Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Folding Chair A woman wrote about an old folding lawn chair,  a beach chair.  The aluminum tube frame,  folding.  The nylon strap webbing,  frayed and splitting   at parts making sharp prickly ends.  Maybe there were weathered  real wood arm rests.  I loved pressing my face against the sun-warm webbing,  the chair folded flat.  A boy could make it tip and tilt until he was comfortable,  twisted and contorted  until as much of his body was touching the chair as possible.  He imagined being entirely wrapped in the webbing like a bright yellow mummy set out in the sun.  It is a bright warmth  like a roasted water chestnut wrapped in bacon.  I also liked the chairs woven out of narrow PVC tubes.  To push one’s arm between the wide weave  until it dangled under the chair,  brushing the grass with his fingers,  digging into the coldness underneath the sand.  He is tanned and skinny and flecked with sand.  There is a sensation  once the arm was thrust through the chair,  that it no longer bel

Delicacy I feel delicate,  like the broken piece of egg  that has fallen into the pan  and is resting on the edge of the yolk.  How when you touch it with the corner of the spatula  it fractures into smaller pieces,  determined to become like sand in a bowl of rice.  It is as if all surfaces are coated  with a thin sheen of barely perceptible ice  and it is better to walk awkwardly  than to fall down and risk fracturing  like a delicate egg shell.  I am witness to the delicate nature of healing,  how time is an imprecise thing.  Days, weeks,  they are also months and years,  or seasons, or minutes or hours.  Can you feel each mishap like an old lover?  Like a fateful kiss?  Can you smell the stink of the subway,  the musty tent,  the old carrots gone soft?  I believe in fresh garlic,  perfect rice,  new sheets,  and cold juice.  There is little else that separates goodness from bad.  On a night where the cold gives birth to sleet,  and the stove is so hot it nearly singes your eyelashe

Reflections on Language Wars Upon reading Nicholas Kristof’s editorial  and in conversation with an old mentor/friend: I guess the writing teacher in me says, know your audience. In certain realms, Latinx is preferred. I first heard it used at a conference in a panel of radical Latinx grad student geographers (certainly not your typical blue-collar Latinos).  And I serve on the AAPIC (Asian American Pacific Islanders Commission), which recently appended its name to allow and encourage Pacific Islanders to feel included.  I’ve ceased trying to sway the right. They are entitled to their own… rhetoric. I think I’ve tried to adapt to using language that demonstrates the world I want to live in as much as possible… but, I also try to understand who I am standing next to. That might be a survival tactic from when I went to college in TN, where I perhaps was too tolerant at times and could have spoken up more.  I guess what I see the language suggestions pushing us to do is to think of people

The Last Jumbo The flight on a 747 I remember most was when I was five and traveling to Korea for the first time. We were seated near a bulkhead and a stewardess gave my mother a soda crate so my mother could put my infant brother down and rest her arms.  Korea was still such a small country that people would almost always run into somebody that they knew, and so it was boarding the plane that my mother struck up a conversation with a business man and maybe he had gone to school in the same town, or his sister had been friends with my mom’s sister, or some game of five degrees of separation connected them and he invited me up to the first class section in the upper deck, once we were airborne.  I did venture up the stairs. A flight from Boston to Honolulu is a very long flight for a five year old and I roamed the length of the plane as one could in this era before mandated seatbelts. But, at the top of the stairs was a velvet rope, like what you would find at a movie theater. I could s