Duwamish River visit

                Stephanie and I drove down 1^st and parked near Spokane and took our bikes over the currently restricted lower West Seattle bridge and commenced on the Duwamish River trail. It’s been years since I’ve done it, and remembered thinking then that, for a trail by a river, it was a wasteland of a ride all the way to South Park. But now I’ve learned enough since then to appreciate the magnitude of the industry here, and the winding majesty it replaced.

               What is that five mile industrial channel between recycling pits and container yards? It’s what remains of the Duwamish River. The River that Made Seattle suggests that had Se’alth rebelled with others in the Indian Wars that followed the scornful 1855 treaties with Isaac Stevenson, he might have won claim to lands for the Duwamish people, as did others like the Nisqually under Leschi, whose meager reservations set aside by government were expanded to better lands and waters. But Se'alth did not follow Leschi into battle and sided instead with white trading partners; and now the Duwamish remain refugees on their own ancestral lands, a solitary longhouse on the side of East Marginal Way.

               Stephanie and I spent most of our time in the park across the street from the longhouse—Herring’s House Park, on the grounds of the former village of basketry hat from 500 A.D. The lone, remaining curve of the Duwamish River is there, bending the park, with Kellogg Island, the dredged piece of land between the curve and the machine straight channel, on the other side. Since 1970, people have worked to restore habitat, and a sign there made me realize the grass and marsh trees aren’t reserved principally for people; it serves osprey and beaver and salmon even more urgently. Nature has been so effectively thieved and repurposed that parks I thought were recreational are desperate habitat instead.

               To get to the park, Herring House Park in one name, T-107 in another, one must circumnavigate trains, tractor trailer yards, alleys of fenced-off homes, buckled sidewalks, and then cross a roaring five-lane arterial. This is the first two tenths of a mile of the Duwamish River trail. Here is the park. Across the street, the longhouse. And the remaining bend of the river, here. Everything else is steel and slurry, concrete silos and razor wire. To imagine this place ever habitable to people up and down the tide flats or to envision these waters navigated by cedar canoes among barges acres long is just too much for the mind. Of the ancestral paths and trading posts, even in this hard-won oasis of cormorants and clam shells, only industrial pathways remain.

               In the park, there are plaques that unwind a story: A salmon wants to swim up the river, but an older, wiser salmon warns that the river is bad. There is an otter, and it will eat you. There is a bear, and it will grab you. There is a man with a spear, and he will spear you. The river is bad! But the salmon wants to swim. The fish jumps over the otter, under the bear, and through the man with a spear. The river is good! So many obstacles the salmon must overcome. But what if the river itself is yanked straight and dredged deep and barrels of chemicals invisibly leech through sediment and there are fish with bellies of iron the very size of rivers themselves?

Asking my class, What is it like to be you?

                In my Hands for a Bridge class, we’ve discussed the traumas and perpetuations of racism and colonialism; we’ve read and investigated poetry, autobiographies, stories, and essays, and we’ve thought about disruptions in our own local and national communities. Today, I interrupted conversation on Anu Taranath’s book, Beyond Guilt Trips, within which we’ve been thinking about the kinds of discomfort we face as we travel, and how we need to be open about these with fellow travelers, mindful and curious about what such discomfort is asking. Anu’s book is a lot about how to have difficult conversations about and across difference.

               The interruption today was therefore deliberate and personal. We wrote and then one by one we shared: What's it like to be you?

We carry different burdens and hurt out into the public: So what do you carry, in public or in conversation? What is it like to be you?

                The sharing was full of heart and pain. Students told of anxieties, relationship to bodies, spirals of thoughts, masks they wear, bullying, pressures to succeed, illness endured, protective walls they’ve built, all the while throwing supportive comments to each other, silently, in the chat.

               It was such ponderous and lonely weight they were sharing, so much private toil and sorrow.

               In response, there was a distinctive slowness, an alert quiet. Everyone nodded and held still, radiating presence and care.

               I’ve never done this in a class. Only a few times in my career I might have tried. In a physical class, we would have tossed desks aside and sat in a close circle on the floor, just to see reflections in each others’ shining wet eyes. Today, we were squares on a screen, throwing compassion to tiny faces in random spots on a computer, and still it moved.

               Afterwards, we wrote of our pride and gratitude to each other, and the testimonials still scroll there, like footprints in a sidewalk that show we’ve walked together.

               We were raw and open and loving to the end.

Being deliberate about joy

                It’s important to be deliberate about joy when holiday contact has been flattened and we’re all locked in with few and sometimes wounded relations.

               On Tuesday night, I ran an all-staff, no-talent talent show for Roosevelt High School. I know students have been isolated and sad, but educators have been too: for the same reason I share with students a Zen at Ten half hour for happiness on Wednesdays, I organized a talent show with health and community in mind.

               And it was so good—a joyous affair that included singing and guitar and poetry, cookie deliveries and virtual eating, cat tricks, juggling, crochet and art shares, a Boomwhacker arrangement of Rolling in the Deep, a dramatic reading of a children’s book, and a stage-stealing pursed lip trumpeting of The Star Spangled Banner, all in one neat hour.

               Today, the day between semesters, an hour and a half away from home, I slipped into a forest at an unmarked pullout and followed the roaring sound to a perch over water churning white, blue, and green. The ground was the soft overlayer of forest—needles and moss and soft rot of wood and earth—until I came out on the slick rocks over a dramatic river. At Eagle Falls, the river had kettled out round bowls in rock while a boulder-layered wall lifted cedars on the other side.

               By the time I got back on the road, I was buoyant and happy in ways I haven’t felt much since the lockdown and the car drove like a teenager’s.

Democracy Terrorized

                Yesterday, white terrorists stormed and vandalized the capitol. Images of a man smugly propping up his feet on House Speaker Pelosi’s abandoned desk unsettled me as much as pictures of Pramila Jayapal huddled on the floor of the balcony, hordes breaking down barriers, smashing windows, marauding through halls of Congress, pipe bombs found at Democratic and Republican headquarters, a corpse of a young woman carried down the Capitol steps.

               A president of the United States effectively sparked violence against another branch of government. We’ve had an illiterate, racist, hyper-coddled man-baby running our country, and he never seemed to understand the difference between presidents and kings. Our democracy has always been partial and inequitable, but I never expected to see it so severely ignored and violently sabotaged.

               Yet democracy is our country’s most vital and originating claim.

               Do we know anymore what this means? Equal voice and power of citizens hang on mechanisms of consensus. That means a number of things.

               We have signed on to a loud, messy project, one that calls for a rarely-smooth caucusing of ideas and good communication of facts to inform decisions. It calls for a mechanism of settling debates. And it involves a social contract that citizens will abide by rules of debate and then peaceably tolerate outcomes.

               Such debate calls for protection of assembly and speech, as well as dependable information and therefore vigorous protections of the press and quality education. We then need careful and accessible means of voting. And the settled outcome of these decisions requires our trust and peaceful acquiescence to what’s been decided.

               Our democracy is in trouble.

               The Republican Party, for too long, has relied on compromises in democracy that advantage targeted minoritarian interests. To achieve this, an executive class seeking to avoid taxes and regulation sold grievance, xenophobia, patriotism and freedom to a white, rural working class seeking to preserve Christian values and access to jobs. Such compromise includes a Senate where Nebraska has power equal to California and an Electoral College where sparsely populated states punch above their weight. These compromises have served Republicans well.

               Add to these compromises other degradations of democracy that advantage Republicans: massive voter suppression, Gerry-rigged redistricting, poorly funded schools, a bullied press.

               With all these advantages, Republicans still lost the White House and Senate.

               They were then able to go to courts, packed with judges appointed by Trump and rushed through confirmation by McConnell, and still, they lost. No fewer than 60 times, judges and Justices listened patiently to claims of election fraud, and claimants lost over and over.

               The President told his supporters yesterday he would never concede. He told them to march up Pennsylvania Avenue and give Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”

               That’s not democracy. That’s a bullied press, degraded schooling, arduous voting, and an absolute refusal after two months to accept the will of the people. The fact that it ended up in the breaching and vandalizing of the People’s House where state-certified votes were then being honored and received is only the most demonstrable statement of the fact.

               Democracy is fragile. We have kicked the shit out of it. And we need to attend to its needs, quickly and with care.

The use of professional mourning

               In the book I’m reading today, In the Language of Miracles by Raija Hassib, there’s mention of professional mourners. It’s a job I’ve heard of before, but I’ve only nodded towards the intrigues of other times and places. I understand how one might hire others to demonstrate high standing—behold such sorrow at this great loss! I also guess that even if funeral-goers knew the keening and gnashing of teeth was amplified by mercenary wailers, there’d be respect for the effort to broadcast pain.

               But I put the book down to feel it more. Last night, Amelia and I were watching the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary that tuned in deeply to Fred Rogers’ radical slowness and quiet and love, his intent stare and unblinking recognitions of hardship and anxieties of children. In one tender moment, Daniel Striped Tiger is talking to Lady Aberlin, and the tiger softly says, I’ve been wondering if I’m a mistake. Then he timidly sings that he's not like anyone else he knows. She sings back, forcefully: “You’re not a fake. You’re no mistake. You are my friend.” It becomes a duet, where the tiger continues in his anxieties, and Lady Aberlin continues in her reassurance.

               When they stop singing, Lady Aberlin says, “You are just fine, exactly the way you are.”

               The way I look? he asks.

               Yeah, she says.

               The way I talk?

               Yes!

               The way I love?

               And she says, “Especially the way you love.” And that’s when I know I’m crying.

               But I’m not weeping like I am at the end of the movie, when Amelia had joined me. It’s after Mr. Rogers’ funeral. One of the talking heads remembers a time Mr. Rogers had said, Think of someone who helped you along the way, for one minute; I’m gonna time you. And then we hear Mr. Rogers’ own, slow voice and deliberate timbre: “Let’s just take some time to think of those extra special people.” And we see former cast members, sons, sister, aunt, friends looking off, looking down, one at a time, as we hear the rest of Mr. Rogers’ statement—that wherever those people are, you know that deep down, they always want what’s best for you; they’ve always cared for you beyond measure, and encouraged you to be true to the best in you. One by one, we watch the seven or eight people think; we watch them feel. They cry, smile, nod, fill, and finally, they look at us in blessing through the magic of the camera, by which point, I was ugly crying, and embarrassed to be doing so, but Amelia was crying with me, and we were transported together.

               This morning, I was thinking about professional mourners. I was thinking about the onion cellar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, where people go to cut onions and cry together. Maybe the role of professional mourners isn’t mostly to broadcast status, but to encourage our wary grief. A quote from the book of Jeremiah suggests this to be so: “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; And send for the wailing women, that they may come! Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, That our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water” (9: 17–18).

               Sometimes we need help to liberate the churning and bruised humanity within.

Dear my Seniors, 2020

June 10, 2020

Dear my Seniors,

               We are living a moment so broken and so full of raw pain and danger that entrenched failures have become, finally, un-trenched. For those living my many privileges, family is wide open and present in a way I’ve missed, and I have a work-life balance I’ve never had in America before. And for all of us,  white complacency that has allowed brutalities against African Americans and Latinx to occur repeatedly and overtly—the white complacency that has allowed institutions, laws, stories, and ignorances to nurture destructive biases and inequities in wealth, safety, and health—is finally being shaken. The re-imagining of community health is loud enough to reach city halls; and many whites, however halting and awkward, have finally joined people of color in a reckoning of the racist bones of our country.

               How we meet this moment depends on you.

               My own generation and class and race have worked hard to protect freedoms. We’ve been about individualism and freedom and achieving personal comforts, successfully ripping away taxes that my parents’ generation paid and stoking profit margins against unions and workers, eating the climate and wrapping guns in a banner of freedom. But in this broken moment, the ethos of individualism and personal freedom is being tested: failure to mask up, wash hands, and stand apart can cripple and kill our neighbors; white safety is being shown in connection with the brutalizing and killing of black bodies. The ethos of individualism is being tested by both pandemic and by racism, and by its successful fulfilment in our dunderheaded president, and so we find ourselves in a communitarian moment we have not seen in half a century.

               The Great Depression left a deep impression on its generation, who were frugal, coupon pinching people to the end, appreciating family, tradition and stability. This era will certainly shape your generation as well: You’ve already had to be so adaptable; you’ve leaned into friendships and social connection in creative, soulful ways; you’ve recognized mental health challenges my generation stigmatized; and you’ve embraced understanding and supporting people not your selves; you’ve been shaped into a more activist, generous, compassionate and outraged thoughtful citizenry, open to sharing and receiving anger, to standing together when we are called to stand together, and to sacrifice personal comforts and easy silences for a common good.

               I said this to Hands for a Bridge on our last day, but I’ll say it again here. I believe your most important quality is kindness. If you are also smart and funny, that’s a bonus; but when it comes to the room I want to be in and the people I want to sing with and how we heal the world, kindness is paramount. If you put two people of opposing views together and they are both kind—no matter how intelligent or how ignorant—those two people can learn something together. The good news is that most people can be kind, and the ones who can’t are wounded in ways that can use our compassion.

               You have demonstrated such good hearts over and over. You’ve shown repeatedly your thoughtfulness, kindness and grace, your love, tenderness, vulnerability, and care. I’ve seen it in Amelia, and how easy she is to express joy, how fast to express grief; I’ve seen it in choices she makes and the company she keeps—the big hearts that sustain her own and bring her to her best self, and I’ve certainly felt it in what you bring me. I so miss what it means and what it does in my classroom. Just as I’ll miss you.

               Dear my seniors, this moment can be one of reconstruction and healing, but you must keep up pressure, continue to witness and share, and, to my white Seniors, over the ignorance, careless silence, and comforts of my generation’s brand of individualism, you must continue to privilege the lives, spirits, and bodies of your brothers and sisters, yellow, black, brown, white. And to all, if and when you can do this with love in your hearts, our world is that much a better place.

               I’m too sorry I can’t hug you in celebration and farewell. I zoom hug you.

Love,

David Grosskopf

Dear Derek Chauvin's knee

June 8, 2020

Dear Derek Chauvin’s knee,

               You have been blamed for cutting off the air of George Floyd, of leaning on his neck while he begged for breath and his mother, and Derek Chauvin now stands accused of murder in the second degree. We are now entering the third week of growing protests to what your uninterrupted eight minutes and fortysix seconds mean in this country, the long minutes of “I can’t breathe I can’t breathe” ignored by Derek Chauvin and three officers who didn’t stop you from Floyd’s neck as bystanders said you’re killing him you’ve probably killed him get off do something, a kneeling that would later call to mind Colin Kaepernick’s knee protesting uninterrupted brutality of police that absurdly and eventually lost Kaepernick his job after the President said Get that son of a bitch off the field right now he's fired, and later, Derek Chauvin’s knee, after you stopped George Floyd’s breath, the President and his approving 42% angrily decried movement on the streets saying Why can’t you protest peacefully, and the protesters say to the police but also to you, I can’t breathe.

               I learned about unarmed Michael Stewart being strangled by transit police who were acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed Amadou Diallo who was caught in a hailstorm of 42 bullets by police acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about woodcarver John Williams who was shot multiple times by police never charged with his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin shot by neighborhood watch who was acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed boy Tamir Rice who was shot playing in a playground by police who were cleared of his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed hands-up Michael Brown who was shot six times by police who was acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about handcuffed Freddie Gray who died from a rough ride delivered by police who were acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about armed but not reaching Philando Castile who was shot seven times by police who was acquitted of his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed Charleena Lyles shot in her apartment by the very police she called and who were then cleared of her absurd murder. I learned about unarmed Botham Jean who was shot in his apartment by police who at last was charged with his absurd murder. I learned about unarmed Breonna Taylor who was shot in her apartment by police in a no-knock midnight raid under current investigation. And I learned about unarmed Eric Garner who begged the same fucking thing we heard six years later from George Floyd when police didn’t let up and killed him and who were never indicted for his absurd murder, even after he said, and George Floyd said, and thousands and thousands and thousands of African Americans on the streets begging for air said, I can’t breathe.

               That was you on George Floyd. That was my knee on America’s neck, for far longer than eight minutes and forty six seconds, Black America gagging as I did and said nothing.

Pandemic Diary

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 18^th 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.