Balancing Act: Living (and Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 2
The new maroon Converse All-Stars of joy.
Monday, 16 March 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic (and the public response to it) is getting more and more serious. School has been canceled for four weeks – spring break and the following three weeks of scheduled school. Are we going to extend our school year by three weeks? But it’s all for the best. Even though it has barely infected our little inland state, the virus is wreaking widespread and deadly havoc in other parts of the world, and this could potentially go wild everywhere. Shutting everything down is the smartest thing to do to minimize the spread of the virus.
Nonetheless, I’m feeling the disappointments of canceled events I was involved in organizing – no student-staff basketball fundraiser match-up, no Just Mercy movie field trip and Black Writer guest speakers for my African American Humanities classes, probably no Chicago field trip for my U.S. Humanities students (scheduled for April 28), maybe no Guatemala student service trip (scheduled for June 1-10). I’m trying to resist the impulse to wallow in my anxiety that the rest of the school year will be canceled. The Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 infected over 25 percent of the world’s population and killed approximately 50 million people. You might think we are more knowledgeable and better prepared a century later, but we don’t seem to be. Our nation’s slow response, in terms of canceling events and gatherings and putting together testing kits, even as the virus was hitting China like a sledgehammer, suggests that this will get much much worse.
Last Wednesday, we were able to squeeze in our African American Humanities field trip to Hancher Auditorium just before everything started shutting down. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance was amazing. A friend of mine in the marketing department may have played a role in reserving the front row center seats for us. Twenty minutes before the performance began, many of the dancers were on stage warming up, giving us a fascinating peek behind the scenes. The performance combined historical background about Alvin Ailey and the dance troupe with two dance pieces, which included some participatory dancing in our seats. My students loved the experience, and yet, I will feel terrible if any of them contract Covid-19 because they came into contact with the virus at the show.
In the front four rows of Hancher Auditorium, my students and their chaperones await the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance.
Saturday night, my friend Jennifer and I watched a stunningly beautiful movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, at Film Scene, a day before it closed its doors. The twenty people in the theater all carefully chose “socially distant” seats, but one might argue we were being unnecessarily risky. And last night, six friends came over for what had been planned as a potluck dinner to welcome my daughter Emma and her two sons. Although Emma had to cancel their trip, it felt good to get together with friends and enjoy some delicious food. We cautiously bumped elbows rather than hugged, and our gathering was well under fifty people, so we obeyed that restriction, but again I wonder if we were being foolhardy. I’ve made a list of errands and tasks I don’t have time to do when school is in session, but out of sympathy for store clerks and cashiers, I’m hesitant to enter shops unless I must.
Tuesday, 17 March 2020
I had a Covid-19 nightmare last night. People with the coronavirus were taking everyone else with them. Once they knew they had the virus, they gathered everyone with whom they had been in contact into a room and then shot them all and then shot themselves. I think this has something to do with the fact that people have not only been stocking up on toilet paper and antiseptic wipes and hand sanitizer but also guns. Why do people feel that they need more guns and ammunition at a time like this?
Thursday, 19 March 2020
Inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and determined to cling to some optimism during these dark times, I’m attempting an essay on the joy of pancakes: When my kids were young, I would usually make pancakes on Saturday morning. When Pat was working on her nursing degree, taking classes during the day and working evening shifts at the nursing home, I would sometimes make pancakes for dinner. (The kids made fun of me because they claimed I only knew how to make flat meals – homemade pizzas, pancakes, tacos.) Somewhere along the way, I found a good pancake mix recipe: unbleached white flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, a bit of buckwheat or seven-grain flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. I’d often add blueberries or overripe bananas, and in the summer, leftover sweet corn off the cob. Sometimes I’d make small silver dollar pancakes. The kids liked this tradition. As they slathered the pancakes in butter and syrup and peanut butter, they’d often sing, “she never made me pancakes,” which I somehow assumed was an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song, but it turns out it’s from the song “Pancakes, off The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits album.[1]
Now I make those pancakes for my grandsons. They have come to expect them whenever I visit them. They call them Poppy Pancakes and claim they’re the best. As I cooked some on the griddle this morning, I meditated on the transformation from batter to pancake by the influence of heat, how the batter slowly rises on the griddle, bubbles forming on the surface and then popping, the edges lightly browning, a signal the pancake is ready to be flipped. A sweet and simple way to show my love for my children and my children’s children.
Monday, 23 March 2020
Spring break is over and we should be back in school now, but we’re not, and won’t be for at least another three weeks, probably longer. It’s distinctly possible this school year will be canceled entirely. I worry about my students. Are they safe and sound? Are they following pandemic restrictions? Are they bored? I sent out an email to all my students today just to connect with them, a habit I plan to continue until we are together again.
The snow that fell yesterday outlines the branches of every tree and bush, the sharp contrast of black and white, but the snow is already melting and dropping from the trees as I write.
On a whim and out of a desire to give myself something to look forward to, I’d ordered a pair of maroon hightop Converse All-Stars on Amazon. Rather, the fifteen-year-old inside of me ordered them. And the fifty-year-old didn’t complain or object, nor did the sixty-five-year-old who is the combination of the other two. These were the tennis shoes I wore all through my teen years. They were the basketball shoe de rigueur at that time – lightweight canvas uppers, high tops whose extra support protected against ankle rolls, rubber soles in a grid pattern that enabled us to make sharp cuts on the hardcourt. We called them Connies or All-Stars, never Chuck Taylors or Chucks. That all came later.
Only two colors were available back in the sixties – white and black – and I always wore white Connies. Now, Chucks are fashionable casual wear rather than athletic shoes, and come in a rainbow of colors. When my maroon hightops arrived on Friday, I immediately laced them up. In a time of coronavirus and sheltering in place, they make my feet feel lighthearted and fancy-free.
Tuesday. 24 March 2020
I love moments when minds intersect, when paths cross, and I get to witness those serendipitous moments. Here’s a “conversation” that took place yesterday between a scientist (Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl) and a poet (Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights) about the symbiotic relationship between fungi and trees. While reading Jahren, I came upon this:
Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it lives for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi – just five thousand species – have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper, and phosphorus, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.
Jahren goes on to ask why they are together, but posits no scientific answer, only suggesting that “perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.” Maybe she’s guilty of anthropomorphizing the fungi. Or maybe she’s suggesting lessons that we can learn from trees and fungi, reminders of what Paradise might feel like. In my reading last night, Gay continued this conversation:
In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.
By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work.
Gay is a bit more explicit than Jahren about the allegory: “Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love.” I’m sure Jahren and Gay are not the only two folks who have made these connections, but that I encountered this profound idea twice in one day is, well, pretty cool.
Footnote:
[1] Marvin Pontiac is a fictional musician created by the musician, painter, actor, and director John Lurie.