I observed cautiously from across the room as N watched Zoe’s friends Elmo and the fairy Abby Cadabby do their best to make her feel included, adapting the lyrics to “If You’re Happy and You Know It” so everyone shouts “Wahoo!” instead of clapping their hands.
IM A BELIEVER PARODY TV
The next afternoon, exhausted enough to give TV another shot, I fast-forwarded through Zoe’s compound fracture to the scene where she returns to the courtyard with a fresh cast on her arm. I turned off the TV, grateful she didn’t have the language to tell her mother what I’d just shown her. N stared wide-eyed at the screen, absorbing Zoe’s pain like an empath, then burst into tears. When her grand finale comes, Zoe slips on a banana peel, shatters her arm, and writhes on the street in Muppet agony.
Zoe leaps here and there across a courtyard, impressing all who see her. A Muppet named Zoe shows her friends the ballet dance she’s been practicing. The first episode N and I watched together was about body parts. You could see individual strands of fur on the Muppets, who seemed to have time-traveled from my own childhood in the internet-free ’80s to the social media–infused pandemonium of spring 2020. Three decades later, here was essentially the same program, now in its fiftieth season, in stunning HD with music that sounded like it could be on the radio.
I couldn’t tell you when exactly I outgrew the show and stopped watching it, only that I somehow absorbed everything I saw and heard along the way. The zany music resonated long after the TV was off, jangly tunes that stuck like glue until bedtime-and often until the next episode. And… so was I? I remembered Sesame Street as a low-fi grab bag of skits on Oregon Public Broadcasting in the 1980s, the show my parents put on before and after school.
An oasis from my own childhood was streaming on demand: “Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away…” We nestled into the couch and fished the remote from between the cushions. We’d managed to shield her from television for the first sixteen months of her life, and I resolved to keep protecting her from the ads and anxieties that would dominate her vision soon enough.īy the end of day three of sheltering in place with a toddler, worn-out and desperate, I revised my parenting philosophy to embrace “developmentally appropriate educational television” in hopes that something, anything, on PBS would hold her attention long enough for me to plan for a Zoom class or, better yet, close my eyes and breathe. To keep N amused, I would try anything, as long as it didn’t involve turning on a screen. I pushed her in a stroller until she fell asleep and at last I could read student work or, more often, doomscroll on Twitter, wondering if we’d brought a child into a collapsing world. I pulled her around town in a bike trailer, BART trains wailing past overhead, empty car after empty car.
IM A BELIEVER PARODY MOVIE
I pushed her in a toy car around the neighborhood, which felt like an empty movie set, the skies above the nearby airport devoid of planes. I pulled weeds while she followed me with a toy bucket. The official word from the college where I taught was that we would be back on campus after spring break, so I passed the official word on to my students and convinced myself that I should enjoy some precious time with N while capitalism was on pause. This was back when it seemed equally plausible that the world was ending and that we would flatten the curve in six weeks. For N, there was no yesterday, today, or tomorrow, no best-laid plans, only the vast, enthralling Sea of Perception, where we drifted together from the moment her mother, a health care worker, left the house after breakfast until the moment her mother returned just before dinner, the outline of an N95 mask still impressed upon her face. When N’s daycare was shut down, I was plunged into the role of full-time work-from-home dad, responsible for the safety and enrichment of a one-and-a-half-year-old girl who was just beginning to walk and babble, blissfully unaware of viruses and politics and the concept of time.
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