who taught in England, and set the whole class up with pen pals from his friend’s class. I could hardly wait. And wait. And wait. And wait, I did. While I waited for the magical moment to receive a friendly letter from a kindred spirit, living thousands of miles away, I fantasied about what I would tell her. I fantasized my pen pal living in the big city of London. Maybe she lived on the same street as the Queen. She would never have known what it was like to live in a rural area, like the outskirts of the Town of Weston which was located on the outskirts of the City of Toronto. She wouldn’t know about cows or foxes or skunks or squirrels. She wouldn’t know about rabbit hutches or chicken coops or fruit trees. It was going to be so much fun telling the “city girl” about life in the “boonies”. The Grade Four pen pal thing never became a thing, though. By the end of the school year, the thought of having a pen pal paled against the lazy days of summer adventures. Climbing trees. Eating berries. Baseball games and camping trips. And then?
And then, in May of 2020 a pen pal materialized. Of course, pen pal and I aren’t actually handwriting our letters on paper, instead she and I are more like social media pals. Our correspondence is just between the two of us. We don’t share our online conversations with others. And, we don’t live thousands of miles apart, either. I could walk to her house and we could have our chin-wag in person—wind, weather and pandemics permitting, of course. But we wouldn’t be pen pals if we did that, would we? And we rather like the idea of being pen pals. We wouldn’t be able to tell each other our secret fears about the state of the world if we were face-to-face. We wouldn’t share all of the emotions we feel while spending most of our days with one other person while in a social isolation. Some days, I wake up, check the weather, have a morning coffee and check my messages and there she is. Last week we were rather chatty. So many things happened in this weird world, apart from the pandemic, we both felt the need to unload, and to laugh at ourselves. Sometimes our concerns with the pandemic are especially emotional. We miss our friends and our families. Being isolated with one other person, as we are, brings out the amateur comedian in both of us. We’d never make a living in stand-up comedy blathering on about our socially distanced lives, but we manage to make each other laugh. And laughing has become a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.
A pen pal. Go figure. Seriously, this is a whole lot like it would have been in Grade Four. We really don’t know each other very well, yet we find it easy to share our thoughts. We’ve talked about our gardens and lawns. We muse about husbands and children. We yak about our families and our upbringing. Sometimes we just wonder if we can imagine life after isolation and curve flattening. Once, or twice, we laughed about our own pandemic curves. Today, as I walked alone along he Trail, I wonder if we would have noticed all of those little things if we weren’t pandemically challenged. I don’t think we would have become pen pals under old-normal-circumstances. We’re Pandemic Pals. Primrose and Lilac.
Wow!! Interesting 😁