A Journal of the Plague Year

How many literary works that revolve around plague and disease can I reference in blog titles?  Today it's Daniel Defoe; yesterday's title was from Katherine Anne Porter's short novel.

This morning I walked outside, and everything seemed so normal.  In South Florida, it's neither warm nor cool, a lovely 71 degrees at 5:15 a.m. when I headed to spin class.  I heard crickets and not much traffic noise.  All of my neighbors were sleeping in their dark houses.

I thought about how it was like the days before a hurricane when we know something is happening, but we don't know how big it will be or how much it will affect us.  And yet, everything seems so normal, so quiet.

Is it my animal sense telling me that something bad is coming our way or residue from reading too much news?  I don't really think I have an internal barometer; I've been notably wrong in my premonitions too many times to think that I have much in the way of a sixth sense.

And yet, suddenly my brain shifts into poetry mode, and I find myself grateful because it's been a few weeks.  I can always reassure myself about why I'm not writing poems (travel, work pace, tiredness), but I'm always glad when I start again.

I wrote a poem before I headed to spin class, and then on the way home, I realized that incantation rhymes with lamentation.  I was thinking about writers during past plague times, like Chaucer and Boccaccio.  My poem contains this line:  "Who will be our Chaucer now?"

As I write these blog posts, I think about historians and scholars hundreds of years from now--will they appreciate the work we all did recording life in these times?  Will they scroll through all of our tweets?

Let me record that we've had several meetings at school to say that we don't know what we're facing, so we don't have a plan, but we should make a plan, but we don't know what's coming at us.  As we've had these meetings, more and more schools across the nation have been moving classes online--but that won't work for all of our classes (and I suspect not for all of the classes at schools moving online).

Yesterday the city of Hollywood, the city where I live, canceled all sorts of gatherings.  Part of me thinks this is wise.  Part of me is sad. 

My spouse thinks we're all overreacting.  I say it's too early to know.  The reports from doctors working in hospitals in Italy make me think we should be doing more.

And now, it's time for me to get ready for my dentist appointment.  Afterwards, I'll go to the grocery store next door to see if I can score some wipes.  I don't need them, but my school needs them to wipe down equipment.  It's been just long enough that I might get lucky.

There are days I shake my head over what my professional life has come to.  There are days I say, "Nothing has prepared me for this."  Then there are other days when I have the eerie feeling we've been here before:   like the early days of AIDS.

We lost too many people to AIDS.  I hope we're not seeing that plague year unfolding again.