March 21,
2020
Dear Windows
and Doors,
Outside, the light hits the
gutters of our neighbor’s house and brightens the contrast of lines. It’s not
the only contrast. We’re not in a lockdown yet, and I’ve gone running in
mornings and some walks in the afternoon, hoping to pass far enough away from
people on the sidewalk, sometimes running into the street if it’s empty enough:
so here is the world inside, and it’s cozy, and filled with people I love, and
we are fortunate enough to be in a house of many rooms and spaces; our furnace
has been recently fixed, so there’s warmth too; but outside are friends,
restaurants, jobs, travel and plans of future—so the contrast right now,
inside, outside, is wide.
You, Windows, try to give us
both, and how much worse would it be without you. And you, back door
especially, I can walk through you and take in the sun in the yard closed in by
its bamboo screen and barrier walls, can swing in the hanging chair in the
corner, though it is shaded and cool there.
You, Front Door, don’t yet shut
as tightly as you might. The papers wonder about lockdowns, which have now been
implemented in all of California and parts of New York. You are the gateway to
delivery services, which we haven’t yet invoked, and only a few of Maisie and
Amelia’s friends have rapped upon you to be let inside, where Stephanie may or
may not be infecting surfaces with COVID 19. For now, you are still open, well
enough. But the world is shut enough that I wonder sometimes that I even lock
you, for it seems quieter of strangers outside than it has in the past.
Dear Windows and Doors, here’s
one thing you failed to separate from me: Two days ago, I took an unauthorized
walk in our neighborhood and was almost all the way down a street when someone
rotated toward me like a plant towards the sun, and I turned around to see a
colleague from school, in a place I thought I knew no one; and she came towards
me, abruptly stopping ten feet away and there we stood stiffly, where she told
me she hadn’t told others but that her mother was in a home, 94, with
coronavirus, and also pneumonia, and that she had last seen her mother a few
days before where she waved to her from the window of a door (dear Windows and Doors),
and that is likely the last time she will see her mother. Even funerals, I
understand, are thinned out, so she will have to memorialize alone, in her
home, when it happens, though it has probably happened already. I blew my
colleague a kiss, and then later, wrote her a Facebook message, saying I was
sorry I couldn’t give her a hug.
Dear Windows, dear Doors: Too
much the world outside looks absolutely ordinary.
David
March 23,
2020
Dear Creativity,
There is much more time to play
with you right now, because I am home and my work demands are so fewer and I’m
also getting more time to sleep. I’m so excited to play!
But somehow there is not as much
time as I want every day even now, and strangely, when people are asking each
other, What are you doing with your time because there’s so much of it now that
people are threatened with boredom and loneliness, I want to hunker down, want
to say, Leave me alone I’m busy, because with all this time, dear Creativity, I
am constantly interrupted by phone calls and emails and people who suddenly
want to connect and who believe deeply that we need to connect now more than
ever. But I want to play with you, Creativity, and not with connection, which
has begun to feel like a job.
Here are things I want to do with
you right now: I want to finish the Passover Haggadah that I’m basing on Albert
Camus’ The Plague, even though it turns out to be not so funny and I’m
not connecting with it or enjoying it nearly as much as I’d done with the Moby
Dick seder. I could also start playing with making videos for students,
although that’s only of some thin appeal. I want to start writing again,
although maybe I’ll just start with this Pandemic Diary: there was a writing I
had started a couple of years ago with great beginning but no plan or
direction, and maybe that would be worth returning to—but for that, I’d
definitely want to tell people to leave me alone for part of the day, and that
doesn’t seem easy.
Dear Creativity, I’m excited that
there are so many people (privileged people, surely, like me) that can
re-imagine how they exist in relation to time right now, re-imagine how they
exist in relation to work and to the natural environment. Everything is so
fully disrupted, we have a real opportunity now to turn to you and kick off the
habits and institutions entrenched by systems and routine.
I know people (privileged people,
surely) are overwhelmed with possibility right now, Creativity. Just give them
a thin line at a time, and this can be an exciting moment.
March 25,
2020
I had a dream last night that I
was walking back to visit Dad’s house—1917, the house in Montlake where he
lived when I was a teenager—and I walked past a discarded water furnace by his
garage, which I was glad to see (because in real life, Stephanie and I had a
water heater die yesterday), but then saw another appliance on the way up the
stairs, and another, and another, and I started getting alarmed, but thinking
some house cleaning was going on. Once inside, it was like in the sanctuary of
a mosque, just a wide rug, and then Dad made it clear I needed to keep my
distance.
The feeling was of disruption, of
concern for my Dad, and also sense that he was taking care of himself.
Dad and Wendy are holed up on
Vashon. They counted down the days from when Wendy last taught her UW class
before they had any contact with each other in their tiny house; and every once
in a while, Dad would go out early early to the store with gloves and wipes and
do a dash shop and leave. He is post-operative and has trouble sitting or
standing or walking or running without getting blood in his urine a month after
his prostate surgery, the terrifying highlight of which was the surgeon coming
out and telling Wendy he didn’t know how to stop the bleeding. So my father is
being very careful with his immuno-suppressed body; Wendy, with her weak renal
system, is also so careful.
Stephanie is in the 18th
day of a fever, also has cough, also has no sense of taste or smell, and she
gets wiped out. She’s still putting in full days of work, but she can’t get
tested.
I’m more worried about my sister,
who can’t get through a phone call or a walk through the rooms of her house
without shortness of breath. She was admitted to urgent care a couple nights
ago, but they told her she had an upper respiratory virus, didn’t test her for
COVID 19, didn’t take an x-ray for pneumonia, and sent her home with instructions
to contact her doctor if it gets worse.
Last night I went shopping at
Fred Meyer for the third time in the last few weeks. They still don’t have
toilet paper, frozen peas, flour, canned or dry beans, brown or granulated
sugar, bleach, hand soap, sanitizer, and they’ve shut down all the bin items,
which is fine. No problem finding donuts or candy or chips or, thankfully,
fruit and vegetables. Even though shopping the other two times was hard, last
night nearly brought me to tears an hour in. At 8:30 at night, the store was
thankfully populated sparsely, which was why I went then, but a third of the
people were wearing masks, which was scary, and another third didn’t seem to
care how close they came to others, which was also scary, and by the time I
didn’t find important things I wanted to find and went to the single checker
and her line that snaked halfway to the back of the store, I wanted to cry.
I got home, finished the dishes,
and then Stephanie and I went upstairs to go to our separate beds, calling to
each other our love. And it suddenly felt so lonely, closing the doors against
each other.
Dear Woman Sitting
in her Room in the Nursing Home,
Are you okay?
I wonder how life is different
without visits, but also without movement—you can’t go out for meals anymore,
can’t go out for social hours or bingo or go to the window down the hall for a
view. You’re just in your room now, keeping safe, and plenty of people are out
there thinking about all the terrible residual effects of COVID 19, but in this
country where we uniquely house our old and sick separately from working
families, the only people thinking about you are the very people who are not
housing you with them where you could share your stories, child care; where
your dementia would just be part of growing old and so maybe not as scary as
when the young experience it in such concentrated, impersonal, terrifying form.
I wonder how it is for you, if
you are getting extra care from nurse aids, if they are slower to move from
room to room because they are making sure to have conversations with you. I
hope you have a roommate, and that your roommate has some acuity of mind. I
know wealthier residents get rooms to themselves, and I don’t know how that
must be now, when the walls and doors are suddenly so thick, your health
prioritized as they cut you off from the dangerous, moving world.
March 30, 2020
Dear Self-in-One-Month,
I hope that you and the girls and
Stephanie are still healthy—maybe Stephanie never had COVID 19 after all, or if
she did, it was mild and she’s through it now, and hopefully she’s developed
some resistance to the virus.
If that is not the case, I hope
you are all well enough anyway that you haven’t had to go to the hospital; and
I certainly hope Dad and Wendy are still at their home in Vashon, doing okay—I
don’t suspect they’re back in Seattle.
I hope Sophie has been okay
returning to Seattle, shut up in a house with not much to do; I hope the
sisters have been playing games. I hope the girls have come into the cooking
rotation more fully, and are responsible for more chores. I hope Amelia is
happy with her choice of college (she has now heard back from all schools, so
self-in-one-month, it seems like Grinnell and Middlebury are her top two preferences—has
she made a decision, and is it Middlebury? no, Grinnell? I think it’s, I don’t
know!).
I hope you’ve been able to buy
toilet paper at some point, and maybe some flour. I hope that you are still finding
the will and permission to go running. I hope that you are continuing to find
use for every minute of the day with teaching and organizing work, reading, running
a little writing, some streaming at night, and communication. Hopefully people
haven’t been bugging you too much with need for video chatting, or if they are,
maybe you are welcoming it.
Is your energy okay, your mental
health? Are you taking advantage of family time and the upheaval of existence
to reflect and renew?
I hope you’ve made it through the
month without terror or tragedy, and that you are muddling through okay.
March 30,
2020
Dear Hands,
You are the enemy now. You want
to touch everything; you don’t care where everything has been. Everything has somewhere
teeming, Hands. Everything is juicy with bacteria and contagion and you just
don’t care, touching counters, door handles, books, money, toilets, pants. And
then, right where the body is most a gaping wound open to the disasters of the
world—the porous mouth, the mucus membranes, the squishy wet eyes—you just
reach up and rub and wipe and scratch, all the time, even when I’m looking at
you and telling you not to.
I wash you when I get too close
to my wife. I wash you when I touch counters. I wash you when I walk by water.
I wash and wash until I bleed, and I started bleeding a while ago, so now I
wash and put moisturizer on you. I’ve never pampered you so well, and yet I
know you’re ready at any moment to betray me.
Stay down!
April 1,
2020
Dear Homelessness,
You must be loving this moment. I
know Washington State has been very clear in its directives to landlords to
stave off evictions during this time, and that King County has also been at
least thoughtful about what to do with homeless people so they are less
vulnerable to the gradations of coronavirus—like buying that motel in Kent,
like trying to get more people housed, but I’m sure it’s not enough, so there
are people for you to prey on, people to keep unsheltered.
Exposed to the weather and need
and poor health, the homeless are surely equally exposed to virus and disease.
Homelessness, maybe now is not the time for you to be so selfish.
April 6,
2020
Dear Essential
Worker in the Grocery Store,
You seem so calm and like nothing
too unusual is happening. It’s true, you have on gloves, but you don’t have a
mask. But, oh, yes, here is the credit card from my pocket, let’s both handle
it. Anyway, I read about you in the paper where it reminds us that you are
putting your life on your line to make sure other people have the food they
need, and the paper, that reminds us that it is the people with most need and
least money who are on the front lines like this, not social distancing because
they have low income jobs and no safety net; plus, I think I understand that
because you are essential workers, you also don’t have a choice but to come to
work, because people whose work is nonessential stay home and are granted
employment insurance, but not you. You even still talk about the food I’ve
selected that you also like, because it’s a normal day and we’re making
conversation, you through your smile, me through my mask. When I leave the
house to face other consumers because I absolutely have to buy something like
milk, and I try to be as fast and as careful as I can; I feel like my family’s
lives are in my hands; but you are there hours and hours every day, smiling and
handling thousands of objects hundreds of people have touched, facing faces,
standing so close. Thank you! Please stay healthy!
April 8,
2020
Dear Structural
Racism, and 70% COVID Victims Black in Chicago, New Orleans, Elsewhere,
You’re really out in the open
now, aren’t you. When everyone is afraid of coronavirus and looking over their
shoulder at deaths and then we see Blacks disproportionately sick and dying, we
can’t look away at how poorly we treat our poor, at how many people of color
map this way—lack of health care availability, lack of insurance, more prone to
live near toxic sites, less access to healthful foods like vegetables and less
time to make meals from simple ingredients, more low pay but essential jobs on
the frontline of coronavirus like grocery clerks, less time and resources for exercise,
more crowded housing, more dependence on crowded transit, and the symptoms we
already knew about that said all of these things: more obesity, more diabetes,
more heart risk, more hypertension.
Well, Structural Racism, I’m hoping
more people are onto you right now, although I worry it’s the same people who
were already noticing who are noticing. But right now, you’re showing yourself
like a happy tornado, and all it takes is a couple weeks before you’re not just
leading to unequal lifestyles but mass deaths.
April 20,
2020
Dear Face Mask,
I don’t totally understand how to
use you well, and I’m not trying that hard. I at least understand you better
than the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, putting one ear strap of his N95
mask over his head and letting the other ear strap dangle below his chin as he uses
his naked-to-the-world palm to smash the thing closer to his nose.
Our household owns seven of you
now, all delivered from my father from a batch of 50 he bought from a medical
supply company; five of ours still sit unused in a plastic bag; the other two
are open on the car seat, and I alternate their use between weekly shopping
trips. I never get the top bow tight enough, but it works when I extra-loop them
over my ears, a little uncomfortably, fogging my glasses a little as the breath
rises from the top.
You embarrass me when I’m
actually in the store and have to say something, because I sound so muffled
inside you; but I’m not embarrassed the way I was the first time I wore you, or
the way I was when I went to pick up takeout from the Chinese restaurant and I
was the only one wearing a mask and I was just standing and waiting and hoping
people didn’t think I was just wearing a mask to protect me from Chinese
Americans, at the same time I was wondering why they didn’t have masks at all;
I’m not embarrassed to be seen by you now because so many people are wearing
masks—they’re supposed to out in public—but maybe I’m a little embarrassed to
be wearing something that should have been donated to a hospital, even though I
reuse these and I wouldn’t donate my used ones anyway.
I’m sorry I have no desire to
take you running, but you trap air I need. Maybe next time I’ll take your
cousin, Bandanna, over my face when I run, but I’ll keep it lying and loose and
flapping on the bottom, like that moron, Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
Dear Face Mask, thank you for the
invisible job you do. I hope you’re doing something—for me and for other
people, other than be what I know for sure you are—a symbol that I’m trying to be
careful.
April 22,
2020
Dear Mass Incarceration,
I’ve been reading up on you. I
read a book called The New Jim Crow, where I learned by what precedent
and what racist indifference you have become a tool for disenfranchisement,
continued slavery, and caste barriers. But now that you are newly deadly,
whether you are a for-profit outfit or a public pen, because you’re likely to
be overcrowded in a time that calls for social distancing, and sickness can
blow like a wind when people are trapped together, let alone in a place that arouses
no sympathy from a public already straining for protective and testing
supplies.
April 24,
2020
Dear Parent
of Student with Severe Needs,
I’ve been reading about you in
the paper ungenerously. I hear some of you registering how your child’s needs
are not being met in this time of remote learning, how your child needs
one-on-one help and is not getting it, or maybe is needing more guidance because
an aide usually helps translate and break down the work. I have been ungenerous
because for a while it looked like school wouldn’t happen at all if your child
couldn’t get equal access, and in this moment, I got very, very utilitarian,
counting the number of educations stopped because of your small number, even
cheering Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education I loathe, because she is
stepping up to something predictably loathsome in wanting to grant waivers of
equal access to schools willing to ignore you.
But I know that this moment
highlights something else besides my every-person-for-self selfishness, and
that is, what it must be like in your home right now, because I know you have a
job, and you also have a child who needs constant attention and very often both
of your hands; the isolation your child experiences must be compounded in this
moment, and what must that do to your own sense of being cut from the world,
and when you’re needing help, to have people like me, people like me usually
generous and equity-minded, to have people like me looking angrily at you like
you are the selfish ones. It must be exasperating besides.
April 27,
2020
Dear Self on
a Walk Outside,
I am so glad you are getting out
there. Spring is beautiful, and how many Springs you have missed from the
inside of a classroom, light coming so sharply in the morning that I have shut
it out, or have only vaguely noticed the quality of light.
But you, Self on a Walk Outside,
you see the vibrant grass, lush and untamed or blanketed in care, the fallen
cherry blossoms, the tended flowers in bunches and rows and fearless color, the
busy bugs and birds, and the proud walks of houses tended perhaps more lovingly
than before, and you can walk into it all, smell the crisp air against the
light rot of growth and cut grass, and a wind carrying three miles of salt from
the Sound, of dung from the zoo.
I walk by others who seem happy,
not scared, though we plan our escape vectors to keep a distance, an occasional
phone zombie cutting slowly and randomly across.
April 29,
2020
Dear Groceries,
Are you dirty? Do I need to wash
you down when I get you home? When I touched you, did I also touch my mask? Sometimes
you don’t include sugar or flour or toilet paper, and thanks to the quick
thinking of our President, you will continue to include lots of meat, even
though meat butchers and processors have consolidated dangerously in the last
decade and then pushed workers closer and faster and people on the floors are
flaring up with coronavirus in meat centers of Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado—I
say “even though” because the President is going to force workers back to work
and Tyson and all those companies don’t even need to worry about sickness and
death because the President said that he’d protect businesses from legal action,
and because OSHA has already relaxed what CDC usually demands in problem plants
into voluntary recommendations, so not even exposure to terminal danger to workers
and families can slow a pig or a cow from becoming groceries.
Dear Groceries. Are you dirty?
May 1, 2020
Dear Science,
Did you know that today was
International Workers Day—May Day? I’m sure you did. You know everything. It’s
even in your name. Science. From Latin scientia, scire, to know.
It’s hard for me to understand the many, many world and local leaders who are
scorning you right now in the face of a disease they can’t visibly see and
whose occurrence and tessellations must seem random and mysterious, as in, the
Lord’s ways are Mysterious, even when you have so clearly laid out many of the
things we can and do know about COVID 19, as well as the best ways to slow its spread
while your workers, the scientists, develop how best to respond, and,
eventually, a vaccine, and how to prepare for the next uncontrolled and
possibly manufactured virus.
I’m thinking of you today, May
Day, as I’m thinking about workers in meat processing plants all over the
country, including Tyson Fresh Meats in Walla Walla county, where workers are
getting sick and dying in faster, concentrated rates. I was just writing about
this to Groceries. I just can’t seem to ignore our President calling for an
emergency measure to force meat-workers back while simultaneously protecting
Tyson from lawsuits should workers happen to sicken and die but not forcing
those same factories to turn to you, Science, to require safety measures for
the close, high-contact work.
Our President wants to force the
economy and therefore his popularity back to life, and you can be as loud as
you want, Science; you can show up at all of his daily briefings; you can even
whisper to him occasionally from Fox News; you can stand next to him and contradict
him; you can do all of these things the same way you’ve been trying to get him
to see the already-upon-us disaster of climate change: Our President doesn’t
want to hear it and you’re Fake News.
I have to level with you,
Science. I’m worried that a lot of the reason he won’t listen to you is because
of what you show but also what he might be able to see with his own eyes—and
this too is a reason I am writing to you on May Day: The people who are getting
sickest, the people who are job-losing-est but also working and commuting among
throngs the mostest, the people dying in highest numbers, are transparently the
most poor and of most color, and those are not Our President’s people. Science,
you objectively show who’s dying the most; we could lean on you to correct
inequities and wrongs as well as save more lives and protect livelihoods. But
we live in a country led by willful, craven ignorance and racist indifference.
Science, this should be one of the
crowning years of this generation. But it’s just not your year.
