May 9, 2020: A Good Day After All -

I woke up yesterday drained of oomph and cheer. Nothing new had transpired, no loved ones suddenly in danger, but I was just sad and tired and lonely - even though I am in no way as lonely as people who are cooped up alone, or, worse, with an uncongenial roommate. I can go for walks and bike rides, I can wave at neighbors walking their dogs, I can mask up and go to the greengrocer, and I have a thriving social-media social life. Nonetheless, yesterday I was sad and lonely. 

I tried all the things that usually mitigate the blues - music instead of  listening to the news, doing something fun, doing something useful, yoga, admitting I was blue, trying to distract myself from the real world out there: reading, streaming, enjoying something funny. No dice. It's not that sadness isn't totally appropriate right now. But I wasn't in the mood to acknowledge and sit with it. I didn't want a "just-be-sad" sort of day. I wanted to get past it.  

So about 8 pm, cheer still unattained but at least on a smooth glide path to bed and Tomorrow Will Be Another Day, the phone rang.

It was Theo! You may remember Theo, the dyslexic kid I read with for SMART when he was in first-through-third grade. He's in seventh grade now, and we had been keeping up a very desultory correspondence until the pandemic hit, when I sent him a postcard asking how he was doing. He wrote back to say it was okay with his mom if we talked on the phone now. He's been calling every week or two since, and it's been great. 

Theo wanted to show me his recent artwork, which was quite cool - a huge water-spirit towering like a mountain above and then below a spindly bridge. He has been thinking about water lately. (He's an interesting kid.) He wanted to tell me about the best brand of markers, and why they are the best. And then he wanted to show me something he had found on his bookshelf. It was a book I made for him right before he aged out of SMART, called The Happiest Bird Dog in the World. 

I said Oh, I'm so glad you kept that! He said, in perfect seventh-grade eye-roll tones, "I wouldn't throw it away! It's a good book!" Then we talked about pretty much anything at all, for a while - the local town that has a crawfish festival, and the summer ice cream festival downtown, which Theo has attended but I have not. Forty different stands, four coolers at each stand.  I said, "That sounds just like a dream. Can we go??" and he said, this time in much more explanatory and adult tones, "Well, not THIS year. But next year, I'll ask my mom...."

Next year at the ice cream festival! That cheered me up.