The Best Days

Like most of us, I didn’t love it when COVID hit.

I was in my second semester teaching at UNLV at the time, and at least in my mind, hitting my groove teaching the courses at hand, when I joined the masses of faculty across the country teaching remotely. Moreover, working from home, I found myself distracted with my wife and our son right there, a kitchen full of food, not having embedded accountability of other people working around me in an office or on campus.

As the pandemic carried on, I told people who asked that my job and life were in many ways easier in than life outside it. After all, once I’d established routines, recording video lectures and facilitating discussion boards was less taxing than leading class in person. It’s just that it was less fun, too, not to interact with students in real time or in person all that much. The more time that went on, though, the more I found myself adapting, and appreciating that at least a portion of the time I’d traditionally spend on a daily commute did feel like it was going toward my writing. And perhaps most importantly, I was spending at least double, quite possibly closer to triple the time with my son than I had in pre-pandemic times, I felt closer and more attuned to him than I had for months before.

I can’t in good conscience claim that the times of working from home and social distancing were good, and yet, in my personal life, there were a number of very good pieces. By the time the pandemic was drawing to a close, I knew there’d be a time I looked back on them with the warmth of nostalgia.

In the next phase of the pandemic, after my closest friends had been vaccinated, I caught a flight and spent a weekend hanging out with them. We ate good food and caught up on our lives. We played video games we hadn’t played together in twenty years and quoted sophomoric movies we’d spent late nights watching together.

Even in the moments when I missed my wife and son, and struggled with the time change and sleeping poorly at the Air BnB where we stayed I knew that I’d look back on pictures and memories from that weekend in the most positive of lights and my only regrets would be about not staying longer.

Toward the end of that trip, though, one of my friends and I got in a forward-looking conversation about where we were headed and what life might look like as our kids grew older, when we had more money, even so far as imagining our retirements. My friend arrived at a question, “Do you think the best days are still ahead of us?”

I knew what this friend was getting at. Neither of us were all that popular in high school, and indeed we’d come to feel sorry for people who peaked then, talking about how sad it was to have one’s best days come so young.

And yet, one of the bonds that friend and I shared was we could work ourselves into a nostalgic fervor about anything.

When we weren’t popular in high school, we nonetheless spent late nights in his room drinking Mountain Dew and watching basketball games or movies. When I worked my first job in residence life for the smallest full-time salary I’ve made, he’d come to visit me and we’d make the most of being bachelors who didn’t have meaningful responsibilities those weekend days and nights, when we’d shoot the shit into the wee hours of the mornings. When we were older and single, we’d keep each other informed on pursuits--fumbles and miscues that we couldn’t help laughing about in recounting to one another, the thrill of a first date that had gone well, the joy of seeing each other when we lived a long road trip or a flight apart. And that very weekend, in between catching one another up and reminiscing, hadn’t we traded stories about our kids--how funny they were and how quickly they were growing up?

We’d reminisced about a lot of those times over that weekend, and it could be hard to resist calling those times past the good old days. Was it naïve, then, to assume that we’d have days we liked even more ahead of us?

Are our best days ahead of us? It’s all a matter of perspective. The more I thought about it, long after that conversation was over, the more it occurred to me the best days were all around us--years past, years ahead, and even in the present moment. Not that we were happy in every given moment, but every moment did have its place and value, its meaning, and even if we weren’t happy in the moment, plenty we’d look back on with a sense of wonder.