Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

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Day 679 May 12, 2022

- May 12, 2022

Things I Have Lost A boom box circa 1985 at a party outside by Cat Rock. A yellow Schwinn that was returned to me broken. A nickname that was smoking related. A nickname that was temperament related. A nickname that never really fit. My first nice guitar. A leather jacket with an ink stain on one breast. A first love because all I would do is hug. A car with 300,000 miles and no passenger seat. A second childhood. My mother’s tongue. All the lines of poetry I memorized. A freestyle wrestling tournament. A white jazz bass. The key to the roof carrier. The leather bound Shakespeare plays. Ms. Busse’s Faulkner novels. The ability to drink more than one glass of alcohol. The words to most Grateful Dead songs. Several lovers, a spouse. Two dogs in particular. A fantastic house. Most of my old band t-shirts. A skateboard. Countless kites strung up in trees, or flung into the horizon. Four dreams, each more and more ephemeral and nearly forgotten with each waking day. A chicken that vanished

Day 678 May 11, 2022

- May 11, 2022

Counting the Days I pass the time by counting how many ponds I pass in my days. The black birds with red shoulders flit along the already tall reeds. I am speckled with bugs. I am a bug eater. There is a dead animal that reminds me of other dead animals, a pregnant opossum’s teats. I carry heavy things, which is why I eat so much, because I need to carry heavy things. I covered her with sawdust to hide the smell. It was a shallow grave on the side of the road near where I once found a broken guitar pedal, like a fractured manna from heaven. I could not lift her in the shovel. Not easily. A shovel is an awkward tool with a heavy object. Ducks hiding their heads under water like ostriches. They are making faces at the mud and tree roots. A pond is like a relic, something that remains after everything else is gone. A glacial footprint. A logger’s impasse. That is one day. Day one of many. Leverett Pond

Day 677 May 10, 2022

- May 10, 2022

Annunciation I have never really felt like I had a home town, which I suppose is false, but I guess I mean a place where I felt I fit in and felt comfortable. This weekend, for my daughter’s graduation, I was able to return to my alma mater and in between celebrating her achievements, I swooned in the nostalgia of memories from thirty or more years ago. My cynicism has melted away into the sentimentalism of an aging man who is now the age of many of my professors from that time. I wonder how many places on this Earth are so imbued with memory, where I can touch my hand to stone and know that I once touched my hand to that stone in that very same place. Not so many, I think. And even fewer that carry the transformation that happens as a child tries to figure out how to become a man, mistakes and all. I loved the contradictions of my own being, how I was at once a bad mischief maker, but also a good person who tried to do good things. Sewanee is imbued with those same contradictions for

Day 671 May 4, 2022

- May 04, 2022

No Time Like the Now time compresses like an iron lung the pleural space embracing hours and days deadlines careening like a pleurisic cough through the air a man sunk in a barrel there is no time there is only now a foundation begins to crumble from underneath an undelivered delivery

Day 670 May 3, 2022

- May 03, 2022

How Reading Changes Reading Oliver Sacks now elicits equal parts awe at the human mind, and fear of the frailties of our bodies and brains. How can one write but not read, reimagine letters on the pages, street signs in New York as Cyrillic or Korean. It makes one wonder how much of our perception is imagined, falsified, a glitch in the system? As a child, my imagination was as vivid as yesterday’s memory. I could imagine tragedy befalling our family, the absence of a phone call after a burglar alarm at the store, the late arrival home. Imagination thrives in the absence of agency. In the absence of ability to do anything, the mind creates everything. In the twilight, I spy the neighbors trees composed entirely of flowers. I remember the poet’s tree festooned with blue bottles. I remember Uncle Sam’s dogwood split by a bolt of lightning at the tail end of a dinner party. Sometimes the mind is like sorting porcupine needles by size, satisfying and intricate, sh

Day 669 May 2, 2022

- May 02, 2022

Auditory Memories I grew up surrounded by music. Before I could walk, my father would strap me on his back while he practiced violin. My father had a tall spindled turntable where you could stack multiple records to drop down on the platter like a personal juke box. And, of course he had reel to reel tapes, which I famously became ensnared in, always being curious and easily excited. When my father had guests, he would proudly show off his stereo with music that was never the background, it was always the thing to be doing, listening to music. He would play an album or song almost uncomfortably loud so that it was impossible to hold a conversation, so we could all hear the thing he wanted us to witness. My father taught me to be a listener. I can hear landscapes, valleys in the distance, a storm, a conversation, a playfulness. When I play music with my friends, we talk to one another in this language, an improvised language and syntax that we learn simultaneously. We may, in fact, und

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