Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Indiscriminate  is the memory feature on my phone,  a holiday in Culebra,  that October snow storm,  a grown child in her evil bunny costume,  a dog long gone,  a happy day in a previous marriage,  playing bass on the wood porch of the old house,  baby chicks,  before they were eaten by wild animals,  a smoky recording booth with blue lit faces,  standing in the cold ocean pretending to read a paper,  red hair blowing atop the Space Needle.  A pen I dropped that skirted across the rock and blew into a glacial lake.  The sound a Big Wheel makes when tied to the back of a black Huffy with the number 25  emblazoned on its racing tag.  It wasn’t really a Big Wheel,  but a Spinout 360.  Almost the same sound though.  Sitting in the driveway after my first prom.  The velvety soft front bench seat of the Buick.  My first kiss ever.  My first real kiss, not counting the time with Emmeline  because we were just kids and took no pleasure in it,  we were just trying to get to some astronomically

Remembered into Existence I had the first sentence to a new short story in my head this morning. I repeated it to myself several times to be sure I would retain it. And yet, I’m pretty sure by the time I had walked down the hill from my parking spot to the road behind the office, I had lost it.  How do we recover things that are lost? A hypnosis session to remember the name of an old housemate? A reenactment of the scene. Perhaps, if I wear the same purple shirt and purple tie, listen to the same passage in the audio book, pick my teeth with that same decrepit toothpick that I promised myself to throw away. Maybe then it would come back to me. The last time I went home, my brother handed me a box of old letters. I unfolded one, it was elaborately illustrated. There was so much life and love in that letter. But I did not remember it at all. I became melancholy and sad. How could I have not read those beautiful letters? Because, forgetting them, was like unreading them. I had forgotten t

Trouble With Counting It is possible I have lost track of the days.  Sometimes,  I am surprised that it is Friday.  Sometimes, I pause typing in the days date,  scanning my mind,  what day was it yesterday?  So,  it is entirely possible that in the counting of days,  I missed one.  Or in the calculation of missed dates,  in the subtraction and addition,  I have misconceived a place in time.  How old is my car?  How many years have I lived in this house?  How many Holiday parties have I attended at the new job?  Everything feels longer than it has been.  New rotaries have been built,  restaurants have closed,  and coffee shops have been rebranded.  Sometimes,  it is hard to recognize where you are.  The autumn has fallen,  a thick layering of leaves on the lawn.  I should run the mower over them this weekend,  churn a deciduous mulch.  The gutters are probably lousy with leaves.  This is how I measure time now,  the color of leaves on the ground.

The Future A microwave meal is a terrible thing.  It is like riding a bicycle on under inflated tires,  swimming in a stagnant pond,  shaving with a bar of soap,  cutting your nails with little scissors,  owning a deep fryer,  the smell of a birthday candle burning itself into the frosting,  an out of tune string ensemble,  testicle pain,  a stained sweatshirt of your alma matter,  a damp log,  a long flight of stairs to your seat at the top edge of the stadium,  a dentist’s praise,  forgetting your reading glasses in the car when visiting the restaurant,  stopping at the farm stand when it is no longer corn season,  a bath towel that never dried,  an ambitious nose hair.  Someday, we will not remember that.

Building a Fire Building a fire you learn from your mistakes,  you do not disparage the newspaper for not igniting the kindling,  you do not bad mouth the kindling for not catching the log.  You feel the cold on your fingers and toes,  on the face underneath the eyes  and across the bridge of your nose.  Sometimes it takes a second try,  and there is the patience of not closing the damper too early,  of not poking and shaping the embers before you have to,  of waiting for there to be love before weighing it with new logs  still damp from last night’s rain.  Today was beautiful, somebody says.  You tried to sit outside and eat your sandwich,  but it was so cold your eyes started to water  and it looked like you were crying.  A woman was sitting on the wall smoking a cigarette  and staring at the busses.  You wanted to lean over and whisper something encouraging,  but you didn’t,  and you walked away coughing conspiratorially.  There are no secrets in an office where the walls don’t touc

 Scenes of Mortality in the Emergency Room A woman brought in on a gurney,  her neck secured in an elaborate plastic brace,  like she might have been an African queen once.  The old woman in a wheel chair,  accompanied by the younger woman.  It looks like we will be here all day,  the younger woman says.  I am festooned with electrodes  that are connected to wires that etch a waveform on a piece of paper,  and then the wires are removed,  but the electrodes remain  and I will remove some of them later that night when I go to bed.  The x-ray technician wheels me to the x-ray room  even though I tell her I can walk.  I don’t protest though,  and submit to the ride.  Inhale and hold, she says.  And then, Breathe!  She yells from the other room.  The phlebotomist works from a mobile station  and he is like a juggler,  a man with magic tricks,  how he handles needle, vials, tape, and cotton.  My blood looks surprisingly dark and gritty.  He holds a vial to the light to make sure he drew eno

The Shepherd  “The pandemic changed people,” she said. “All that time isolated from anyone else. If you looked at him you would never say he wasn’t fit.” “Is it cold out?” “I was out just a little bit ago, it wasn’t bad, mild, but it’s going to get dark.” They stared out the window at the shadows on the street, the passing cars, the people.  “The funny thing is, I am suddenly seeing names, people I haven’t seen in decades. People are sharing stories, poems. It has been a strange week.” “It is a reminder of one’s own mortality.” “Yes.” He touched the cuff of his sleeve where a fleck of ground espresso made a tiny stain. “It seems he made a lot of people laugh. But he also seemed sad.” And he thought of his own sadness, and how tired he might be.     

Murmuration “Is this all there is?” He asked.  “What.”  “This waking up and eating toast, and drinking coffee, and driving to work, and doing my work, and coming home, eating food, listening to a chicken die, and going to sleep. Is that all there is?” “Maybe.” “I mean, there was the day there were two baristas instead of one, there was the time the chicken lived, and sometimes I can fall asleep, but most of the mornings are already dark, the evenings are dark, and I only see by flashlight.” “Most flashlights are leds now, isn’t that strange?” “Last night, when I stepped outside in my bathrobe, there was a fine mist in the air so I couldn’t see very far. It was as if the entire world had become a place needing glasses. I felt like I was trying to read the back of a cereal box, except it was like there everywhere I looked. I peered into the trees, up in the branches. There was nothing but feathers on the ground, a broken coop door.” “You need to think about different things.” “Sexually t

Palmistry  Cold that causes muscles to seize.  A seam of belly showing on a young body.  Carousel of rice, pork, egg rolls, chicken wings, fajitas, and vegetarian lasagna.  Technical issues and a camera focused on a man’s tie.  Choosing a seat by avoiding the heavily perfumed.  The rain is nearly imaginary.  Sometimes people talk about the things they overhear.  Stamina is sometimes measured in the number of returns.  Return, return, return.  The woman and the man ran out of things to say.  The woman and the man ran out of time just as they ran out of things to say.  Sometimes fiction ends with a sinking below the surface.  Sometimes cooking is nearly dangerous.  Sometimes there are large animals lurking just beyond the circle of light.  The fire almost took.  The carpet needed the vacuum.  The sky needed the stars.  The chicken cooed as she was shut in for the night. Portrait of Franklin by Anya Malkin

Cruel Month The end of September is melancholy,  like a brush ink painting of a marsh  or the taste of a breath mint on the tongue.  It is what comes after anticipation,  a resetting of the odometer,  the drudgery of finishing a box of cereal.  How can you say that April is the cruelest month  when September makes me cry so?  A constant reminder of the things I have neglected,  the people I have lost,  the laziness stealing momentum into entropy.  Count the decades on a hand,  we have become old.  No wistful looks,  just a gasp of surprise.  How the years have passed,  as if we have all been off battling windmills,  beheading dragons whose neck spews forth books  and other blatantly esoteric pursuits.  In the meantime, in the meantime,  children have grown and moved away,  and countless Septembers have become October.