The trouble with normal is somehow it just gets worse

June is imminent, but if I may, I haven’t had my fill of May. Specifically, I have been remiss in the required “stopping to smell the flowers,” although I will say that the cup of coffee sitting here next to my keyboard does provide a not-unpleasant fragrance.

Saturday is the first of June, another one of those months from Roman antiquity, kicking off the summer Caesars July and August. According to historians, June was named after Juno, the goddess of marriage, childbirth, and love. Still, other historians argue that it comes from the Latin iuniores, meaning “younger people.”

I get it. I was a teenager once, reciting love poems by Keats and Shelley under the Strawberry Moon in June and all that.

But here’s something, I just saw that health officials are talking about a new coronavirus variant called (seriously) FLiRT, so that bugaboo hasn’t gone away. It was even highlighted on Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David gives Bruce Springsteen COVID, and idiocy ensues.

But seriously, I can’t fault the smattering of people still wearing masks in public, particularly because I recently found myself experiencing a bout of fever, runny nose, and fatigue. I wondered if the COVID gremlin might have me in its sights again and took a home test.

All is OK, but here we are in 2024 and what we started calling a so-called new normal back in 2020 isn’t new anymore. But hey, when does it let up? I’ve always heard that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but I’m thinking the more things change, the more they become new normals.

I mean, I started working from home four years ago when everybody was freaking out, and after things more or less died down, I never stopped working in absentia. It’s now my normal normal, still typing away on my laptop at the kitchen table and increasingly appreciating a homebody kind of domestication. So it ain’t so bad after all.

Actually, I was a stay-at-home dad for a few months when my son was born and got into domesticity with the aplomb of an amateur. Suffice it to say that during that period I learned two new things: how to bake a potato in the oven and how to change my son’s cloth diapers without stabbing him with safety pins. Except for once or twice. Or thrice.

It was like learning skills that I never picked up while growing up. With six kids in the house, our mother gave everyone chores to do and rotated them around for the most part. Cooking, however, was not rotated, and neither was sewing or ironing or doing the laundry.

My two brothers and I were tasked with cleaning the gutters, mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, and retrieving the occasional dead possum from the crawl space under the house. My three sisters were relegated to that other stuff, the “women’s work.”

The boomer generation was raised in an era when it was normal for the man to go off to work and “the little woman” stayed at home. These kinds of things came up while I was talking with my college student grandson last week and trying to convey how wholly different society took as normal.

More often than not in that era, hubbies were considered the only responsible party in a marriage, and most things financial or legal had to go through the man.

In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but in some cases, an employer would pay a guy a higher wage if he was married under the assumption that wives did not work. While that is seen as archaic and arbitrary today, that’s the way it was and was considered normal. However, it wasn’t too long before a new normal took over, and married women were able to open their own bank accounts and do a heckuva lot more than just the shopping and whatnot.

It was high time for a change, and there was no holding back after that. In the succeeding decades, we have seen a string of new “new normals” and not only in the marriage and work categories but all over. I remember when easily obtained credit cards became the new normal for shopping, microwaves became the new normal for cooking, and VCRs became the new normal for watching movies.

Oops, then DVDs became a new normal for watching movies and then streaming became the new normal for watching movies and … and ….

But I digress.

All in all, the next new normal may turn out to be better (or worse) than the current normal, but whatever the case, there’s always another normal to come along before I get used to the old normal.