Another “emergency message” from San Francisco’s public school district came late Wednesday afternoon: “All SFUSD schools will be closed to students” Thursday, the recorded voice told me over my phone, adding, “We recognize that this may be disruptive.” The words are, by now, as surprising as the hotel alarm clock was to Phil Connors in Punxsutawney.
For those still keeping track, today marks day four of the SF teachers’ strike. Barring a miracle, the city’s public school students will miss a full week of classes, homework, friends, and play. Which leaves me and my wife, like so many others, in a sustained tug-of-war between childcare and distracted work. (For me, on Wednesday, childcare won big time.)
The latest marker of the strike on my family: my wife’s new high score in Tetris. It has jumped exponentially from 67,000 pre-strike to more than 93,000, a whopping 38 percent improvement. At this rate I’ll be living with the new Alex Thach by the end of the school year — or what’s left of it.
I’m not talking about any form of Tetris, on Switch, PlayStation, a PC, laptop or even a phone. This is a miniaturized version of the original arcade-sized game, shrunken to 5.5-inches tall and 3.5-inches wide. My wife, who maintains a nostalgia for the appealingly simplistic game invented by software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, bought this handheld version for my 11-year-old son for Christmas. It was one of those gifts that you buy for someone but that’s partly for yourself.
My wife was playing it again last night. I asked her when she had achieved her new high score.
“I don’t know when, Joel,” she said. “Time is blurring for me.”
I turned to my son and asked if he has played it lately. “Not really,” he said. “It’s always occupied.”
His response drew a sharp objection from my wife: “I play it, like, twice a day!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” my son said.
Later, as I oversaw my son’s teeth brushing, my wife was working on a possibly new high score.
“How did I end up with it again?” she said. “I said I wasn’t going to play again, and then someone handed it to me.”
My wife is no fool, and also a terrific multitasker.
“I don’t want to be the one in your diary who’s playing Tetris when I’ve read a Booker Prize novel, and am reading another one,” she said.
“And I read The Correspondent,” she said, adding that it’s an epistolary novel. With an approving nod, I pretended to know what that was. “It was excellent,” she said. “It made me cry.”
Let it be known: My wife is a voracious reader of almost exclusively serious works of fiction.
She is also constantly feeding our children library books, including one this week for my son about Jim Jones.
Me? I’m reading a profile of Gavin Newsom in The New Yorker. I’m also reading The Hunter by Tana French, the American-born “First Lady of Irish Crime,” another novel my well-read wife passed along to me.
I’ve also acknowledged that the strike isn’t Covid. If there’s no public school, at least the public tennis courts are more available than usual. I’ve somehow managed to play a total of about three hours of tennis with my kids this week.
On Tuesday, my daughter battled me to 5-6, and quit when she faced match point. “I’m tired,” she said, retiring. Which was fine. Because at bedtime yesterday, as I said goodnight, I noticed she was reading a novel she bought for herself, Game, Set, Match. If only someone at the negotiating table could say those words about the teachers’ strike.
