Decameron

Well, Succotash. Where to begin?

First I will say that usually, when your father is paranoid, I tease him relentlessly and it winds up not being a big deal. But here we are, barely a week since I last wrote to you, and we are holed up in our house in Massachusetts with you and our dog, hiding out with two weeks' worth of groceries during a worldwide pandemic of coronavirus. At the moment, my reason is rebelling that this is really happening, and that we could have fled NYC ahead of a city-wide quarantine (which has not yet been called, but which probably will be, as there is one in place for the Bay Area). I have no adjusted to the fact that millions of people could die as a result of this, and certainly I have not processed the knowledge of the coming global recession (depression?) that will result.

What I have processed is how big you are getting, and how smiley. You have now at long last seen the Atlantic Ocean. You have sniffed the batter of my first ever mediocre attempt at pumpkin bread. You have finally outgrown your baby stroller and are now riding around in a big boy stroller. You are sitting up by yourself for moments here and there. You are desperate to try our food, and as your second high chair arrived today (your first having been abandoned in NYC as your father seized the last Jeep available at the rental place to get us out of town last Friday), we will probably give you some of your own in the next week or two. You think you are on a grand adventure, and are a bit perturbed that we are asking you to sleep in a pack n play in our bedroom in Mustard House. To be fair, you don't know that we have lived here for thirteen years. You can be forgiven for thinking that your whole life would unfold in the den in New York, since that is where most of it has been spent up to this point.

The Decameron is a classic text, by Boccacio, that your father and I read in college. It is about a group of young people who flee the Black Death into the Italian countryside, and pass the time in a country house by telling each other ribald stories, most of which derive their ribaldry from the idea that members of the clergy might be sexual beings. As I write this, all of Italy is in quarantine. Honestly, the only saving grace is that the disease is widely considered not serious in children and infants. It is deadly to people over the age of 70. One of the more tasteless nicknames for this event is the "boomer remover."

Anyway. We shall see. You are living through the first global pandemic since Spanish flu in 1918. It's something.