For the sake of history, I have investigated the myriad ways our planet's 15-month sojourn with Covid has sparked joy.
There are none.
But Covid lockdowns and isolation forced my family to purposefully seek out and choose ‘happiness.’ And I mean, in earnest.
Beyond catching up on every novel I meant to read as an English teacher and every streamable show I’d missed (same reason), I found that, of all things, technology made me happy. Which is impossible. My husband and I recently retired (early), so even though we are BARELY Boomers by age, conquering tech is a thing.
There we were, co-retired the moment Covid diffused itself through winter of 2020, working hard to learn streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix, and stuff that sounded like 90s video-game bosses. Or sushi. Tubi, Fubo, Crackle, Crunchyroll, Sling, Venmo, Optimus Prime.
And WHAM. Our first lockdown struck, just as we became addicted to streamable crime shows.
We felt patriotic, staying in. Saving the nation. Binge'ing Mindhunter, Evil, and an Aussie show, Harrow. We lost track of a few network favorites when Covid halted production. So we missed a season of Walking Dead, then discovered it was only streamable through AMC-Plus — which we did not have. We were too busy upgrading to ad-free YOUTUBE and buying K-95 masks and canned meat through an Amazon app.
None of our crime shows felt long enough, though, to fully rot our minds in early 2020. So Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect seemed perfect, as it had aired from 1991 to 2006. But it was soooo long, and so British, we wondered if we’d contracted Covid due to fatigue. For instance, Helen’s character’s pregnancy at age 47 went from season 2 through season 3 until she scheduled a termination, which was when we terminated Prime Suspect. We are not necessarily Pro-Life. We just needed faster intrigue.
The Hulu algorithm thoughtfully noticed we liked crime dramas, so it began suggesting some. When it got frustrated when we weren’t watching them, it auto-played Murdoch Mysteries without us touching the remote.
At first, we rejected Murdoch and his Mysteries because it appeared to be set in Industrial London, which any English teacher will tell you was a damp, uncheery time featuring syphilis and Jack the Ripper and I felt if we wanted that kind of clinical depression, we had CNN.
But due to actors using the words “sorry” and “out” in a familiar way, we learned this was a Canadian show set in Toronto.
Toronto, as you may know, is not the same city as London. But one of our four adult children lives in Toronto. We had not seen him, our daughter-in-law, our two grandkids or the new baby bump since early December of 2019. So Murdoch Mysteries it was.
It made us happy to hear constant references to landmarks we had personally seen and streets our Ubers got lost on. We became deeply involved with 19th Century Toronto. And this brought us happiness.
Plus Murdoch Mysteries is visually beautiful. They open each show with stunning digital skylines, then pan downward through quaint, undangerous alleyways until viewers seamlessly land in open air markets with horse-drawn carriages and costumed folks milling about with typical Canadian joy. The dialogue is legit 1890’s, interior sets gorgeous. It was inspiring how a place with such pretty digitized buildings could be so infested with crime. It all felt so authentic, it was easy to find happiness inside this temporal vortex and come to believe we lived in that time.
This hallucination took days of disciplined, marathon viewing, from 9 am until midnight, also called Total Immersion, which I believe is how Virtual Reality got started. And that is how I acquired my Oculus Quest. I wanted to see if I could stream Murdoch through the Oculus, and maybe never re-emerge. (Murdoch wasn’t compatible with Oculus.)
But the show continued to bring joy whenever we heard familiar street names like DUNDAS, because we'd stayed at a B&B on Dundas, and another on Queensway, although their reference was to Victoria, not Elizabeth.
It was on these comforting, familiar streets that the most diabolical murders occurred. Poisonings, garrotings, electrocutions, drownings— “except there’s no water in the lungs”… dun dun DUNNNN—das. Plus their autopsies were magnificent. That’s when this show does its finest work with latex and tripe.
Beyond feeling closer to our Son and Family of the North, Murdoch Mysteries is pro-woman, so the coroner was female, who eventually practices psychiatry when that became a thing, and was replaced with — another WOMAN CORONER. Joy! Both physicians struggled with misogyny in every episode in authentic ways, but sadly, only a portion of each show was devoted to this.
Best of all (for English teachers), they used word-play for inventions from the distant future, which they could never quite properly coin. Murdoch was always inventing, but poorly naming, cumbersome versions of contemporary conveniences. They even playfully called him Detective Gadget — because he was not, technically, an Inspector. Our favorite Murdoch invention was something called The Bicycle-Pedal-Powered Balance Device which looks like a time machine. It “detects metal.” Surveillance cameras were Scrutiny Cameras. And in one episode Murdoch mixed modeling clay with a polymer to lift newsprint and discovered the substance was bouncy when he dropped it, and his boss told him to put away his putty — "because it is silly."
By the end of March '20, Murdoch Mysteries crested the 20th Century where opportunities to mis-name inventions abounded, so that is pretty much the reason we watch the show today. It is no longer mysterious that a body will wash up on the same part of Lake Ontario we have paddle boarded, or that the villain is not who we thought. Although it's fun to pick the least likely character and be foiled. “Dammit. It wasn’t Murdoch!!"
In April ‘20, it was clear our Early-Retirement Plan to travel seemed beyond “postponed,” and grocery shopping felt lethal. So I abandoned my Smartphone destination-searches and replaced them with online shopping. That brought supreme happiness, even though I hated recycling cardboard and wiping groceries with Lysol. But we adapted. And soon turned our attention to missing our four kids and all of our infant and toddling grandkids.
That is when had to force ourselves to focus on things that we HAD... vs things we ...Had Not.
We HAD Early Retirement. We HAD cellphone chargers.
Cellphones are the most consequential joy-generators for lockdowns and quarantining. That device can do anything. I taught mine to read me the news in an Australian accent, until political news sparked dysentery. And it was a cellphone company that employed our daughter for years, until that store shut down due to Covid. But I DID learn to find my husband whenever I lost him using a Tracking App. He was usually less than twenty feet away, taking cellphone photos of his re-stacked wood pile and posting them to the family chat on WhatsApp.
Isn’t it strange that it is a cell “phone” -- yet "calls" are not the first or tenth thing I think of, regarding their sorcery-like powers?
Sometimes strangers call my cell to alert me that my Social Security number has been linked to heroin trafficking in San Antonio and I must press “1" to connect to a sheriff waiting to arrest me. When loneliness strikes, I appreciate their interest.
And I can literally no longer cook without my phone.
Covid made us all expert-chefs because we couldn't go out to restaurants, and I still limit the amount of take-out we get because:
1. We live in rural Massachusetts and restaurants are a 75 minute round-trip; and 2. Lysol Wipes create napalm when rubbed on styrofoam and I won’t eat what’s inside until I disinfect the packaging.
So I think about a restaurant food I’ve missed and Google it, or just scroll around Sally’s Baking Addiction Blog to find a novel dinner concept. It gets frustrating when the phone-recipe goes blank because of the screensaver. So I email myself the recipe, turn on the printer, kick up the points to 40, delete photos to save ink, paper the bin, print, then bind my recipes into what is called A Cook Book so I can forget where I keep it and re-search Safari for new recipes. Happiness restored.
Another happy thing that we ‘had’ vs things we didn’t: We "had" our 29 year-old daughter who, joy of joys, lost her job due to Covid and came to live with us, then start a new remote job, here. This made us ecstatic. She is bliss to be around. We like to pretend she just graduated from college and we are 45, unemployed, and under house arrest.
We also regularly SnapChat her from an entire floor away, though she is nowhere near as enchanted with this as we.
But there were other platforms to learn, other offspring to annoy. There was the FaceBook Portal, Google Duo, and FaceTime. Every nanosecond on each, every technological feature, was a treasure. And not JUST because we got almost good at three separate virtual visit platforms, but that did make us happy.
Oh who am I kidding? We are really bad at all of it. My phone regularly FaceTimes the entire WhatsApp Family Chat when I slip my phone into a cushioned chair pocket. No one ever answers.
I FaceTime Canada by mistake during that son’s workday pretty regularly, too. And although the FaceTime outgoing ringtone is different than incoming, I always forget that. I can only tell I’ve committed an Erroneous FaceTiming by the recipient’s expression. “Um. Hello???” Faux smile. “Oh. Did I FaceTime YOU? Or did you FaceTime ME?” Faux smile. “I see. Goodbye.”
Google Duo? The first hundred attempts, I routinely answered and disconnected at the same time. This defies Space-Time but I did it. I only recently learned that answering Google Duo with sound, is half the process. There is this neat Camcorder Icon that appears to be outlined in pencil that I must also touch in order to SEE that particular son and our toddling granddaughter.
It astounds me how patient everyone is with me. That they continue using my personal phone to initiate a visit. In fact, Canada only FaceTimes my husband’s phone when mine is lost in soft furniture.
And The FaceBook Portal. It was our Covid Christmas gift, brainchild of our engineer daughter-in-law. It is amazing technology affixed to the Smart TV. The camera is sound-and-motion-activated, so it self-pans to whomever is speaking or walking out-of-shot. An important privacy-violating feature. Our son Zach steps away to do work on his computer or eat cake and thinks he is off-camera. But depending how quiet his girls are, the camera just follows him.
By February the Portal had self-improved with various upgrades that only Zach down or uploaded. We are waiting for ours to upgrade itself.
Our first five Portalings had not yet benefited from any upgrades, confounded as they were by our fruitless search for the remote. Zach upgraded this experience by calling us 30-60 minutes prior to an attempted Portaling so we could begin the search early.
Today it takes less than ten minutes to activate Sound, but we still puzzle over the blank screen until Zach’s wife gently urges us to remove the plastic cover from the camera’s eye. It feels like a War-Time Victory when we finally connect so we can watch our livingrooms fade in and out like a Star Trek episode when the Transporter is on the fritz and we are stuck between dimensions. There’s always that moment where we fear the Portal will transform us into yak meat. But we are getting better and better, faster and faster, exploring animated options where we can read stories to the girls that have music and characters, or we can turn our faces into cartoon yak meat.
In person visits, though, are particular fun. Yesterday we visited our family IRL that we usually enjoy via Google Duo. It was insane. We had not been together in person in 31 days but who is counting, and we all underestimated how important it is to be together. It’s nice to hug and smell other humans, especially toddlers because they smell magnificent, mostly, and that kid is dope at 23-month-old hugs. It’s more like a protracted snuggle-collapse and it’s glorious. We drank Jake’s coffee and ate homemade cookies and devoured piles of Chinese food via touch-free delivery. And we played sooooo many games with our grandchild, marveling at how much difference 31 days, I counted, make in the development of a turning 2 year old.
I do not personally enjoy Zoom Birthdays because that platform was designed for business conferencing, so feels like a meeting without agenda or facilitator where attendees help the birthday person feel old. Everyone looks exhausted and tries not to yawn and check their watches. We’re coming up on a second birthday Zoom for our Toronto son and I think we’re going to use filters so each of us is a yak. That makes me happy.
As the nation begins to open back up, as we are newly reunited with our Early Retirement Boat, as Father’s Day approaches and lockdowns and masks are gone for the vaccinated, I cannot help but acknowledge that our 15-month quest for happiness has become a habit of mind. Of heart. Plans are underway for our Massachusetts kids and grands to visit together at our house for the first time since the toddlers were infants. We’re even hoping to plan a Toronto visit late summer to finally re-smell our Canadians and meet the newest baby boy addition. These things used to be ‘events to look forward to’ but— truly. Now they’re everything they were always meant to be. They. Are. Everything.
