Sometimes, things change for us personally, on a small but important-to-me scale. I got braces and now I feel ugly. I failed an important test and my score to get into college is down a point. My pet hamster died and I’m sad.
Sometimes, they change for us personally, but we realize the scale of the problem far outweighs what one small individual feels. In these pandemic days, this looks like:
- My mom says I should wear a face-mask, but it makes me feel ugly. Besides, no one else I know wears one, and they laugh at me and my family.
- I’m falling way behind at school because my neighborhood has no high-speed internet, so I won’t get to take my core classes. I may not even graduate.
- My father-in-law is dying, and the hospital won’t let me in to see him, not even to say goodbye. Not even my husband got in…
These miserable, individual-yet-global cries seem to sum up the pandemic in a nutshell.
This week we lost one of childhood’s most beloved authors, Norton Juster. He gave us The Phantom Tollbooth (the veritable bible of my youth) and The Dot and The Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. His kindness was manifest (to me at least), because he wrote a charming personal note in reply to my fan-girl letter, sent several years ago.
This week, we as Americans lost 2,059 of our friends, colleagues, parents, siblings and children to Covid-19. They contributed books, perhaps, but they also nursed the sick, prepared our food, drove trucks and buses and ambulances, taught our kids, checked our groceries. A handful we’ve known in person. The loss of many more has made small but noticeable tears in our community cloth.
Keep going, past the purple tollbooth
Tonight, we also heard from the nation’s carer-in-chief and noodger of our collective conscience: Joe Biden. As president, Biden’s approach to talking about the pandemic — its cost, its cures, its consequences — is not dissimilar to Juster’s approach to writing for kids. Juster’s magnum opus was criticized by “experts:”
Not everyone in the publishing world of the 1960s embraced The Phantom Tollbooth. Many said that it was not a children’s book, the vocabulary was much too difficult, and the ideas were beyond kids. To top it off, they claimed fantasy was bad for children because it disorients them.
Norton Juster on NPR
How wrong, I cried aloud when I heard that! Fantasy feeds kids’ minds, lets them invent their own Lands Beyond. Far from being disoriented when I read Tollbooth, I knew better where the ground was beneath my feet, because I could imagine Alex Bings (who sees through things) standing at his adult height, well over my head. Just like some of my parents’ chats were well over my 2nd grade head… and just as frustrating to understand.
We now have a president willing to talk about difficult things, in a grown-up manner. He calls upon us to envision acting beyond our routine path, to travel outside our comfort zones, into places we never thought we’d need to venture. Milo learns to embrace learning for its own sake, for the sheer joy of it. We must learn to embrace medicine and science because they will save our lives — even if we blush to admit we’re a teensy bit afraid of needles, or worry our neighbors will think we’re fraidy-cats because we wear a face-mask in a crowded store.
The road home through a pandemic
Milo, the hero of The Phantom Tollbooth, learns how ignorant he is the hard way. (Just reread his first encounter with the Watchdog in the Doldrums to remember how being scared silly put Milo in a receptive mind to learn to think for himself!) Learning to spell and calculate enabled Milo to save Rhyme and Reason from the prison Castle in the Air. He gained the kingdom of Wisdom by admitting he didn’t know everything there was to know.
Can we gain our own Wisdom in 2021, more than 50 years after Juster wrote Tollbooth, by acknowledging we have more to learn about this pandemic? By agreeing that scientific evidence and the pleas of front-line medical professional outweigh our cross and childish wish to “do it my way” and forego their advice?
If you, like Milo, feel a little cocky about your ability to suss out your surroundings and act on your own instincts, just remind yourself how much more ignorant and frightened we were at the outset of the pandemic. Watch tonight’s NPR visual story reel, One Year Later.
If you’re like me, you’ll likely relive the awful uncertainty (will it affect me, harm my family?), and feel the fear. If you do, take some action in the bright sunlight of tomorrow morning. Maybe you can help your neighbors, friends and family find some Wisdom … to wear a mask, wash their hands, and keep their distance … until the vaccination deliveries reach your home town.
Banner photo by: Jesse Yelin from Pexels