Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

The End of the Day The end of the day  is a fragment of feather  resting on the palm  before blowing away  in the cold spring air. My goodness,  how eager the animals are  to eat a bit of feed,  drink a few throatfulls of water. When I come home, I am the same  and cannot wait  to crawl into my bed  and close my eyes.

 What Do We Remember? What do we remember from the beginning of time? The dark areolae of my mother’s breasts. A boy’s apartment and the Formica kitchen table. Powdered mashed potatoes in a box. A tabletop egg cooker. A warm cloth diaper fresh from the dryer. Hot vinyl car seats. Long lines of movie goers stretching down the street. A snow storm so deep we walked to the grocery store with a sled. Picking out dresses and things I’d like to own out of a Sears catalog with a waitress at a lodge in Maine. Ketchup drizzled over rice. A picture of the dog that ran away. A sweater knit by a woman who died of cancer. The feel of carpet on my cheek. The smell on the inside of a wood chest. The sound of a violin in the next room. It has been cold enough the chicken font froze.

The Story of Popsicles Some time, in the not so distant past, I purchased a package of replacement zipper pulls. The little ziplock bag is safely tucked away in the bottom of some drawer, or nestled in a box with sewing needles and thread. Trying to remember where I put it is like trying to answer a question on an exam that I did not study for.  I was thinking I should get my jacket washed before putting it away for the season. I actually already put it away for the season once, but then pulled it out again because we’ve had a string of chilly days.  This morning I was reading about how the Alps are losing snow days and that the famous ski resorts are left making their own snow or trying to preserve the previous season’s snow under blankets. There is a thought that gravity-fed snow machines might, over a decade of time, begin to rebuild a glacier through delicate accretion.  When I was a child, we treasured Everlasting Gobstoppers for no reason other than they stretched t...

Still Recovering Sometimes it feels like I am still recovering from a particularly strenuous first career, the loss of the family dog, the loss of a favorite uncle, the end of an engrossing book, a Leonard Cohen song, a distant love affair, a particularly vicious football tackle my freshman year of college, that time I was thrown into the sand head first by an ocean wave, the last time I got sick and had to stay all day in bed, when I had bad alfalfa sprouts from the salad bar, the car accident I don’t remember, the times I have been called to a hospital bedside, my last colonoscopy, a bowl of curry with too much sriracha, the sweaty feeling of eating a piece of fried chicken that is not quite cooked all the way through, sitting next to a very large woman on a Greyhound bus from Massachusetts to Washington D.C. while starting to get sick, that time with the stomach flu when I could not even eat a popsicle, releasing a mouse from a mouse trap, the childhood friend who moved away, that t...

Entropy Don’t let the sunlight fool you,  it is still quite cold out.  Wear gloves when you ride a bike,  and cover your face.  I dream of warm places,  sweat dripping off your nose  on a summer night,  an ice chilled glass.  Open your mouth and let me climb inside.  That is how wolves greet people.  My resilience is measured in my food choices,  what my body tolerates,  what it does not.  The man with the funny name  wears funny glasses,  but says serious things. Today, I travelled a different route  and rode past the house with the gates  that used to open on Halloween,  such a magical event,  a three ring circus,  scary clowns and fun house mirrors. One pound bars of chocolate for everybody.  At places, the wooden fence leans precariously  like a child on an amusement park ride.  One misplaced tug  and it seems an entire section would succumb to curiosity.

A Prayer for Peace This weekend my parents visited and we stopped to visit the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett. After a steep hike up a dirt path, and after passing a few metal shipping containers and rusty old farm implements, one is rewarded by the surprising immensity of the stupa. This white dome rising out of the Massachusetts earth as if one has been transported to a different setting, a different country. There is an undeniable sense of calm and peace, even when moving with the affect of a chilly tourist.  After walking around outside in the brisk spring air, we stepped into the temple for a little respite from the chill. I walked around the temple taking in the photographs, the offerings of food, the candles, drums, and paper canes. My father sounded out the words he could shape from the calligraphy. I had the overwhelming urge to kneel in prayer or meditation, but I didn’t. I wasn’t certain about protocol, if the pillows set before the altar were for a special person,...

Long Day In the late pandemic, things became more expensive. The rise in cost was rooted in the most basic laws of capitalism; supply, and demand, and profit. At first, it was a mere inconvenience, a shortage of toilet paper, frozen strawberries, N95 masks. But then, all the things people desired to fill their days became stuck in shipping containers, or delayed by factory closings. Bicycles and guitars, rose in price, as did houses and cars. Even used bicycles, guitars, and cars have risen in price dramatically.  In the late pandemic, mask mandates were lifted as rates of infection fell. People wore masks when they wanted to. I still carried a mask in my right jacket pocket. When it became musty, I cut the elastic ear loops and threw it in the trash. I had imagined making an art project with all the varieties of lost and discarded masks I saw on the sidewalks, but I never wanted to touch them. In the late pandemic, people started playing music together again. There were new venues...

The Bee-loud Glade For a summer when I was in college, I took classes at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and lived in the spare bedroom of the Maguire’s. Mr. Maguire was a milk man, and when returning home late at night, I would circle the housing development on the outskirts of the city until I found the house with a milk truck in the driveway. Mrs. Maguire only smoked cigarettes when out drinking at the pub and made the most delicious brown bread, which she fried up with rashers and egg.  On sunny days, Mrs. Maguire hung the laundry out back and shooed away the blackbirds, that had pecked a hole in the head of the poor neighbor’s cat. Their son helped with the milk deliveries, and the oldest daughter worked in the city, but was hoping to get into one of the universities. She was dating a former lodger from America, and that made them all proud. The youngest was a ribald toddler, growing up around a lot of good natured cussing, but was most loved of them all. Also in the house...

Today  The light through the office window,  the blue ultraviolet film tints everything.  The geese flying through the sky,  the woman jogging in black leggings,  the shirtless skateboarder,  the car driving by with panel shaking bass.  Today there were flowers and a meandering walk.  Today there was so much uncertainty.  I’ll leave it at that,  because today was hard.  Today was beautiful and hard.

Remembering to Say Goodbye  Sometimes it is better to leave things untouched.  An open mouth attracts flies.  An exposed belly, a fillet knife.  When I was little, my uncle goaded me to ride  the rollercoaster.  I had finally achieved the required height, But in the last moment, I demurred,  not knowing that wooden rollercoaster days were numbered,  and memories are easily disassembled  into artifacts auctioned off to the highest bidder.  I might have bought a carousel horse,  or maybe a cotton candy machine.  Who does not love a memory of cotton candy,  or the delightfully smooth flank and mane of a colorfully harnessed steed?  Listening to an old voice reminded me of how tired I had become, how disappointing it was to live with regret,  the boy’s fingers out stretched, to this tall.  A little thing,  a series of digits,  that are nothing to me except as a metaphor,  the way a bowlful of shav...

Taste the Innocence Every March 14th, a friend of mine used to throw a pie/pi party, which doubled as a pie contest. The last pie party, I brought my own entry, something from my childhood. My parents were intrepid travelers, and when my father went on tour, my mother often would accompany him. Somewhere in France she picked up the idea of a thin crust rolled out flat like a pizza, topped with jam and fresh fruit. It was delightfully simple, but like many simple things, delicious. It had all the best things about pie, a crisp and flaky crust, the true flavors of strawberries, blueberries, and slices of apple arranged in a mandala of flavor. It had just the right sweetness and tart from the jam, but none of the messy syrupy mess of a deep dish pie. Mostly, when someone mentions pie, this is what comes to mind.  My mother stopped making these pies somewhere along the way. The world became more cosmopolitan, perhaps, and simple approximations gave way to more extravagant confections o...

 The Marvelous Cycle Twenty-seven years ago, the coffee shop, Rao’s had just opened. It was a noisy, fragrant, gem of a coffee shop where they roasted the beans in the building and there was the constant grating sound of beans being turned into grounds, but it was novel, our own version of the coffee shop in Friends or Fraiser . I remember because, during the Caesarian birth of my twins, the anesthesiologist was talking about the cup of coffee he had bought there. Simultaneously, my daughter shifted away from the newly incised opening, and my son emerged first, and them my daughter. Luckily, it was not a surprise twin birth, we had learned about the twins eleven days earlier, so we were, at least were a little, prepared. Twenty-seven seems at once, not that long ago, and an entire lifetime ago. I was attending the same university where I now work. I was teaching English classes, eating Chinese food, and yes, drinking cappuccinos and lates in the sensual extravagance of air scented...

Just Keep Swimming  A March storm, similar to one 23 years ago, and similar to one 27 years ago. The roads are slippery and sidewalks un-shoveled. It is like we forget about winter, and what ensues is madness. Too many cars sliding off the road, ineffective plows pacing the highways, and pedestrians stepping out into the evening with little warning. Most of the way home I am stuck in a line of cars following a cautious tractor trailer and it is good. It keeps us all at a sedate and stately pace. It slows our racing minds, our accelerating hearts. Eventually, two towns later, the truck pulls over and lets us pass. After two cars turn off towards Montague Center, I am now leading the caravan and try to check my speed. My road is coming up and I turn on the blinker early, start to slow at the mailbox before the street sign. As a teen, I practiced careening down the snow covered driveway in the family station wagon, eventually perfecting the fishtail glide so well that I slid into the ...

Unmasked Today was the last day of mandatory masks. Tomorrow we will see people’s faces. We will have to cover our mouths when we cough and check doubly for errant nose hairs and lackadaisical shaving. This seems like something momentous to document in this space I have been inhabiting. Each day I order a falafel wrap, I save the paper bag it comes in, and in my office, I line them up, each with its own KN95 mask. At the start of a day, I rotate a mask in the bag, and draw a mask out. I read about this craziness at some point in the pandemic, and it seemed like a simple thing to do. I also have emergency surgical masks in my car glove box. I have two masks in sealed packages in my laptop bag. I have one individually wrapped KN95 in my jacket pocket, in case I lose the one I am wearing. I wonder who will continue to wear their masks, and who will not. I wonder if we will marvel at each other’s faces, each other’s facial expressions… if our smiles have changed. There is something comfort...

The Gale The rain is blowing sideways against the house,  rising up the windows like a gale hitting a schooner.  It is enough to be thankful the house is not at sea.  I shut the chickens in,  and dragged the recycling to the curb.  I can only hope nobody has blown away.  I spoke with a colleague today  who said all she does is drive and then work,  drive and then sleep.  It is getting monotonous.  I’ve been wondering what else there is to life.  A character in a move I watched said  that we work to avoid dwelling on the tragedies of our lives.  Which means,  without which,  there would be even less  and that is a frightening thought.  Sometimes, I have a tender gut,  an unruly colon,  and it makes me tired.  Everything is a little bit harder.  Everything feels waterlogged,  like you’ve been walking around in wet shoes all day.  Everything feels on the verge of panic.  ...

Late Fire A late fire in the wood stove flickers weakly to life. The paper bag laced with cardboard, has burned away, and what is left is smoldering embers on the sharp edges of split logs, the short stunted sections of logs I’ve sawed off of pieces too long or too fat to fit in this modest fire box. It is a late season chore, all the leftovers and rejects that have cycled to the bottom of the wood pile, the last of two seasons of two cords. These I cut down awkwardly using whatever jumble of logs I can arrange to support the cut with an electric chainsaw. There is something about an electric chainsaw that offends me, that makes me feel like less of a man, less of a rural resident, but it is convenient, and my last gas chainsaw failed and died, and this one keeps my ambitions a little more modest, and since I am older and slower now, perhaps that’s a good thing. The shorter pieces of off cuts, I balance on the diminished section of stump and use the splitter to make a box of kindling. ...

Efficacy Working in higher education, the question is often, how much impact can one person make? Will my one meeting with a student help alter a course that needs correction? Will changing one process or policy make a noticeable difference in retention, in equity, in the lived experience of students? And then, ultimately, the question becomes, will all the individual efforts of many different people, collectively make a difference? My boss talks about not fixing the student, but fixing the system that is created in a way that works better for some learners, but not all learners.  And then there is the compromise of scale when we are talking about hundreds, thousands of students. What is the current human capacity within a limited frame of time?  A colleague talked today about a rowdy group of college students surrounding a woman driving a car, and as a group, rocking the car back and forth on its wheels. In addition to being terrifying for the person in the car, it is also an...

Sam-il  March 1st marks the Korean independence movement under colonial rule from Japan. My grandfather’s brother disappeared at the hands of the colonizers and his father rode all over the countryside on a bicycle looking for his son. When his father finally returned home, he fell ill and died. My grandfather then left home and joined a resistance movement in Shanghai, China, where he also went to college.  I wonder about the order of things, how stories become compressed with the retelling. In a story, one thing follows the other like a recipe or the song tracks on an lp. But in lived experience, maybe it was something else, maybe there were years interspersed there. How long must one ride a bicycle before one becomes so ill that one dies? Were there terrible sores? Or, was the loss so great, that the parent could not continue on. And for the other son who remained, how long did it take to decide to leave home?  My grandfather was surprisingly brave. He spoke Korean, Ch...