The New Abnormal
For those of us really struggling with the Pandemic Blues it might offer some perspective to know that during the Great Depression folks just hunkered down and played a whole lot of Monopoly. Yes, I repeat — Board Games! (Perhaps an etymological off-shoot from the term “Bored Games”, but don’t fact-check me on that.)
Before some of you rush to conjure up nice, nostalgic, Walton-esque pictures in your minds, we might take a few sober moments to remember just how calamitous these games really are. Humorless trench-warfare-like-stalemates stretching on for days? Volcanic displays of emotions subject to fickle turns of the dice? Disturbing revelations about family members’ dictatorial personalities? (Without getting into details let me just say our home has now effectively banned both “Settlers of Catan” and “Risk” for the duration of the Pandemic.)
My point here is not to suggest that we find consolation in comparative suffering, (some of you might find this as healing as a spoonful of cod liver oil). But certainly there might be a lesson here. A few historical nuggets to be mined.
One historical interpretation (if I may take some liberties) about that 1930’s Monopoly phenomenon, is that maybe folks were just looking to fill a void. (Don’t ask me to explain the accompanying goldfish-eating craze.) That folks were drawn to this large-living, capitalist simulation might just suggest something about the Depression era it thrived in. I suppose the general mood was that if you couldn’t have a functioning economy at least you could “play economy”. Maybe just Pretend like stuff was still happening, right? And just because money was scarce, didn’t mean you couldn’t simulate that somehow –even if it was funny money. I mean, when was the last time anyone had fistfuls of bills to swing around?
Recently I heard of a similar social phenomenon: in an attempt to simulate atmosphere in Pandemic-restricted 50% capacity restaurants, some owners were resorting to populating their tables with mannequins. Yes, reader, you heard me correctly. To recreate that bustling climate diners are used to, restaurateurs were actually putting lifeless dummies in their restaurants. Had you told these restaurateurs a year ago that this would be their reasoned response to a global pandemic I’ll wager many would have hung up their aprons. Personally I can’t say that I’ve ever been drawn to eat in the company of motionless mannequins. But I think we can at least applaud folks like this for having their heart in the right place. And maybe be reminded that in our collective desperation for normalcy we all just need a little grace.
A call for grace was what I certainly could have used when I forced my family into a home intramural Bocce Ball Tournament. (With all the sports being cancelled it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.) In my normalcy-deprived frame of mind, I was convinced that our family of 6 was enough to recreate at least some semblance of a sports season. Unfortunately in my zeal of hanging a game schedule on the kitchen wall and assigning team names I seemed to overlook a decidedly lackluster spirit among the athletes. By game six I was eventually able to take the hint. (My wife’s quiet removal of my intramural poster off the kitchen wall and setting it next to the recycling bin in the garage was not lost on me, I can tell you.)
But to my way of thinking our troubled attempts at holding on to some kind of normal might at least seem a little more mainstream — a little more excusable — if only social scientists would generously offer us a nice label to explain away our behavior. Something to really legitimize things. “Desperately Pretending a Reality Kondition” or “DPRK” for short, for example. (By spelling “condition” with a “K” you share an acronym with the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea which I think might really lend some weight to this disorder.)
Had I such an available condition at my fingertips things might have been a little less awkward when a neighbor stopped by the other night. In our family’s desperation to fill the void of those closed movie theatres, we had made a large screen out of a bed sheet and hung it on the back of the house for a make-shift movie night. Like anyone who would hang bed sheets on his house in the middle of the night for improvised theater during a Pandemic I was really counting on a little grace.
Coming around the back of the house he found the lot of us in the backyard. We were eating popcorn, covered in mosquitoes, and watching a rather sub-standard projected image of an old Hitchcock movie. All of us desperately pretending a movie theatre. Our collective drive for normalcy, I must say, had reached fever pitch.
To his credit he respectfully pulled a lawn chair, grabbed a few handfuls of popcorn and started swatting at the mosquitoes like the rest of us.
It’s nice when friends feel right at home when they visit. It’s even nicer when strange behavior doesn’t need explanation to a house guest during a Pandemic.
Hang in there reader.
