The Blissful Ignorance of Not Being on Social Media

I took my eight-year-old son to a birthday party on Friday afternoon, a party for a close friend of his that he hadn’t seen since the pandemic began, a friend he’d said goodbye to before spring break in March and had then vanished from his life. The party was carefully put together to play by all the rules—outside, masks, plenty of distance between parents—but the second the kids got out of their cars, they all tackled each other anyway because they are eight and they are boys and they were all puppies who had been tied up for far too long.

As my own kids piled out of my car, I spoke to the party’s host, a very nice woman I’d seen at countless ballfields and PTA mixers, back in the Stone Age when those things existed, I couldn’t help but bring up what was weighing on my mind most at the moment, which was that the president of the United States was, any second now, about to be airlifted to the hospital because he was suffering serious complications from a highly contagious, potentially fatal disease that he had spent the last seven months of everyone’s lives pretending wasn’t much of a big deal.

“Wow, crazy day, huh?” I said.

She looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that?”

“You know, the President,” I said. “He’s going to the hospital.”