Comment: How do grandparents stay ‘socially distant’ from kids?

By Barry Golson / Special to The Washington Post

I am in our living room, looking fearfully at my lively, affectionate 4-year-old granddaughter.

“Hey Pops, can you twirl me?” She is moving toward me, hands outstretched, a threat to my very life.

If she makes her next usual move, which is to wrap her arms around my neck, and I twirl her around, it is possible that she could transmit the virus from her sweet mouth to my droopy eyes or shaggy nostrils.

Who knows where she’s been? Did she grasp the monkey bars at the playground? Were they recently held by the sweaty palms of some other unwitting kindergartner whose uncle had a stopover in Wuhan, or perhaps Milan, and then Kirkland, Washington, thus completing a terrible chain to deliver a fatal dose of coronavirus to this dozy retiree in Tampa, Florida?

I move back, put up my hands defensively.

“Not now, sweetie.”

“Aww. Is it your back, again, Pops? I can jump up to you.”

“No, it’s not my back.” Always implying, this one. “My back is fine, strong as always. It’s like your mommy told you. We just shouldn’t get too huggy. There are germs around now.”

And there are. Nobody knows how quickly these viral fleas jump from host to host, but from what I read, by the time I finish writing this, it is expected that several new nations will be in lockdown. My wife and I moved here to be “close to the kids,” the legal term that describes this phase of our generation’s migrant golden years. Being a part of their lives is pretty much what we have going for us now. And now we have to figure out how to extricate ourselves, at least for the time being. Which time could be … a long time.

So here we are in the spring of 2020, amid a pandemic out of a Stephen King novel that targets the elderly and the infirm, but mysteriously spares the young; who may be silent carriers.

Those of us past our 65 die-by dates are now supposed to decide how much or how little we should quarantine ourselves from our kids’ lives. We oldies are supposed to quarantine ourselves, to sequester from children or the sick, to FaceTime each other, to stay away from families — and pretty much anyone else — until the tsunami recedes. Which could be, I don’t know, three months, six months, a year, longer.

But it’s not because we want to avoid exposing our innocent infants to grown-up poxes but because the little critters could kill us. We’re the prey in this streaming movie. The darling kids are the ones standing in a row, eyes glittering in the fields, children of the corona.

The subtleties of navigating possible self-quarantine depend as well on our conditions. If, in addition to being just old, we also have underlying problems, such as lowered immune systems, or certain cancers, or respiratory ailments, or hypertension — the list goes on and on — we are supposed to be more susceptible to the virus, and should wall ourselves off accordingly.

So we rely on our old standby, checking the condition of our conditions, asking which couples, parents, and extended family, are most susceptible? Is my autoimmune disease more susceptible than my wife’s hypertension? If so, do I have to stay alone at Easter while she bends the rules to hide the colored eggs? (Of course, she’ll vigorously wash her hands afterward.)

My wife and I have only a few years left before we become as hopelessly out of it as, say, elderly presidential candidates tend to be. Our granddaughters, ages 6 and 4, have only a few years left before they start to find us hopeless, before the eye-rolling begins.

How brief a time do we have? What a small crack of light, while they think you are interesting, care what you think, laugh at your granddad jokes. And, it has to be said, how impossibly, ridiculously adorable they are just now, with their ballet moves, and their stick-figure sketches, their lisps, their princess gowns, their one-act plays, their tumbles off the end of the sofa, and their upside-down sunglasses.

We’re supposed to give all that up, stay away, cue Netflix and chill down to safe, antiseptic isolation? To save our lives?

Nah.

“OK, grab my neck, I’ll lift you. Let’s twirl.”

Barry Golson is a veteran journalist and former editor at Playboy, TV Guide and Yahoo! Internet Life. He has contributed to the New York Times, Los Angeles, Salon and others.