Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

 The Novel Reads Like a Long Fantastic List  Today is your lucky day.  Today is an unlucky day.  Today is cloudy with a chance of thundershowers.  Today is your birthday.  Today is a metaphor for the past two years of your life.  Today is masquerading as evening and that is why you are tired and hungry.  Today is full of anticipation.  Today is a gentle strip tease into tomorrow.  Today is asking questions about tomorrow’s answers.  Today is a ham sandwich.  Today is a nearly expired fruit cup.  Today smells funny,  like a dirty pillow.  Today is cold,  but not so cold as to be the coldest day,  but just on this side of tolerable. Today is a joke about three people with different professions walking into a bar,  going fishing in a canoe,  standing in front of a firing squad.  In the newspaper a school teacher cried as she waited to be sent into the war.  Today there are videos of wha...

Peacenik  I miss the contact of people, the hand in palm, the press of cheek, a pulled close embrace. I am not a naturally hugging person, and I miss being startled by the comfort of others, that initial shock and tension, and then the release and drop of falling into it, the touch, the embrace, the sense of calm. Perhaps that is what is lacking now, in this moment. More of those strange happy white people holding Free Hugs signs. More massage chairs in public locations. More uncomfortably long handshakes. More distant friends you are happy to see. I thought I might write about finishing a jar of my mother’s kimchi. For the last serving I am attentive to the small slice of pear, the small pieces of ginger, scallion, the slices of red pepper, and cabbage. I note how it brings flavor and texture to everything it is added to. And later, when I am washing out the empty jar, I can smell it waft up from the sink in an enveloping wave before it is rinsed and all goes down the drain. It is...

A Life of Consequence The air this morning was moist and the rivers were swollen and loud. I rode for the first time in a month or longer, the studs on my tires leaving a satisfied crunching on the asphalt and sand. So much changes in a month or two. Roads buckle and crack, give up terrible teeth that fill with water. Christmas decorations wilt and become etched with salt. A new mailbox goes up to replace the one destroyed by the snow plow. A deer with a white muzzle stands aside and watches me pass. I ride slower, there is more exertion involved, and I need to will myself to observe the surroundings, the glimpse of sky in the break of trees, the fog lifting from the lowlands. I pass two other cyclists, for one we exchange a good morning, for the other she is too focused and she says nothing that I can hear. I am attuned to the smells, the damp earth, the fabric softener in someone’s laundry, a wood stove, a ripe compost bin, the cigarette smoke form a passing car. I am pleased that I ...

Remembering Tom My friend Tom had long lanky arms that could stretch out and clock you if you got in a fist fight in the middle school cafeteria. But he was also surprisingly kind hearted, and those few times where we shared a moment, it was in recognition of our misfitedness. Two people who did not belong, and finding camaraderie in that. We only had one conversation after high school, a social media moderated debate about politics, my politics in particular, and how he could not tolerate my vehement liberal posts. But what started at a high boil, dropped to a simmer, and a gentle kindness room temperature moment of listening to one another. I mostly stopped posting my political soap box and he stopped using social media. And that is the last I heard from him. I take comfort in the capacity of the brain to fold time into intricate fans of undulating scenes and days and faces. One can nearly relive a lifetime in the span of a few moments. Perhaps, even when you die in your sleep, there...

Street Crossing In the years of the pandemic,  there has been an increase of accidents,  an increase in the deaths of pedestrians.  Researchers attribute it to restlessness,  the native state we all return to when left by ourselves.  I nearly struck a coyote on the way home,  driving fast because I was carrying dinner  and I could smell the steaks, mashed potatoes, and green beans. In between the tail lights ahead and the too white led glow of my headlights,  a slow motion dash,  a full length stretch of the gray glory,  thick and luxuriant winter coat,  effortless even in its swiftness.  Plastic, metal, and glass might have kissed its rump,  if I had not pressed hard on the brake,  hearing the chocolate mouse collide with the passion fruit tart.  All business and purposeful. There must be a reason to cross the street between two passing cars.  My childhood is littered with  the carcasses of dogs that w...

 Ode to Betty Davis Tired like an old dried fish hanging on a string. A shiny bubble, glistening and swirling with color, just before it pops. I hear a little Hendrix. Hardness attracts hardness, Imagine the arguments, the love making, the taste of blood. Stare at a record label long enough and you get dizzy. Did you hear that last verse? The one banned from the radio? It makes me feel like I am climbing out of a greasy pipe. Eating cheese and crackers while she was flying a spaceship clear through the room, the oscillations leaving ripples in people’s glasses. I wonder of the pilgrimages to Homestead, if people waited on the sidewalk, climbed the front steps, stood on her porch. How much does an old lady still bestow on her admirers? Can it be anything like eating a hot donut out of a brown paper bag? Some people are born with confidence. Some people are unwavering. Or at least they seem that way, sometimes. Music so deep it turns the molecules over in their sleep. One cannot but ...

The Practice of Remembering An Art Deco tin that once held mints, purchased in the gift shop of a museum. A pin from a fictional cult figure in a movie I had a bit part in. Still in the clear plastic envelope collar stays and spare buttons. A set of cuff links. A sheet of transparent numeral stickers. A rubber stamp of a lion exclaiming something in Korean. A string of miniature Tibetan prayer flags. A collection of small rectangles of scratch free polishing cloths. An unused heavy duty bandaid. Two packs of moistened towelettes saved from a visit to a clam shack. A fancy pen decorated in the style of Frank Gehry, that has been mostly unused because I wanted to preserve it. A plastic freebie bag from the dentist with an assortment of little bristle brushes to wiggle in the gaps of one’s teeth. Hand drawn flash cards from when I was trying to learn Korean. A pair of small scissors like one uses to cut long eyebrow hairs or loose threads that one of my teachers once owned, but the pivot ...

 Warm and Whole The sidewalks slick with a slurry of freezing rain, I walk in the crusty grass and call out to the students like a grumpy old man, Careful, its slippery! I can’t tell if I am yelling loudly or not loudly enough. The asphalt glistens. Perhaps this is what it is like to walk on water, equal parts marvel and equal parts tenuous fear. To fall here one might slide a long way. I once had a low speed crash on my bicycle on a sunny day, with students lolling in the grass. People came running to see if I was ok. If I am lucky and fall, no one will see the ridiculous long slippery tumble, but eventually somebody would pass by. I once crashed my Alpine slide sled on a steep banking curve, falling out and continuing down the track without my sled skinning my knees and elbows. A man passing overhead in the ski lift chairs took pity on me and managed to drop a sled off the back of his chair. But, I had lost the taste for the summer luge. I can’t remember if I managed to get the s...

Service des Monuments Historiques   In our personal Notre Dame, what would we restore? What will be forsaken? What toxic metals will we painstakingly apply again? Would we bathe the rafters in light reflected through a pool of water? Hand shaped trusses are like the caresses of lovers, each leaving their mark on the green oak. Out of every jumble of debris there is evidence, what was lost, what was miraculously saved. Stained glass windows, photo albums, copper clad apostles, a child’s hand written note. What does it mean to be faithful? The sixty-six pound rooster that nobody could see until it lay like a carcass on the floor of the nave. I have buried chickens and built their cairns out of river stones. Is it alright to throw away this thing, this piece of paper, this object that is so full of meaning? Viollet-le-Duc’s visage upon the shoulders of Saint Thomas. A heavy Rolleiflex camera on a tripod, lights, and a contrived staging. I never liked that pose, too self aware, never m...

Bump I stopped to let a cluster of students cross the street, and moments later there was the heavy thud and the pressure of being pressed into your seat. It was a surprisingly solid hit, like a full shoulder into a door kind of hit. Headlights reflected in the rain. There was a bus nearby. I stepped outside and it was a woman in a light blue Geo Prism with black duct tape on the bumper. She suggested we pull on to a side street, so we did. We looked at our cars. I could not see any damage, it was raining and dark. It was wet, she said, as if that might excuse her car. One of her headlights was loose and jiggled in its housing when she touched it. There were a lot of things in her car in the back seat. Belongings. It was ordered. She asked if I wanted her license and I said it didn’t look like there was any damage. I asked what her name was. Valerie, she said. What are you studying? I asked. She wore a hand knit winter hat. Neuroscience, she said. I am your academic dean, I said. She l...

Be Sure to Remember The crown of the Statue of Liberty, where my brother was too frightened to look out. The ramparts of the Great Wall of China, where I hiked listening to Simon and Garfunkel on my iPod to drown out the other tourists. The Samseonam Hermitage on Namsan Mountain at morning prayer where a nun sat with me and offered me water. The skin smooth stone benches in the concubines’ living quarters in the Forbidden City. The Muslim quarter in Xi’an where a boy sold me a rose to give to my girlfriend (she was not my girlfriend, but we pretended for a moment). The mountains of Guilin, where soldiers once hid, where painters retreated, where on a riverboat we ate eels. The observation deck on the Eiffel Tower, where we hemmed an hawed about whether we should go and how high we should climb. Sun streaming through the narrow embrasure at Castillo San Felipe del Morro and dragging my fingers in the bioluminescent bay of Laguna Grande while my wife paddled. Sliding my body into the sca...

Happy Seollal My father used to fry sliced rice cake, the sliced ovals blistering gently in the heat, then he sprinkled them with sugar and a dash of soy sauce. It was like Korean fry bread, unleashing an insatiable desire, and my father, of course knowing it was nothing good, made only a small batch at a time. My brother and I were hungry lizards leaving him only the ones he could eat while cooking. A yard a few days after a snowstorm is a testament to a man’s routine, the paths worn into the snow crusted earth,  to the chicken coop,  the compost,  the woodpile.  Like the yellow dog stains, the path is packed and pressed tight here, loose and indistinct there. One can almost count the passings as a tracker might.  No one speaks of empty nesting, how a box of cereal lasts an inordinately long period of time until you are so tired of the sugary flakes and can barely stand to tolerate another bowl. Ice cream remains forgotten in the freezer until the carton is thi...