{"id":68600,"date":"2020-06-27T17:26:07","date_gmt":"2020-06-27T21:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/?p=68600"},"modified":"2020-06-27T17:26:39","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T21:26:39","slug":"yoda-in-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/yoda-in-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Yoda in the House (Prompt 9)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

At the last family zoom meeting, I asked my 8 year old great niece,<\/p>\n

“Why are you wearing a mask?”<\/p>\n

She flitted about the family furniture, jumping over her 11 year old brother,<\/p>\n

prone, propped chin in his palms, in deep lethargy, staring at the television screen, as she cooed,<\/p>\n

“I’m protecting my family.”<\/p>\n

I glanced quizzically at her mother in the background, who shrugged her shoulders.<\/p>\n

“Why are you protecting your family?”<\/p>\n

“Because of the corona!”<\/p>\n

She continued to hop around the circle of the room, sometimes vanishing off camera to the perimeters,<\/p>\n

each round jumping over her catatonic brother.<\/p>\n

I tried a different tact.<\/p>\n

“Did your teacher tell you to wear a mask at home?<\/p>\n

Suddenly her face filled the entire screen as she furrowed her brows, pursed her lips, and<\/p>\n

snapped, “No! My teacher is dumb. She doesn’t know anything about the corona. The man with the white hair in the video said to wear a mask to protect your family, so I am.” And her face was gone.<\/p>\n

She gets it.<\/p>\n

In a dark room, curtains drawn, she, like a firefly in a bottle, lit up my questing heart.<\/p>\n

She totally gets it.<\/p>\n

She has no fear, no denial, no panic, no past, no selfish idols, no unhinged conspiracy-driven anger drawn from the depths of a harried suburban life fixated on the next cocktail, next workout, next paycheck,<\/p>\n

wear the mask<\/p>\n

to protect the family.<\/p>\n

We are all family.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the last family zoom meeting, I asked my 8 year old great niece, “Why are you wearing a mask?” She flitted about the family furniture, jumping over her 11 year old brother, prone, propped chin in his palms, in deep lethargy, staring at the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,441],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-poetry-prompt-responses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68832,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68600\/revisions\/68832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}