From the Editor-in-Chief

As I write this, it’s early August and while our children are supposed to go back to school in just a few weeks, things still feel uncertain. We all desperately want life to get back to normal, but Covid rates are spiking in areas that have already started school. The kids, for their part, seem more than ready to get back to a routine, and ditch e-learning. I don’t think I’ve ever known them, or their parents, for that matter, as eager to get back into the classroom.

I have to hand it to our kids, they’ve been surprisingly resilient during this crazy time. From e-learning to canceled sports events, birthday and graduation parties, so many rites of passage have been put on hold, but they’ve managed to roll with the changes and keep a positive attitude. Our daughter, 15 and a sophomore, weathered the disappointment of having her entire freshman tennis season canceled, and our son, age 13, continued his virtual preparation for his bar mitzvah, while watching the planned date fade away on the calendar. In addition, he navigated the stresses of switching to a new school without actual school to attend, which made making new friends doubly hard.

As this “Groundhog Day” of a summer progressed, with one week running into the next, we tried to make it feel normal. Our son spent much of the summer at his grandmother’s lake house in Michigan, becoming quite adept at piloting a boat. Although we obviously missed him, we’re proud of his new skills and love it that he had fun. Our daughter threw herself into her social life, hanging out with her girlfriends as well as her first boyfriend, a milestone that her mother and I experienced with a gamut of emotions and many questions. We navigated new territory as parents the night they stopped making TikToks long enough to join us for dinner in the garden, our daughter suddenly part of a couple instead of our little girl.

While Covid put a massive damper on travel for just about everyone, we still managed to take a few trips as things loosened up. We flew for the first time since December, visiting Palm Beach, which provided a welcome respite. A drive to charming Mackinac Island yielded lots of wonderful family time and great memories, but ended with a (literal) bang as we blew a tire on the way home and wound up spending the night at a roadside hotel, trying to find someone to service our car and having to rent a cargo van for the drive back home.

A “last blast of summer” trip to Chicago provided a nice change of scenery, though the lack of traffic on Michigan Avenue was a reminder of current times. You can read my account of our trip on page 88. Our visit to the Apple Store, although fun from an architectural standpoint, turned out to be unnecessary when our son’s school director informed me that, no, a brand new MacBook was not exactly essential equipment for the upcoming school year. Sadly, the store was looted repeatedly several days after our return.

Back home again, with the kids sleeping their mornings away, occasional family games of golf or visits to the pool, and of course, the kids’ seemingly endless orders for food delivery, it almost felt normal, and yet it wasn’t. The ever-present masks, the constant warnings on the news, the uncertainty of the coming months make me wonder, as my children look back on this experience that we’re still in the midst of, how it all will affect them down the road. One thing is clear, they’ve certainly gotten a lesson in resiliency, and I hope that will serve them well their entire lives - to know that life can, and does, go on, even in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.

Jeffrey Cohen jeff@slmag.net