Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

The Last Diner Eggs and toast,  left over stir-fry,  pad Thai.  Every day my car starts with a Tom Petty song.  Today there were no photogra/phs,  I ran up a long hill like an old Asian man,  and best laid plans were laid to waste.  In a few days I will have a day off,  and then another.  Children change their plans,  landing on Wednesday,  then Thursday.  One city,  and then another.  I forget to bring one thing,  but then remember another.  Someone is waiting in a very long line.  Did you blow me a kiss?  It is hard to tell behind a mask.  We will surprise one another some day,  when we can see each other’s faces.  I can imagine sleeping for a very long time.  I wait for a drink,  a bite of food,  an inanimate object,  to give me pleasure.  Maybe I will join a religion,  align with a political affiliation,  imbibe in doctrinal Marxism,  becom...

Getting Ready Over the weekend I put the snow tires on the car, and today the LBS (local bike shop) called to say the winter bicycle tires I ordered have arrived. I’m almost ready for the snow. Some how, each year, we get used to the cold. I’m not sure how, but it happens. Like swimming in the ocean at Cape Cod, eventually your breathing returns to its natural pace and the burning numbness in your extremities fade into a dull ache.  It was raining today, so I drove. I’ve been listening to a Chang-Rae Lee novel, My Year Abroad . He is a master of metaphor. These marvelous constructions, finely wrought descriptions, land in rapid fire succession like images flying off a zoetrope and coming to life. He is almost too good where I get distracted by his construction and I lose track of the narrative. I imagine he must be a fantastic MFA teacher somewhere and his students read his novels like how-to manuals. When I was in grade school, I sent away several dollars for an advertisement in t...

Finishing I have been back to work long enough that I have finished listening to my first Audible book (Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart ) since the pandemic began. I only listen when I drive, and I settled on Murakami after dabbling in a couple of different podcasts. It is wonderful to listen to a good book, it makes you savor stoplights, linger at crosswalks, and close your eyes before turning off the car and unbuckling your seatbelt.  Murakami wrote about living in dreams, and I started to think about a dream I dreamt a long time ago. I was in an airport and my grandfather was there. I was translating for him, but something was getting lost in the translation. I don’t think I knew either language I was trying to convey, and that was part of the problem. Like all dreams, this one is frayed at the edges, and some of the finer details are lost, like the seats at the airport gate. They were hard blue fiberglass like at the Cleveland bus station. The walls were painted corrugated steel....