How I Was Robbed

Dear Kate,

"How the pandemic has robbed me of a full high school experience..." thus the story begins, with its end, and we want to listen.  After all, if you are the one who's telling the story and you're feeling this way - being robbed, you would like the world to listen to you.

And that's what we do, and we might even say doing better than ever: listening to stories, opinions, perspectives, that would otherwise be dismissed, trivialized, for being too slight, too inconsequential, too self-absorbed.  The above "First Person" news report is an example of good culture, human progress.

For us to absorb the self-absorption of others is more than a mere courtesy now, but a moral duty, a chief access and evidence to human solidarity.  Yesterday I drove my kids and niece back from church, and for more than half an hour straight they talked about the new Batman movie: the "emo" Batman that, for some, might not be among the best regurgitations, but is still hardly redundant for the man being so damn sad.  Look at the poor guy, he is so hopeless: can't you at least listen to his despair?

I read novels, stories long and short and many.  You can say I want to listen.  I can tell you there's not a moment that I don't have a story of other (often accompanied by a piece of music, almost always randomly associated) in my head, not even when I am dreaming, I suspect.  But it probably wouldn't surprise you that I am also someone who would hold up my hand and ask, How? when I read the above headline.

Yes, I want to know exactly how a pandemic, an impersonal force with no motive or will, can rob a person of anything, how one is to presume there was an entitled ownership of some expected return or value destined to be materialized in the unfolding of the said experience, and that there is a way to account for the loss - actually robbery, by way of an ugly balance sheet maybe, with a proven formula of a life desirable if not for the variables now deprived perhaps.  Yes, I do want to know, How? 

Am I refusing to listen, a bigot?  The same person who reads stories from all around the world, old and new, strange and simple?  Do I do all that just to dismiss the voice of a Grade 11 girl, myself being a father of teens?  Two of my favorite novels are Tim Winton's Breath and Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone, both about marginalized youths living on the edge of society.  I dream these characters.  I am asking you to explain me.

Usually I would go on to do exactly that, explaining myself to you.  No, not this time.  I want to see - to hear, how well you've been listening to me.

Yours, Alex