BOGGLE

I have begun to play Boggle online up to 10 times a day. I am getting pretty good and now routinely beat the computer and earn over 300 points on the daily challenge as a matter of course. I play while the soup is warming, and I play while I eat the soup, spoon one hand, smartphone in the other. I play instead of working, cooking, cleaning. I play while my husband speaks to me. I am not looking at my husband, but sense his mouth moving, open and shut. His words or the Boggle words, I think.

Boggle is an acceptable use of my time because it is language, spelling, and involves a good bit of mental agility. Meanwhile, outside, I can hear the garbage truck – a masked or unmasked sanitation worker has taken my trash away. And at the hospital, a nurse, dressed in virus-ridden scrubs, intubates another human. If I think too much about it - Boggle and my other quarantine pastimes begin to feel much less noble.