Today I read that Gen X’ers are well-suited to tolerating
boredom. While generalizations about entire generations are pretty much always
flawed, it is true that our generation spanned a time when mothers went to work
but after-school programs and daycares had not quite caught up yet. My brother and I started
coming home to an empty house around ages 11 and 9 respectively. And yeah, we
were bored and had to find stuff to do.
Today every one of our society’s “non-essentials” are bored
and having to find stuff to do. Here in California we are in our second weekend
of mandated isolation. A Saturday seems so vast
in a vacant, eerily large sort of way.
The boys (aka Jon and Axel) are becoming FIFA 2020 experts,
presumably along with the rest of the soccer gaming world. I have taken the
craft of folding laundry to a meditative art form. But even then, there is just
such an enormous quantity of spare time. We get creative. Axel and I started a
garden last weekend, sowing kale, turnips, beets, and some perennial herb
seeds. Axel cut up pieces of fallen plum branches from a recent storm and constructed
a tiny fence to protect the pumpkin seed he planted.
Today we took our disc golf basket to a nearby field and
played nine holes of safari style golf. Jon won. Axel got second. When we came
home, I decided to bake a three layer carrot cake, whip up some cream cheese
frosting and decorate it with toasted pecans and little frosting carrots. That
ate up a good couple hours.
A lot of carrots and sugar
Hole 1
Lord Gatsby
Axel created an Instagram for our cat, @LordGatsbyCat for
those who wish to follow. Jon rode his bike in the rain and then picked up
some Jerusalem Artichokes from his mom’s porch. They were able to talk for a
bit through the closed door. The artichokes, having been parboiled and flash
frozen after being lovingly dug out of the ground, makes me imagine Margaret is equally
bored. Are the Boomers equipped for boredom too? My opinion: definitely! Even though
they did not, generally, come home to empty houses, I am pretty sure their moms
were not plying them with Pinterest crafts and playdates. I am pretty sure they
opened the front door and said, “go-on, git.”
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