Uncharted territory, no? Strange times. I don’t recall any other period in my life when, as I was leaving the house, anyone would regularly have said, “Don’t forget your mask, honey,” as though I were Jason Voorhees sauntering off to work for the day. My kids spent their last three months of school not in school, I haven’t so much as shaken the hand of anyone outside my family in 120 days, citizens are filling out tax forms in July, Amazon Prime takes two weeks instead of two days, the leading movie at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend grossed 11,000 bucks, and people are having important business meetings pantsless. Okay, maybe that last thing was always routine for Les Moonves and Harvey Weinstein, but not for most of us. There is a lot of unprecedented going around.

But also a lot of precedented. And I don’t just mean that we’re reliving 1918 or 1347. Coronavirus has set me adrift on the waves of my own memories. I don’t know where you have turned for wisdom, inspiration, and advice these fraught few weeks, but I’ve been watching Weird Science, Top Secret, and the first two Naked Gun movies. Every day I’m struck by the need to watch something with Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn as an adorable feuding couple with big hair who go on the lam, or one with Nicolas Cage when he was still wearing his own big hair, or one where Tom Cruise mixes cocktails. Remember when you could build an entire summer movie around Tom Cruise operating a cocktail shaker and it was obviously a blockbuster idea?

My peculiar need to revisit youthful fixations is, I am convinced, part of the curiously retro existence that corona has imposed on me. I’m living in the suburbs now for the first time since the early Nineties. I’m using a bike as transportation for the first time since 1982 and eating retro meals like tuna-fish sandwiches with a side order of Ridgies potato chips because I’m always home instead of out on the streets of New York City getting sushi or falafel or chicken tikka. For extra retro style points, I get the actual physical newspaper at home too (America’s journal — the New York Post). Someone throws it on my driveway each morning. I hope it’s a kid on a bike. Pleasantville, the 1998 Tobey Maguire–Reese Witherspoon movie, was terrible but I’m living in Retroland and it suits me. (In case you’re thinking this is some kind of coded demographic signal, it isn’t. My town is probably majority-minority by now, having been listed as 45 percent minorities back in the 2010 census, and most of the young people are Latino.)

Sunday my wife and I spent the latter stages of the afternoon cooling off in a retro wading pool, which is a compact version of the above-ground vinyl-and-aluminum swimming pool my suburban family enjoyed in the Seventies. The mellow music from those days, today known semi-derisively as “Yacht Rock” though everyone who doesn’t openly love it secretly loves it, wafted from a radio in the backyard. (Okay, it’s not a radio, it’s an iPhone signal sent through a BlueTooth speaker. Close enough.) Exciting activities these days include walking down to the 7-Eleven to get Slurpees and playing Battleship. The Battleship set is about 40 years old, I think: I got it at a yard sale, because my own nostalgia isn’t enough and I have to go root around in other people’s.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there must be drawbacks to a worldwide pandemic, but by me things are fairly chill. I type these words barefoot in an Adirondack chair on my porch. Barefoot is one of those modes I’d completely lost touch with while living in New York City. I haven’t spent this much time aux pieds nus since Jimmy Carter was starring as National Malaise Man on television. (And wouldn’t Jimmy be delighted to be president today? He’d be positively marinating in malaise. Maybe he could even inject himself with coronavirus on live TV for the purpose of suffering.) Here on Long Island, I walk around outside barefoot while getting the mail or moving the lawn furniture. My soles are getting as tough as a chimp’s.

A couple of weeks ago, we were thrilled to hear that a retro craze was coming to our town: a drive-in movie. We got the kids to put down their iPads, amid some mild grumbling that sounded approximately like a snowplow being dragged over bare concrete. They wailed that they wanted to do what they had done for the previous 110 evenings, which was to stay in. But I insisted that they’d have a great time, and all hopes were confirmed when we drove over to a grassy field to watch Babe, the talking-pig epic. The sound, as relayed through an AM radio station, was scratchy and thin, and the picture, projected on a makeshift screen, wasn’t exactly IMAX-quality. Ah, but the experience: glorious. The kids ate their weight in Cheetos and discovered the sun roof was an escape portal that they could use every time they felt like watching from the top of the car. When they came back, they flopped down in the back of the wagon, which we had made into a flatbed by folding the back seats down. My younger daughter got bored with the movie but enjoyed scampering in the grass, so I co-scampered and pointed out the Big Dipper to her. “Daddy, can we do this again?” she said. Sure, kiddo. The next one has already been scheduled: Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s about a guy who deals with intergalactic strife by grooving on Seventies soft rock. Wise man.