When I was a teenager in the mid 1980s, growing up in a small town in Central Pennsylvania, my best friend and I used to walk places that we could have easily driven to once we had our licenses. The destination wasn’t the point — the walking was a way to pass time together on the long weekend afternoons when we’d already seen every movie at the local theater and had spent our babysitting money at the town’s modest mall. These were our teenage years: we read voraciously; we made mixtapes; we talked on our landlines until parents cut us off; we stole bottles from their liquor cabinets when they were distracted with adulting and we took epic walks.
She and I were talking the other day about how those long afternoons, which feel like both another lifetime and also like yesterday, prepared us well for biding our time during this strange and eerie pandemic.
