I was sure we would be the only ones without masks, but I was wrong.

It was a Friday morning, the 24th day schools had been closed for the virus. We’d been notified that a caravan of teachers would drive along all of the county’s bus routes so that they and their erstwhile students might wave at each other. In this monotonous time it was something to do.

We were walking out the door when I thought about masks. One of the other bus-stop parents is a doctor, and when I’d last seen her in public, a couple of weeks earlier at the CSA pickup, she’d been wearing an Etsy mask. Surely she’d be wearing it again, and surely all or least many of the other parents from our neighborhood would also actually believe and want to telegraph their belief that one should #obeytheCDC.

There was not a mask in sight, as it turned out. After a while, this started to feel like a mistake, for an event such as this one. In fact, should an event such as this one have been permitted at all?

The school board had announced that the parade would set out at 10:30 a.m. We’d walked to the bus stop at 10:50, thinking that would allow enough time for the teachers to work their way around to us. By 11:15, with still no sign of the caravan, it finally dawned on me that, of course, it was making the rounds of all the bus stops on all the routes, not just our route, and that we might be in for a really long wait.

We weren’t the only ones to have miscalculated in this way, with the result that, because of this event, 25 or 30 of us spent a good hour standing around each other, with not a mask in sight. So much for the governor’s prohibition against gatherings of more than 10.

The adults observed the six-foot rule, for the most part, standing around chatting in little widely spaced groups of three and four. But the children unavoidably mingled quite a bit more closely. Perhaps not as closely as Before, but it certainly wasn’t the case that they were consistently six feet apart, and some of the littlest ones naturally behaved no differently at all, ping-ponging around and through a crowd that silently parted before them.

“Six feet, Julian!” came the shouted reminder from one neighbor to his ten-year-old, who was up on another neighbor’s porch, hemmed in by a gaggle of girls. “I’m trying, Dad,” Julian answered, “but they just keep coming.”

Another boy was jumping up and down, waving his arms and yelling “six feet apart!”

“I sort of wish we still didn’t have to go to school but there was no such thing as coronavirus,” he said to Julian, later.

“I don’t know,” said Julian, sounding for all the world as if he were about to admit he might not actually mind going back to school if everything could just return to normal. He was carrying a stretchy rubber dinosaur, and he showed the other boy how it could be pulled back and fired like a rubber band, thirty feet down the sidewalk, over the heads of all of the grownups.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud or sad that Axl and Belle seemed to have internalized the instructions about social distancing better than anyone. They stood on the fringes with me, which I was glad of, but Belle, in particular, seemed shut down and wouldn’t even call out a greeting to those of her friends who were milling around. I watched Axl make a wide circle out into the street to avoid one of the little kids. What effect was all of this having on these kids? What effect will it have? Is it something that will mark them forever, or will it be forgotten in a year?

On the telephone pole at the corner, someone had hung up a pink poster board sign for the teachers inscribed with the words “We miss you!”

We do miss the teachers, and we feel sorry for how painful all of this must be for them, and we are more grateful than ever for the hard work they do for our children, during both normal times and this strange era. And yet the sign needed editing, I thought. I added an asterisk and wrote, in small letters at the bottom of the sign, “But we don’t miss losing recess or having to each lunch silently.”

The jumping boy was rolling on the ground, moaning, hands clasped over his crotch.

“Why’d you do that, Julian?” yelled Julian’s father.

Julian’s stretchy dinosaur, which he’d just snapped like a bull whip at the other boy, dangled from one hand.

“He wasn’t social distancing, Dad,” Julian said. “So I hit him in the nuts.”