COPING WITH CHANGE
Lockdown has been a chance to enjoy a slower pace of life, to linger over meals with family, to show an interest in the neighbours, and to decide what to do with all the time in the world.
How lockdown changed things for one family ... some of it for the better.
“THE SHONKY STEP ON THE BACK VERANDA REMAINS UNFIXED; OUR CHAOTIC BOOKSHELVES REMAIN CHAOTIC.”
My dad loved making sourdough bread. In the 1980s it wasn’t cool or hipsterish or even homey like it is today – it was just plain weird. But, back then, he was an artist and it kind of suited his bohemian vibe. I was a teenager and it didn’t suit mine.
“Why don’t we just buy a loaf from the shop like everyone else?”
“Because some things are better when they take time,” he’d reply. And then he’d ruffle my hair as if to say, one day, son, you’ll understand.
May 2020, and I’ve got plenty of time on my hands. With no racing our son off to soccer training after wolfing down dinner or filling entire Sunday afternoons with the games, no driving our daughter to parties on the other side of town, no dinners or lunches with family and friends, no films showing at the cinema, no… much of anything. I find I have vast oceans of time. The realisation dawned on me early in lockdown: I’d rearranged our shoe-cleaning box and the activity had filled an entire evening.
Mercifully, no one we know has been sick with COVID-19. I’m also lucky in that I have a steady income. Everyday we hear news of friends who have suddenly found themselves jobless, or, as one told me as we were waiting in line at Coles: “My business went from paying the mortgage to zero in a week. Gone.” It’s unimaginable and yet it happened and keeps happening. I’m fortunate, too, because our kids are teenagers, and not preppies who require constant attention, which means I can happily work from home. But friends with small children have been dragooned into acting as teacher’s aides as well as trying to parent and find a moment to earn a living. That’s three full-time jobs simultaneously.
By luck of the cosmic draw, our household is fortunate and privileged. Though, at first, that didn’t stop me from pining for the riotous dinners we usually have with close friends – ‘The Usual Suspects’ we call ourselves – or the camaraderie of shivering on the sidelines with the other soccer parents, or even schlepping a gang of giggling girls across town. I also miss my work colleagues, too. Videoconferencing isn’t the same as grabbing a coffee and a bit of playful ‘kibitzing’.
In the mornings, with no school lunches to prepare or the need to dash off, I instead make my wife a cup of tea, letting it brew for the recommended five (not two) minutes, then I serve it to her in bed. It’s become a kind of sunrise ritual.
At the other end of the day, I cook dinners that aren’t squeezed into a hectic 30 minutes. The evening meals might take even a couple of hours to prepare (we traded: my wife does the laundry and cleaning and I do the shopping and cooking – I definitely got the better end of the deal). Without the pressure to be somewhere or do something else, and keen for real human, not video, contact, the family hangs about the dinner table, deep in discussion about Hilltop Hoods or the four waves of feminism.
Just before lockdown, I hunted around for exercise equipment but the guy at the sports store laughed as he pointed to rows and rows of empty shelves. It was as if a swarm of buff locusts had passed through, carrying away with them dumbbells, speedballs and anything else resembling workout paraphernalia. Luckily though, my local gym lent me a carload of equipment and I set up one of my own in the garage. It backs onto a lane and when I’ve got the roller door up, the lane transforms into a stage on which all my neighbours are actors. Neighbours, whom I used to wave at perhaps a few times a year, stop and chat (from a respectable distance of course) about their new pooches, how big the kids have grown, how our lives have changed. How lucky we are.
To stave off cabin fever, I dusted off my ancient pushie and have been cycling through streets I’d not visited since taking the kids in one of those cute little bike seats. On one of the outings I thought, ‘Why not do some shopping?’ Only a small amount would fit into my backpack, but I could always return the following day. So I did. And the one after that. Our groceries are fresher, and we throw out less than after the usual, gigantic once-a-week supermarket run.
I also learnt how to sew on a button. Before you start laughing, did you know that a shirt button needs an anchor and a shank to perform properly? I’ve been attempting to repair my own shirts for 30 years, cursing at how the buttons always dribble off after a couple of washes.
There are lots of other things too; I can genuinely and completely find undistracted interest in the kids’ homework assignments. The chipped fascia around the kitchen cupboard got a fresh lick of paint; those skew-whiff paintings got rehung; I brewed litres of garlic possum repellent; an old school friend and I started making podcasts (who hasn’t?). The list goes on and on.
But here are some things that never got done: the shonky step on the back veranda remains unfixed; our hopelessly chaotic bookshelves remain hopelessly chaotic; my computer folders are still a jumble; Anna Karenina remains unfinished and Dante’s Inferno remains unread. But you know what? I can finally move those things to the list of ‘Not even if I had all the time in the world’, because I quite literally did.
When lockdown started, I missed the old things. The things I could no longer do. But soon after I had a realisation, a guilty secret really – I’m going to miss this. This time when the days began with unhurried conversations, the family hung out in the evenings, when meals were just as much about the making and table talk, when life was slower and lighter but richer and deeper.
My realisation was precipitated by a memory. And, like many memories, it starts with a smell. We’re listening to ‘I’m Good’ by Hilltop Hoods and my daughter is feeding her sourdough starter. Smiling from ear to ear with accomplishment, she begs me to take a whiff and instantly I’m transported back to my parents’ laminate kitchen: my dad with his silky Viennese accent waxing on about the stuff of life, the pungent aroma of his fermenting flour stinging my nostrils.
My daughter says something and I snap back to the present. She’s telling me that we must wait days before baking a loaf. Good things take time, she says.
Across an ocean of time I see my father beaming at me through her. I draw her close and tousle her hair. How lucky we are.