Finally! In the stay-at-home days of the pandemic, people take on personal projects for which they never had time

Dan McVay’s father was a sailor, a man who loved the sea and extended that affection to building intricate wooden models of ships, even as Parkinson’s disease took hold.

For years after his dad’s death in 2016, McVay swore he would complete the half-finished boats left behind, but he never had the time.

Not until now.

The cascade of stay-at-home orders and business closures generated by the coronavirus pandemic has left many people struggling to pay for rent and food. For others with greater financial stability, the enforced idleness has granted them the chance to turn the timing of a long-put-off aspiration from someday to today.

Skydiving is out. So is that trip to Europe. Or hiking the Adirondacks. But for personal projects that demand extended focus, the restrictions on movement create an unexpected oasis of time.

“It’s just a great way to connect with my dad,” said McVay, 46, of Frankford. He aims to first complete his father’s 15-inch model of a Muscongus Bay lobster smack, a sail-powered working boat that once plied the coast. “He was calm and steady. You have to be to do this.”

For some people, this may be the time to finally repair a classic car — or a fractured relationship. Some see a chance to learn yoga or baking or sewing.

Robert Toporek is using the present to confront the past, diving into writing a long-planned memoir of his combat experience in Vietnam.

“Survivor’s guilt — it’s a nasty animal,” said Toporek, 73, of Audubon, Montgomery County. “I grapple with it all the time.”

He grew up in Charleston, S.C., dropping out of high school and enlisting in the Army at 17. His parents had to sign a waiver because of his age. In May 1965, an 18-year-old Toporek landed in Vietnam as part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, the Army’s first major ground unit to serve there.

Writing and talking with other veterans has unearthed memories, Toporek said, particularly of a day when he was set to walk point — the dangerous first position in the line of soldiers snaking through the jungle. Another soldier took his place and was shot down.

That was more than 50 years ago, Toporek noted, but it can seem like yesterday.

That’s the quirk of time, which has been the fascination of humans since the ancients first considered the concept. It lasts too long. It goes too fast. A decade of raising children can seem to pass in a day, but a boring business seminar goes on forever.

People waste time, even kill time, yet always long for more.

For decades, Edie Weinstein raced through life as a workaholic therapist, writer, and motivational speaker, refusing to be slowed even by a heart attack.

“I keep running, as a friend described it, at a hundred miles an hour with my hair on fire,” she said. “I’m essential. I had to be on.”

Now, at 61, the pandemic has forced her to do something she once only imagined: to stop. To stand still. To understand that while the world may look like it’s falling apart, “it isn’t falling apart because I’m not rushing around in it. There’s nothing I can do to fix any of this for anybody.”

These days, at her home in Dublin, Bucks County, Weinstein sleeps late if she likes. She turned her living room into a gym. She calls friends and family to see how they’re faring in the crisis, and visits clients via video chat.

She doesn’t risk outside contact because of asthma and a cardiac condition. And for now that’s fine.

“There’s no urgency to get anywhere,” Weinstein said. “I don’t have to rush to get things done. … I hope when this is over, I’ll have finally learned the lesson.”

Carmen Pagan has embarked on a personal undertaking, hoping for time to finally heal from the murder of her brother, Richard Davila, who was shot to death in January 2016.

The 47-year-old was an innocent bystander hit by stray bullets from a drug-related shootout in Philadelphia’s Fairhill neighborhood, police said at the time.

It fell to Pagan to be the rock of the family, to deal with the police and the courts and the aftermath, exacerbating the depression she’s suffered since she was a teenager.

These days, the adult day-care center where she works is still open, but the government stay-at-home orders have constrained outside life.

“It’s OK to take this time to step back,” said Pagan, 42, of Fairhill, “to realize I have been operating on survival mode.”

McVay is a supervisor at the city Department of Human Services, working three days a week during the pandemic. The other two days offer time to commune with his late father.

Donald McVay led a nautical life, his son said, raising a family in Connecticut and piloting a sailboat across the waters of Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound. He had 17 grandchildren, and made each one a small, blockish lobster boat.

He challenged himself with detailed kits of 17-inch models, each one requiring a 25-page instruction manual and a sharp X-acto knife.

When he died in August 2016 at age 78, he left at least two unfinished boats.

“I’m excited to pick it up,” said the younger McVay. “It’s something I like to do, and a way to connect with my dad.”