She twirled and leapt around the courtyard, and everyone was amazed. N and I watched a show together where a Muppet called Zoe was displaying the ballet routine she had been practicing. With such remarkable detail such as individual strands of fur on the Muppets, it seemed that they had traversed through time from the internet-free ’80s to the wired world of spring 2020. I couldn’t tell you precisely when I outgrew the show and quit viewing it, just that I unknowingly retained all that I observed and listened to in the process.Īpproximately thirty years since its debut, the program had returned for its fiftieth season with an amazing HD presentation and music that sounded as if it could have come straight from the radio. Lyrics so straightforward as to be basic.
#Songs about boys growing up tv#
The crazy music stayed with me long after the TV was turned off, jangly melodies that fastened like adhesive until bedtime–and more often than not until the next episode. And… so was I? I recollected Sesame Street as a low-budget variety of short sketches on Oregon Public Broadcasting in the 1980s, the program my parents ran before and after school. I was delighted to find a show from my own childhood available on-demand: “Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away…” We settled in on the couch and found the remote in the crevices of the cushions.
So I changed my parenting approach to include “age-appropriate educational television” in the hopes that something, anything, on PBS would keep my child occupied while I organized a virtual class or took a few moments to rest. I wanted to shield her from the commercialism and worries that she would inevitably be exposed to soon enough.īy the third day of self-isolating with a toddler, I felt exhausted and desperate. I was determined to keep N from watching television for her first 16 months of life, so to keep her entertained I was willing to try any activity that didn’t involve a screen. I wheeled her in a stroller until she dozed off and eventually I could read student work or, more often, scroll through Twitter in an endless loop, asking myself if we had welcomed a baby into a disintegrating universe. I towed her around town in a bicycle trailer, BART trains passing by in the sky, an abundance of empty automobiles. I drove her in a toy car around the vicinity, resembling an uninhabited film set, the skies above the nearby landing strip were absent of planes. I propelled her in our garden swing and pulled weeds while she trailed me with a small bucket. I told my students the same, and tried to make the most of my time with N before capitalism would start up again.
We would drift together from the time her mother, a medical practitioner, left the house for work after breakfast until she returned just before dinner, the frame of an N95 mask imprinted on her face.Īt a time when it seemed to be both probable that the world was going to end and that we would manage to reduce the virus spread within six weeks, the college I was teaching at informed us that we would be returning to campus after the spring break.
For N, there was no concept of past, present, or future, no strategies in place, just the expansive and captivating Sea of Perception. Who was still oblivious to the existence of viruses, politics, and the idea of time. When the daycare of N was closed, I was forced to become a full-time, work-from-home dad, taking charge of the well-being and enrichment of a just-learning-to-walk and babble one-and-a-half-year-old. Quarantine is what the Letter Q Stands For
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