Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

A little more than a thousand days… I have been thinking about how memories do not become stories until you write them down, or perhaps recite them over dinner and a drink, or sing them in song. Until then, they are just temporal wisps of existence, like the day before yesterday, or the meal you shared ten years ago at the restaurant where you still always order the same thing.The peanut noodle salad sprinkled liberally with scallions and undercooked broccoli. It would be just a meal if not for the retelling and revisiting.  I missed the 1000th day, choosing instead to celebrate the birth of two of my children (twins), and then after over filling myself with bulgogi, pajun, and bibimbap, settled into dozing off in front of the television.  I remember becoming a father like those stories you read about where mothers pick up small cars to save children pinned underneath (there is nothing written about what kind of negligence caused a child to be pinned under a small automobile)....

Look to the Stars There is still the beating heart.  The weary day is not so terrible,  it is just soft and pliant  like the sugar wrapped around a big industrial sized taffy machine.  Sometimes it is hard to tell what will make one  day worth more than another.  A few minutes of imagining an old lady  in a nursing home  meeting her lover for breakfast in the cafeteria.  Producing something that did not exist before.  A chicken’s morning nonchalance.  The scallion stems sitting in a jar of water.  Even with the evidence,  it is all too easy to forget and treat the day  as a thing dreary  and consumed like a bowl of raw sunflower seeds.  A vocal coach will hold sessions with the stars  in their hotel room.  Someone to remind one how incredible this life is.  All your life  you have dreamed of this moment.  And now you are here.  Sometimes we forget that. 

 Simile Sometimes there is quiet for many days,  there is no more room in the voicemail,  the fortune cookies remain uneaten,  the ears chirp with fields of crickets.  A dog is licking his bone,  occasionally jawing the hock,  but mostly licking.  The fire is an even glow,  not too hot, not too cold,  it is like the log has turned to charcoal  and there is a nice even burning,  proper and genteel flames,  not reckless and unruly  like in the morning with the vent open.  Some days it feels like someone  has served a large plate of banana pudding  and I do not like banana pudding  or damp vanilla wafers  and so the day becomes like riding an escalator  when you have a headache.  A long escalator,  like in the subway in DC.  The stop near the zoo and the conference hotel.  It is a terrible thing to have the stomach flu  while staying in a hostel.  When the kids ...

Bands I’ve Known (Part I) Running Water (I think?) In high school, just after learning how to strum a few chords, we started a trio with Brig and Anne. Brig had an older brother who taught him how to play a few lead lines to songs like “Friend of the Devil” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” Anne could do some justice to Joni Mitchell and tried to get us to do some Jethro Tull. I followed Anne around like a puppy dog, but she wasn’t interested in anything like that from me. I thought Brig was a guitar genius. We taped together songs ten pages long and spread the sheet music across the stage when we played… our vision was that good.  I played my Uncle John’s old Yamaha guitar which I had slapped a Jerry Garcia sticker on. There was a little removable sound hole pickup that I used.  Electric Mayhem Began in a college dorm room where Claiborne, Skagg, and I played a 45 minute purple haze. I knew Skagg from the football team where he had rung my bell with some hard as stone hits. Cl...

Namesake The children are grown.  Funny to imagine walking through a grocery store with one strapped to my chest in a snuggly.  I was watched last night by a baby in a high chair, while its parents feasted on a hotpot and assorted side dishes. The baby waited for my acknowledgement before turning back to the task at hand. It took three waitstaff to clean the table, chairs, and floor after they were done.  When I visited China, the babies didn’t wear diapers. Their pants were convenient, and when they had to go, they went.  We learn from the things we are allowed to, not from what we are prevented doing.  We didn’t allow Disney and Barbie. I don’t recall it being an issue, but we probably would not have allowed guns either.  After I left home, all the chickens were slaughtered. I could not bring myself to kill the perpetrator, so she and her babies continued to propagate. I had cut a hole into the wall of the coop and inset a Pyrex bowl, held in place with s...

Divination What happens when we reach 1000 days of the pandemic?  How long has it been since your last haircut?  Do you remember when I fell and first hurt my foot?  The days are like small cat pills held in the palm of your hand.  There used to be so much more hope and optimism.  Now, there is just enough,  most days.  Did you pay attention to how much that meal was?  I did not.  Sometimes hunger is a good substitute for love.  When I was a child we would go to the penny candy store  and buy everlasting gobstoppers that changed color as you  trained your mouth to fit.  Multicolored, candy flavored, drool.  It was enough to lure one across town on a yellow Schwinn  with a black vinyl banana seat.  With a few nickels, a dime,  you could buy a decent day’s worth of dreams.  Sharing was bad etiquette.  I have a small catalogue of ailments that resemble a gamers die.  A Korean game of yut nor...

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 an...

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 sepa...

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...

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. ...

Keyboard Dreams or Analog Arpeggios Sometimes your fingers get used to a thing, a particular computer keyboard, for example, and to shift to a new keyboard suddenly feels foreign and encumbers a whole slew of different mistakes than one is usually accustomed to. I am finally replacing my 2012 desktop with a new version, and the old one will be rotated into a new role as a writing machine in my son’s room/study.  In anticipation of this pending change, I have ordered replacement input peripherals for the AA powered keyboard and mouse I’ve kept up with all these years. For the keyboard I decided to try a newfangled-retro-mechanical keyboard. It is something that harkens back to my original Mac, the one after the Apple IIc in a beige case with a 9” monochrome screen. Can you believe we ever looked at such a small screen and composed papers on such things? The keyboard of my memory was a chunky thing tethered to the Mac with a coiled telephone cord. Am I imagining that? Was it really a...

Year of the Rabbit As the snow falls,  the memory of younger selves,  like a broken and bruised banana,  the salvaged detritus of previous jobs,  a yellowed piece of plastic. Everyone waits in line,  everyone celebrates differently,  everyone lingers suspiciously on faces they don’t know.  At the end of the line is pizza.  At the end of the line are chopsticks and fortune cookies.  The volunteers ladling small portions have name tags that say,  Volunteer. I cannot fathom murder.  I cannot fathom the end of life.  The instant appearance or disappearance  is enough to inspire me to take up religion,  again.  What do you say to someone who has lost an aunt,  a mother, a sister, a dance partner?  Is it enough to listen? In the year of the rabbit,  none of the victims were below the age of 50.  The DJ was playing a Light Rain in March.  It was not yet February.  Here there is quietness....

Salesmanship The same algorithm that shows me ads  for men’s underwear  and off brand viagra  also promotes wool slippers  and extravagantly patterned cardigans.  Titillate or lull.  That is the age I am at,  apparently.  Where are the vacations in Turin,  the scuba diving lessons,  the vision quests?  Who needs a self improvement aid  guaranteed to do something in eight weeks,  at this stage?  I’m tired and have had a low level sore throat for weeks.  My body is doing something.  When I close my eyes  the ticking of the wood stove lurches  like an intoxicated metronome.  The fan of the humidifier  is the distant burble of a hot tub.  A man walks by in yellow striped speedo briefs  and drops into the water.  The dog sleeping on my lap  is slowly weaving threads of hair into my sweater.  Without,  my feet have a slight chill,  but relish in the freedom....

A Bolero Fantasy I still fantasize about the band embarking on a world tour. After the holidays,  all the Christmas tree lights go on sale,  and band practice rooms are so equipped all across our land. When heroes die  there is a requisite period of private mourning  even though you never met the man.  To have listened was enough. Who knows what people are like behind closed doors,  riding in the back of a taxi,  sitting in an airport lavatory.  What kind of man talks on the phone while at the urinal? Who strikes up a conversation with the driver? Who cries themselves to bed at night with imaginary tears? On the fourth night of split pea soup,  do you continue on? I dream with my eyes open,  while eating cinnamon raisin bread,  or waiting for an email to digest,  or watching the sugar on a sweet potato caramelize. If animals remember where they stored last year’s nuts,  perhaps they also remember a particularly warm summer...

Company A cold quiet evening,  the dog is thirsty for companionship  as I build the fire,  release the cat from the bedroom,  eat a handful of wasabi almonds,  pour myself a glass of juice.  I can feel the emptiness in my fingers and my toes,  the chill never quite leaving since this morning  when I stepped out of my robe and slippers  onto the stone tile of the bathroom floor.  I remember walking across a dew dappled lawn in summer,  before even the moose were stirring  and my feet were soaked through.  I had to wring out my socks and hang them up to dry  like a pauper’s Christmas.  My wife hasn’t left me because the marzipan is still on the coffee table  and the dog.  But still,  the quiet.  I might close my eyes. 

What We Think About as We Get Older Taste is a funny thing. Sometimes, perception can be so precise. A specific brand of cranberry-apple juice can be unique and render other brands as mere imitators. If I were more of my mother’s chemist, it would be a blessing because I could replicate the correct proportions out of bottles of cranberry and bottles of apple juice. Instead, I just express my disappointment and suffer through 64 fluid ounces until I can play the grocery store juice roulette and hope my brand is in stock the next time we go. My mother’s taste must be like that for all things. She has a precision to her cooking that is so identifiable. Whereas my cooking is more like a Cray-Pas smudge, my mother’s cooking has the sharp lines of a graphite automatic pencil. I need to be certain to pay more attention the next time I visit. I have to admit, my excitement of eating my mother’s cooking often overwhelms me and I find I have eaten without attention, just succumbed to the pleasur...

A Rural Light I am supposed to be writing a piece about rural life and the crossroads we are facing as part of a Smithsonian and Mass Humanities grant I’ve been a part of, but every time I sit down, all that pops into my head is Ralph Macchio and Steve Vai. I don’t recall if I ever actually saw the film, but the epic guitar battle scene was my introduction to Steve Vai, who in a guitar magazine interview, when he was asked what his favorite piece of gear was, instead of talking about his Ibanez signature guitars, or his Carvin signature amps, or his neon painted guitar pedals, he said it was the fans installed at the foot of the stage so he could stand dramatically with his hair billowing out around his head as he soloed. That made me like him before I ever knew he played for Frank Zappa. I’ve had a more troubled relationship with Ralph Macchio, who is perhaps better remembered for his Karate Kid incarnations. One one hand, Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita made martial arts cool again (aft...

Explaining Crab Rangoon I am a diligent worker,  and today I am finally only one day behind in emails.  I wrote the date correctly on the first try  for the first time of the year.  There is a bare spruce tree sitting  in the corner of the living room.  It is hard work integrating new rituals into one’s day.  The brain breathes with greater exertion,  the body yearns for a nap.  On the floor of my car this morning  was a toilet paper roll,  a disposable razor,  and a dead mouse with cloudy eyes.  I miss resiliency,  but I am enjoying the silence.  When there is silence.  Lately,  I have been re-acquiring heavy objects  that are much harder to move at this age.  I am tempted by the substance  and imagine the fantasies of a younger self.  I tried to describe crab rangoon to my son,  who does not eat animals,  and failed.

A Rest Rural life is sometimes quiet.  Like standing outside and waiting for the mail truck to come.  An automobile speeding down the highway  is like a long slow cresting wave on the ocean.  Taking the trash out at night and hearing a church bell tolling the hour.  At night,  beyond the periphery of light,  there are always twigs snapping.  One can imagine any manner of creature in these woods,  lumbering, or trotting, or taking flight.  A screech owl, or a neighbor’s peacocks,  that will keep one’s imagination working.  Sometimes,  when it is real quiet,  it seems like you can hear the river. 

Everything is Too Beautiful The band I’m in played First Night in Northampton for the first time, and it was a wonderful experience. So many appreciative people. An eagerness for live music. A Buddhist chanter,  a woman from Peru,  a mother I knew when the kids were in grade school,  a man who demanded to know when we were playing next. It was hard to be so thirsty with a water bubbler standing in the alcove,  but no cups to be found anywhere.  Fireworks are very loud on the inside of a concrete garage. The president of a college was dancing across the room. When I was visiting home,  my father tried to teach me how to play a pansori beat on a Korean drum.  He said I played it too rock and roll. He accompanied my son and it was beautiful.  My father looked happy and pleased. A daughter who was going to travel on an airplane with two dogs,  was rerouted to stay home  and so a larger portion of a family diaspora ate acorn jelly together. M...