The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 5

When The Bars and Restaurants Are All Closed

It's our Friday night tradition: dinner out with Tracy at a locally-owned pub, usually Blue Gill Grill or the Mayfair, while the kids begrudgingly put their electronics away during the meal and then tune us out during the pints before and after. It's always been this way. Dinner @ 5:30, arranged by text message. Kids dragged along, rolling their eyes. But it's tradition. It's what we do.

Now the bars and restaurants are all closed. 

I had planned to cook something at home, and then drive up to the Mayfair to tip out their front of the house staff with what we would have normally spent on a weekend. But 5:30 hit and I was hungry. The idea of spending another half hour or hour trying to cook something that anyone in the family would like was daunting. I didn't have the energy or emotional stamina to do it again.

 I called in an order to go. Kelly (the bartender) took the order and recognized my voice right away. The 25 minute quote time extended to 45 minutes as the kitchen was slammed and the phone was ringing off the hook. It was all okay, though. Seeing her as we picked up the food and chatted a bit (no more than 5 people allowed inside at a time) was nostalgic, like we hadn't seen each other in years, and not simply just a few days. We talked about how things used to be; about how things would be again, soon...we hoped. We left an envelope of cash for the waitstaff and bartenders, asking that it will be passed out by the owner with paychecks. 

We took our food home, and ate it at the kitchen table. The kids didn't even try to bring electronics to the table this time. They also lingered a bit after we were done eating instead of rushing back upstairs and putting the earbuds back in. And then they wandered off, and I read, and folded laundry, and emptied the dishwasher, and thought about how different the pace is, suddenly. 

The brakes have been applied, and everything has slowed to frame-by-frame instead of real time. My sister Katie called it "The slowing down to what is essential, primary, necessary..." For most of the week, I've been trying to hold the panic at bay, knowing that I cannot control the unknown, refusing to speculate about all of the what-ifs, and trying to help others process their own rising anxiety. And I know that my own anxiety will rise again, throughout the coming days and weeks, as I try to figure out how to regroup and get back all that we are losing. 

But tonight, I also can see that, with this tremendous change, comes a tremendous gain. A chance to slow down to what is essential, primary, necessary.

So, order a meal from your locally owned favorite place. Tip the waitstaff as if you were there. Take a deep breath. Take it all in. These are strange, strange days, but they are days, nonetheless. Maybe we can learn to cherish them, even while we strain and hope that they will be over soon, and we can get back to normal.

Photo by John Baker on Unsplash

The Coronacation Diaries: Episode 4

The One Where She Refuses to Suffocate 

I fell back asleep after Michael got up at 5:30 (to get ready to work from home) and I dreamed that I was trapped. I was lying on my back, Michelangelo-style, trying to screw sagging ceiling boards back into the joists, to keep the ceiling from falling. Each screw tightened the boards and closed the gaping sags between them. And yet, sandwiched between the deck of the scaffolding and the ceiling, I began to sweat. Some of the boards were sagging so badly that insulation layers were exposed above. It was hot, and dark, and frustrating. I wasn't exactly scared, but I was itchy, disconcerted, uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and mad. And I was goddamn determined to beat this sagging ceiling, one joist at a time.

I woke up, too warm, feeling suffocated by the too-heavy feather bed and ready for coffee, even if it was still dark outside. I checked the breaking news updates, the Facebook notifications, the emails. I checked the number of cases. I wrote lesson ideas for my classes. I finished a book. I got the kids up. I made breakfast. I held class. I wrote emails to all of the parents. I wrote a poem. I emptied the dishwasher. (I did not clean out the refrigerator.) I checked the number of cases.

I'm used to being active, to being on the go all the time. The kids and I have so many activities after school that we are always constantly in motion. Derby practice and baseball practice and Boy Scouts  and Girl Scouts and alternative ed and Taekwondo and physical therapy and choir concerts and band concerts and guitar and piano and voice. Every night there are several places to be. There is a purpose. 3 months of severely limited mobility has taken its toll on my weight, and on my physical sense of self. But access to the pool at the Y has kept me sane since I was cleared to put 50% weight on my ankle eight weeks ago. 

Now the gyms are closed. Physical therapy is cancelled. All of the kids' sports are postponed indefinitely. Everything has screeched to a halt, without much warning. I try to write, to find humor in the ridiculousness of the day. I try to do yoga in my living room, try to regain strength and mobility. I try to find excuses to walk outside in the rain. It's cold, but the dog needs a walk. It's wet, but I "need" to buy wine. I could drive, but I want the exercise. I could give up, throw in the towel, put down the drill, let the ceiling fall, but I refuse to suffocate.

I laugh as I fall out of plank repeatedly and my child's pose resembles a Quonset hut more than a peaceful child. I teach my daughter how to make homemade whipped cream and fresh strawberry sauce. We eat breakfast for dinner. I check the number of cases. I check my email. I check the number of reads on my blog posts. I check the breaking news. I check my notifications. I call my mom. I text my dad. I pour a glass of wine. I stretch and ice my ankle. I check the number of cases. 

I straighten the too-heavy feather bed. I turn down the heat. I pour a glass of wine. I pour my kids into bed. I check the number of cases. 

I write a blog post. I try to keep it light. It turns out pretty dark.

I post it anyway. 

I let the dog out. I stand outside in the rain.

I refuse to suffocate. 

I will beat this sagging feeling. 

One plank at a time.

The Coronacation Diaries: Episode 3

The One Where Texting Destroys All Attempts at Communication

Part of the torture of social distancing is the lack of face-to-face communication. It's nearly impossible to read tone in a text message, and it's often way too complicated and way too disjointed to have any soft of meaningful conversation. 

Disclaimer: I HATE talking on the phone. Hate it. I'm really bad at it. But, it turns out that I am also really, really bad at texting. And so is everyone else. Autocorrect is not our friend. 

So far today, I've introduced myself to my daughter's teacher as "Jeremiah g," had to Google what a "chelate" was, fed a vegetarian chicken noodle soup, and texted the babysitter about "surprise sex." I can't even make this up.

Speaking of educational endeavors, if you are like me, you've heard the word "chelate" before, but not known what it was. So, I googled it (like a life-long learner), and learned that a chelate is: 

 noun

CHEMISTRY

1. a compound containing a ligand (typically organic) bonded to a central metal atom at two or more points.

This definition does not at all explain what is then meant by the following text message...

When I asked for clarification, there was a very confusing back and forth that eventually needed a screenshot before I learned that chelate actually was supposed to be "chocolate." Which, I might add, I never did get to sample. 

She did get to sample the chicken noodle soup in the Crock-Pot, however. 

But the winner winner chicken (soup) dinner text of the day is offered below, without further anticipation or explanation.

     

 TL;DR: if the Coronavirus doesn't destroy our civilization, communicating via text message most certainly will.

The Coronacation Diaries: Episode 2

The "Nothing to See Here, Everything is Normal" Edition

It's hard to know what the right thing to do is in situations that we've literally never faced before. How do I meaningfully explain to my kid that I guess I"m okay with him being outside riding bikes with his best friend, but not okay with them being in the house? Fresh air and exercise and the limited friend group are probably okay, but closer quarters are not? There are so many rules and so many precautions and finding the rules that feel right for us (and for the community as a whole) is a continuously moving target. It was okay to eat out at our "home away from home" bar over the weekend. It was not okay to eat out yesterday. It was okay to swim at the Y yesterday. All gyms in the State of Michigan are closed today.

https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/1239892800138813446?s=20

Meanwhile, Ivanka is helpfully Tweeting artistically posed photos with advice to "throw a bedsheet over some taped together broomsticks. Plan a menu and 'pack' sandwiches, salads (S'mores optional)"; whilst my kitchen counter is a hot mess of electronics, bills, hairbrushes, and dog toys, and my kids wouldn't eat salads unless they were literally made out of S'mores. My daughter ate Nutella out of the jar and a hotdog for breakfast and I made coffee creamer out of almond milk, honey, and hot fudge (artistically labeled with painter's tape and Sharpee. Take that, Ivanka).


And now I will attempt to make soup out of chicken nuggets because that's what's in the freezer.

None of us really knows what we're doing here.

Except for the cat, who is stalking the mouse that lives in our stove. The cat knows. The cat is watching.

The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 1

Building the Schedule

Let’s be honest: for a teacher and for her kids, an unexpected 3-week vacation is like manna from heaven at the end of a dull, grey winter: a gift of precious days of sleep and recovery direct from the gods of teenage hormones and eye-rolling wars. This is a chance to get the house clean, get the rooms finally sorted and organized after the great remodel of 2018, get a fitness routine going after the great ankle-breakage of 2019, get that writing done, get started on reading that pile of books, get the kids prepared to test out of 6th grade math and 9th grade English, and generally get a grip on all of the things in our lives. BUT, I know what weekends are like in my household, with the constant arguing about the need for more cleaning of the bedrooms and less watching of the Youtube. Plus, with Michael working his DTMB job at home in the basement, there was no way we could survive as a family with the door slamming and the stomping up the stairs and the living on cheez-its and the earbuds in...I knew we had to build a schedule, or else we would be at each other’s throats all day every day, and we’d emerge at the end of the social distancing experiment as pale, flabby, angry lumps of (well-rested) dull stupidity. 

I’d seen the schedules floating around. The ideal schedule, clearly built by a control freak, and shared a thousand times on social media:

And the mock schedules, clearly built by others who are flies on the wall in my own home:

            

My kids were resistant (oh, so resistant) and mad (oh, so mad) that I wouldn’t just let them build their own schedules and do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. (If you attempted to enter their bedrooms, you would understand why this would be an oh, so terrible idea.) But, I pulled the parent card (either you build a schedule or I'll build one for you) and handed out pencils and pads of paper. We all built our ideal schedules and then lined them up to compare. Surprisingly, they were all pretty similar and all fairly sensible. 

I am somewhat apprehensive about attempting to adhere to 3 different schedules in the house, but I am also thinking that this compromise might be a way to get them to take some ownership of their day-to-day, and see if they can keep to their word and police themselves. In the classroom, choice and voice lead to ownership and engagement, so here's hoping that the same is true in the home.

And I’m going to hold myself to my own schedule, as well. Because I’ve got things to clean and pieces to write and books to read and pounds to lose and rooms to sort and the only way I’m going to avoid succumbing to day-drinking and watching marathons of Hallmark movies is with some serious ownership of the day-to-day.

I've got things to accomplish and a three-week gift of time.

Starting tomorrow.

Cheers!

The Whiteness of Chicken a la King

Over the past decade, I've spent a lot of time reading and talking and thinking about my own history of being white and my relationship with the construct of race. Reading Waking up White and watching Irving's Ted Talk and interview, I realized that my own upbringing, although less white collar, was very similar, and so very white.

We were a bootstraps family.

We lived in the Midwest, we owned a small construction business, and we worked hard. That was the nightly discussion at the dinner table. We worked hard. We were tough. We didn’t get sick or go to the doctor. We didn’t ask for help. The lessons were doled out with the cottage cheese, and I ate it all: If you got hurt, you put duct tape on it and went back to work. You didn’t accept charity or eat free lunch at school; you didn't wear designer clothes and you didn't shop at Goodwill; you ate ancient chickens that you butchered yourself and then boiled for hours, trying to soften up the leather before you canned it and made it into chicken a la king on toast. You went to college on scholarship or not at all. You did it yourself. You were self-made.

Except, of course, you were not. Your parents somehow sent you to Germany for two months after graduation, even though they were struggling to pay the bills. You see, they had a home they could put a 2nd mortgage on; they had an ability to take out loans; they had collateral in the construction company; they were well respected in town. Your scholarship was tied to your real dad’s employer; your grades and your standardized test scores—the gateway tests that you waltzed through—were a direct reflection of your mother’s college education and your race. You had privilege, and you were frightfully unaware.

In college, you quickly realized that there was a Black Caucus, but no caucus for students who were white. The Black Caucus helped incoming freshmen navigate the university, figure out how to drop and add classes, understand financial aid, and just simply belong. You felt lost alone and on your own, with no club or caucus (or classes), but you were also proud. And then, you did it by yourself. You navigated “the Pit,” you filled your blank schedule, you got a job, you figured out what to do when your scholarships came in after your bills were due, you got a long-distance calling card so that you could call home; you were self-made.

Except, of course, you were not. You knew how to negotiate and arrange financial aid and get a job because your parents were small-business owners.You quickly figured out how to play the game in college, because college was designed for you. Your classes were scaffolded on your high school education. The food in the cafeteria resembled the same chicken casseroles you grew up with. Your professors looked a lot like your high school teachers, just slightly more absent-minded and unironed. You understood how to navigate the system because the system was built for you.

And still, you lamented that you had no culture. No traditions. No race. The word “Caucasian” always seemed ridiculous, because it sounded like you were trying to be Asian-adjacent; but you didn’t even think to research the very ridiculous (and racist) history of that word. You just ticked the silly box, never questioning, and then felt sad that you had no Kwanzaa, no Hanukkah, no Cinco de Mayo. There was no white music, no white traditional clothing, no special white food. You knew that your own family’s grasping of Scottish heritage was an attempt to grasp on to a culture, even though you were barely Scottish. You wished for something that symbolically represented you.

You never realized that this country was designed for you. The entire school calendar was organized around your religious holidays. The post office schedule aligned with your family’s work schedule. Your leaders looked like you. Your friends dressed like you. Christmas, with its white Santa and white sugar cookies and white baby Jesus: that was a mirror reflection of you. Your bubble of whiteness, the one you claimed had no culture, was, in fact, your entire country—all of the holidays, all of the systems, all of the culture—all about you.

You wish you would have known all of this when you were younger. You wish you didn’t spend 20 or 30 or 40 years of your life ignorant of your own privilege, buying into your own family mythology of self-sufficiency and bootstrap success, blissfully unaware of all of the institutional help you received. But you didn’t know what you didn’t know. It wasn’t written in your textbooks or preached from your pulpits. It wasn’t talked about at the dinner table. It wasn’t passed down, generation after generation, the story of your success whilst standing on the backs of others. How could you possibly know?

Now you know.

Actual photo of Chicken a la King

Utah Offers Housing

You are on the park bench, bags at your feet.

A nighttime DJ voice escapes from your gentle face. You could have been in broadcasting.

Who are you talking to? To no one? To someone?

You are a father, a brother, a son.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Perhaps you are explaining.

Perhaps reciting histories.

Bible verses. 

Poetry.

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.”

7 a.m., too early for such lofty thoughts.  My post-run coffee is calling my name.
Is there coffee waiting for you somewhere? Was there, once? What was your life like, then?

You are on the light rail, bags at your feet.

Sleeping, hunched over on 3 seats, head buried in a coat.

Your burgundy suede Timberlands are incongruous with your sweatpants.

A gift? A purchase too dear? A remnant of former prosperity?

It’s cold outside, but in here, it is warm, as we gently and noisily rock towards the airport. Through the neighborhoods. Slicing through the drizzling rain. You sleep.

You high-five your friends as you meet down by the water. All following the unspoken, practical dress code of canvas jackets, hoodies, backpacks, and grocery bags at your feet. Fathers. Brothers. Sons.

You hold your Big Gulp with clenched hands and richocheting eyes, speaking too loudly; cookies in a ziplock, furtively eating on the bus.

Who are you? I wonder.

How did you get here?

What broke?

Can it be fixed?

Can the system be saved? Is there a solution?

We talk in the comfort of our car, driving home from Baltimore. “Utah offers housing. Because without a home, we can’t even begin to address the mental health issues and the physical health issues that are driving people into the streets."

Utah offers housing. That’s a start, we say. 

You stumble out of your house as you wave at me cheerfully.

Stumblin’ Mark, we joke.

You serenade the neighborhood with Barry Manilow and Cream and NPR.

I post your musical escapades on Facebook.

Your faithful dog shits in my yard on the daily, but when they take you to jail again, I tentatively slide into the door off your back deck to make sure that the dog can get out and that someone will feed him.

Your second-shift job stopped years ago, as I am no longer awakened by the loud conversation at 4 a.m. as you get dropped off.

The dog gets slower and slower and then disappears.

Sometimes I see you walking with your backpack down to QD and back.

You get the mail occasionally.

Once we talked for a long time about kids these days as I planted flowers in the front yard.

Your son used to come over to your house. Loud arguments, doors slam. Car races away.

The camper sat listlessly in the side yard until one day it was inhabited with your ex-wife and more dogs than windows. We called animal control. I was afraid.

The camper and inhabitants were gone the next day.

Your house has been dark for a year now. 

No lights, no noises.

I think that the landlord should do something.

I think you might still be there. Once, the door was open.

I consider calling the police, but I don’t want to waste their time. 

I heard that your brother was trying to get you on benefits.

But I haven’t heard your music in years.

Maybe you moved out? 

Your long-dead car is still in the driveway; the Big Lebowski bumper sticker starting to peel.

I saw you walking to the mailbox last month. No longer stumbling, you could barely maintain a shuffle. You looked bad, man.

I thought to myself, you might die in that house and we wouldn’t know for weeks.

Would there be a smell? Would the police come?

They think you’ve been dead for quite awhile.

We’d been under a pretty strong freeze for a few weeks, so there’s one question answered. No smell.

Who were you?

How did you get here?

What broke?

Could you have been saved?

If I’d bothered to move from pity to pathy, would I have then offered you anything more than humorous derision? Would I have bothered to learn your real name?

Where was my responsibility in all this?

Was it enough to listen for the music and wait for the smell?

Was it enough?

- Mark Donald Thompson - May 1963 - November 2019 -

Ode to Winter

Winter, you suck.

Photo by Valentin B. Kremer on Unsplash

First, you are cold. It is impossible to dress in you. Put on heavy jeans and and two shirts and a sweatshirt and heavy socks because the hallways are cold...But then the coat doesn’t fit. Take off the sweatshirt, pack it in a grocery bag along with the real shoes, put the coat back on. Add gloves and a scarf? Can’t add a hat because hat head is really not a good thing when your hair is the only thing that makes you not look dead in January. Put the boots on, even though bending over in these jeans squeezes your kidneys like a sausage and now you have to pee.

Open the door and feel your nose hairs freeze. Skate across the frozen puddle of dog pee right outside the door because he ain’t going out in that, no way. Waddle out to the car. Turn it on. Listen to the grating sound of the wipers on the icy windshield while you find the scraper. Scrape the windows (try not to scrape the car) and live with the fact that you just woke your octogenarian neighbor up and it’s still dark outside.

Because, second of all, winter, (you asshole), you are so freakin’ dark. Like, unnecessarily dark. Needlessly dark. Redundantly dark. The entire state trudges through all the months of standard time because of our collective seasonal affective disorder. We have a drinking problem and we eat far too many potatoes and I blame this all on you. Sure, some people pretend to like to ski, but they live above my pay grade. I do not do “the winter sport,” unless drinking more stouts and porters counts as sport (it really should); the Y smells like chlorinated Brussels sprouts this time of year, but I drag my bloated potato body there and hoist myself onto a treadmill and sadly, mournfully jog because it is too dark outside to brave the ice and the oncoming traffic.

Not only is the ground frozen and our hopes and dreams and hair and skin shriveled beyond rehydration, but the produce has also given up pretending. The strawberries are pale. The grapes are depressed. The apples are losing their luster. The cucumbers are barely erect. The root vegetables are beginning to look like the backs of my middle-aged hands. The oranges taunt me with their Florida glow, but there will be seeds and too much pulp mocking me if I dare to momentarily dream of vitamin C from natural sources.

Winter, you are cold and grey. You are grits with no cheese or salt. You are oatmeal with no sugar. You are porridge with no butter. You are instant mashed potatoes with no milk. You are comfort foods stripped of their comfort. You are miserable and I am miserable and I am not leaving my couch again until the sun breaks through the clouds and Daylight Saving Time rescues all of us from our ennui and pending morbid obesity.

Somebody bring me a porter. 

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

I got catcalled on my 47th birthday.

This was not your standard "walking by construction site in excellent shoes and catcalled by man in yellow hardhat" that one experiences from the ages of 12 - 38; this was a whistle ricocheting off the ice crystals of a November morning, sent out the open window of an early 2000's silver Honda Civic with a bike rack on the back, aimed toward me as I jogged up the hill at the end of my morning run, unbrushed hair straggling out under a stocking cap, mismatched socks showing under too-short running pants that kept spontaneously rolling down my perimenopausal muffin-top in 30 second intervals.

I glanced around. Was that whistle meant for me? Was it an ironic whistle, mocking the middle-aged lady shuffling up the hill? A generous whistle sent in the false belief that women like to be whistled at? A whistle sent by someone I vaguely know? (If so, why would you cat-call? Do you even know me at all?) A whistle mistakenly sent in a case of false recognition and then instantly regretted?

And, how, exactly should I feel about that whistle? There was no one else around. It was clearly meant for me. The car kept driving; it did not slow down. I did not feel particularly vulnerable. I did feel like I should be offended--yet  I was mostly amused, my self-deprecating brain inventing 27 rebuttals on the spot.

And then I started to over-analyze my self-deprecation. Was I implying that I was not worthy of a catcall? Too middle-aged? Too plus-sized? Too awkwardly-gaited? A woman beyond repair? A woman beyond (possibly ironic or mistaken) appreciation?

I am just as worthy of being degraded as any other woman out there, dammit!

This is my dilemma.

And so I have made a decision.

I am going to own this catcall, just this one time, as an act of true appreciation for how truly amazing I am. I am a work in progress, to be sure. But I am a damn fine piece of work, refusing to age gracefully, refusing to go quietly, refusing to be anything other than who I am today.

Today, I got catcalled. Today, I am 47. Today, is a pretty fine day, and today I am pretty fine.

Just Write Something

The challenge for November: Write Every Day.

Just write something. Write something meaningful.

Today, I wrote 7 things on a list and crossed 4 of them off.

I wrote an impact statement to DonorsChoose donors for funding my project.

I wrote a request to DonorsChoose asking if I could hand-deliver thank you cards to donors from students (they said no).

I wrote lesson plans for the sub for Monday and Tuesday.

I wrote 4 text messages to the kids’ grandpa, 4 text messages to a student who seemed down, 3 text messages to my mom, 2 text messages to my girl scouts co-leader, and an email to my daughter asking her why she wanted me to email her English teacher. I then wrote an email to my daughter’s English teacher, giving my daughter permission to read a book in class.

I wrote 4 responses to friends on Facebook (2 responses were snarky).

I wrote several messages on Messenger to Alicia, about surviving the day, and several more to Noel, about surviving the next election.

I wrote an email to my principal (why is it so HOT in my room? And why did the guy from Herff Jones talk to the seniors about partying, getting married as they stand before God, and their gender identity --only choices available? male or female-- all in an attempt to get their orders for graduation gowns before 8 a.m.?).

I wrote an email to my whole building asking if anyone was going over to the middle school who could deliver a package, an email to the middle school teacher (the recipient of said package), and another email to my whole building pointing out that the Powerteacher gradebook might delete full assignments with all entered grades if you tried to change anything about the assignment after it was recorded.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

I wrote an email to the parents of my English 3 students, informing them of upcoming assessments and midterm feedback.

I wrote a Creative Writing project for next week and posted it to Google Classroom.

It is 1:30 p.m. I could use some coffee.

I really want to write a blog post. Something that feels meaningful. Something that feels like my soul gets to speak up. But I’m too busy writing, it seems.