Planning for the Post Pandemic

I have been thinking about our thinking about this pandemic.  I'm thinking about the early days, when we assumed we might go into lockdown for a week or two, and then everything would be O.K.  I'm thinking about some of the tweets I saw from those who were at more risk from this disease, tweets back in March that suggested that the vulnerable might need to shelter in place until June.  I remember feeling a bit baffled.  Until June?  I know that some of them are still sheltering in place.

I remember tweets and posts back in April that talked about how grateful people were that lockdown was happening in spring, that talked about how hard it would have been to shelter in place during the winter.  And now, winter approaches.  Many (most?) of us aren't sheltering in place and won't be during the coming months, but we may not have the same kind of ways to brighten winter.

A few weeks ago, we drove home by way of Hollywood Boulevard, through what once had been a thriving arts and entertainment district.  Many of the restaurants are now gone, including some that have been anchor sites for decades (goodbye Mama Mia's Italian restaurant where I first had gnocchi with an amazing gorgonzola sauce).

We've been assuming, most of us, that life will go back to normal at some point:  we'll drink in bars again, children will go off to a school building and return 6-8 hours later, workers will return to office buildings.  But that might not happen.  We've changed a lot of habits and practices, and now, some of them feel familiar.  Some of our new practices might be even better than our old practices--these changes won't be uniformly bad.

We've been assuming there will be a vaccine, but there may not be.  Sure, we've got lots of people across the world working on this problem, unlike with earlier diseases, like AIDS.  But that doesn't mean we'll have success.

We will likely get used to working around this disease.  We'll assess risk and proceed accordingly.  And if this disease progresses like many of them do, there will come a time when it doesn't seem so fearsome--either because we've gotten used to it or because it's not quite as fearsome.

When the implications of this disease first began to dawn on many of us, we thought about the ways we could reshape our societies to be better than the one we had.  I worry that part of our pandemic fatigue means not only are we letting our guard (and our masks) down, but we're also not thinking about the shape of the future anymore.  

I'm dreaming of a future where we have some guaranteed minimums in the realms of housing, work, health care, food . . . a world where an adjunct wouldn't turn down classes because she was making more for herself and her child by collecting unemployment (in a state that has purposefully kept unemployment benefits low) than by working.

The Return of the Prodigal Books: the Great Shelving Project Concludes

Even though I got plenty of sleep, I feel a bit fuzzy-headed this morning.  So let me assemble a collection of observations and see if anything coheres.

--On Friday, we had a "Tracking the Tropics" update while we were watching a September 11 special.  We went to sleep expecting a tropical storm by morning.  While it was blustery with occasional rain bands, it wasn't bad most of the day yesterday.  We did move both cars to the driveway last night, just to be on the safe side.

--We have a variety of window leaks, but they don't all leak at the same time.  I'm guessing that it has to do with the direction of the wind and rain.  Last night the windows in the front bedroom both leaked.  Sigh.

--We are still finding damage from past floods.  We threw away many of the last of my spouse's MPA books yesterday.  When we pulled them off the lower shelf in the cottage, we discovered horrible mold.  We just threw the books away--we don't plan to replace them.  They're 20 years old, and they're for a program of study and a career that's not likely to return.

--One of the benefits of a wet, blustery day:  we made a lot of progress on our Great Shelving Project.  We can get all of our books on the shelves.  Even though we had done measurements, we weren't really sure.  Here's what the shelves looked like a week ago:

--This was not the original design.  We were going to have shelves go all the way across.  But we discovered that the studs weren't where they're supposed to be--we think there was once a window that's been closed in.

--I still feel such delight when taking my books out of boxes--I'm so happy to see them, event though I know that I'm not likely to read them again. Here's what the shelves look like now:

--I am still not used to these floating shelves.  I still worry that they'll pull the wall down, even though they are attached to studs that are holding up a very heavy ceiling--and it's an exterior wall.

--We are trying to decide what to do with ancient photo albums.  My spouse and I both had cheap cameras when we were kids.  We took lots of pictures, which we stuck in albums--non-archival quality film put in non-archival albums.  Should we keep this pictures which are aging poorly?  Just choose a representative few from each year?  I don't want to digitize everything; it's probably not worth the expense to do that.

--I have done a lot of fragmentary poem writing this week-end.  I'm wondering if all these fragments want to be in a single poem.  I'll think about that later.  I'm just happy to be writing poem like fragments again, fragments that are more than haiku.

Assault Life

I've been awake for hours, as is usual for me.  Around 3:30 a.m., I was aware of a growling, motor kind of noise.  I assumed it was one of the trucks on my street of lots of trucks--the neighbor kid, home from his job in a restaurant?  

But the growl went on and on.  At one point, I wondered if I was hearing a generator.  But then, the engine revved, and the noisemaking engine drove away, only to return minutes later.

I continued to wonder what I was hearing or more specifically, why I was hearing it.  A family living in their car?  Kids of driving age with no other place to hang out?

When the sky got a bit lighter, and the noise persisted, I went outside.  I pretended to be looking at the sky to gauge the process of the tropical system that's over us.  I noticed that the idling truck was parked in the wrong direction, which meant that I could see that it had "Assault Life" lettered across the top of the windshield.

I felt a chill, even though I didn't feel immediately threatened.  I know that it's a play on the common bumper sticker that has variations on the "Salt Life" theme, people declaring that they'd rather be boating or fishing or diving or other sea based activities.  Or maybe it's a trendier way of declaring one's pirate affinities.  Probably some adolescent's way of trying to seem hip and cool, probably not an assault rifle in the truck.

But I did have a moment when I thought about how much effort I spend each and every day tamping down my knowledge of how bad our planet-wide situation is, how threatened we are as humans specifically, how the future of the U.S. seems to hang in the balance, and how as a woman, I feel the threat of assault each and every day.  There's a tangible sense of menace.

I've felt that menace before, but it's rarely felt so personal to me.  As a woman on the far side of midlife, you might think I would feel less menace, not more.  In The Handmaid's Tale, I'd be one of the Marthas or one of the women sent the Colonies. 

These days, while the U.S. west burns with literal fires, and many cities are on fire with demonstrations, while the political situations in many countries gets more dire every day, it's hard to know which threat is most pressing.

And yet, I remind myself that I've often felt that the people/nations/things I hold most dear are under threat.  So let me respond, as I often do:  let me get some bread dough set to rising.

Day of Difficult Memories

 September 11, a day of so many difficult memories:  most of our brains immediately go to 2001, that morning where we saw planes used as weapons of mass destruction.  Some of us might think further back, to 1973, where a coup displaced Allende, the elected leader of Chile and left an opening for the mass destruction of Pinochet.  This morning on my walk I thought about waking up on this day in 2017, packing our possessions back in our cars, leaving our friends' house and coming back to our house that had been ravaged by Hurricane Irma--that was the first September 11 that I woke up, and it was a few hours before I realized that it was September 11 and thought about past September 11ths.

I remember the afternoon of September 11, 2001.  I was crossing the campus of the University of Miami, the long hike to my parking space.  I saw two of my students, and I asked them how they were doing.  They thought we'd all go off to fight a war; I thought we would retaliate in some way, but I would not have anticipated such a long war, such entanglements.

I remember driving home and thinking that I was the grown up now.  I remember so many instances in my own undergraduate years when I was convinced that world events were about to overthrow my idyllic college years.  My professors must have looked at me the same way.

In hindsight, I underestimated what the impact of that day would be.  I would not have predicted the permanent changes in air travel.  I didn't anticipate how thoroughly immersed the U.S. would become in parts of the world that we didn't understand.  In the intervening years, I became enraged over the privacy violations enshrined in the Patriot Act--but I wouldn't have predicted how much of our data we'd freely give away to all the folks who control our technology.  In many ways, the U. S. Government having access to my library card records seems a much less scary prospect.

And here we are, negotiating with the Taliban as a way to exit Afghanistan.  That, too, I wouldn't have predicted.

As I think back over my political predictions, I'm chastened by what I've gotten wrong. I was certain that we wouldn't get through the Reagan administration without a nuclear war. When I parted from my college friends to go to my parents' house for the summer of 1986, I was convinced we wouldn't make it back--Reagan had just bombed Libya, and my parents lived in the suburbs of D.C., and I just knew something dreadful was in the works.

I do tend to expect despots to have more follow through than they often do. I do tend to be surprised at the power of common people to transform common elements like fertilizer or airline jets into agents of mass destruction.

Let us also remember the power of the common people to be a force for good, as we so often are, as we saw 15 years ago in the face of tragedy.

Day of Difficult Memories

September 11, a day of so many difficult memories:  most of our brains immediately go to 2001, that morning where we saw planes used as weapons of mass destruction.  Some of us might think further back, to 1973, where a coup displaced Allende, the elected leader of Chile and left an opening for the mass destruction of Pinochet.  This morning on my walk I thought about waking up on this day in 2017, packing our possessions back in our cars, leaving our friends' house and coming back to our house that had been ravaged by Hurricane Irma--that was the first September 11 that I woke up, and it was a few hours before I realized that it was September 11 and thought about past September 11ths.

I remember the afternoon of September 11, 2001.  I was crossing the campus of the University of Miami, the long hike to my parking space.  I saw two of my students, and I asked them how they were doing.  They thought we'd all go off to fight a war; I thought we would retaliate in some way, but I would not have anticipated such a long war, such entanglements.

I remember driving home and thinking that I was the grown up now.  I remember so many instances in my own undergraduate years when I was convinced that world events were about to overthrow my idyllic college years.  My professors must have looked at me the same way.

In hindsight, I underestimated what the impact of that day would be.  I would not have predicted the permanent changes in air travel.  I didn't anticipate how thoroughly immersed the U.S. would become in parts of the world that we didn't understand.  In the intervening years, I became enraged over the privacy violations enshrined in the Patriot Act--but I wouldn't have predicted how much of our data we'd freely give away to all the folks who control our technology.  In many ways, the U. S. Government having access to my library card records seems a much less scary prospect.

And here we are, negotiating with the Taliban as a way to exit Afghanistan.  That, too, I wouldn't have predicted.

As I think back over my political predictions, I'm chastened by what I've gotten wrong. I was certain that we wouldn't get through the Reagan administration without a nuclear war. When I parted from my college friends to go to my parents' house for the summer of 1986, I was convinced we wouldn't make it back--Reagan had just bombed Libya, and my parents lived in the suburbs of D.C., and I just knew something dreadful was in the works.

I do tend to expect despots to have more follow through than they often do. I do tend to be surprised at the power of common people to transform common elements like fertilizer or airline jets into agents of mass destruction.

Let us also remember the power of the common people to be a force for good, as we so often are, as we saw 15 years ago in the face of tragedy.

Wrestling with Images

This morning, the flooding rains have disrupted my walk/run through the neighborhood this morning. Nothing to do but make the house smell autumnal--pumpkin bread is baking in the oven!

I've been having a good writing morning, in a way.  I've been wrestling with images.  First I started off with poems.  I wanted to write in the voice of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden.  I had a vision for what I wanted to write, but the words didn't come.  I researched that idea that trees are actually more communal than we think, that they develop an intriguing root/fungi system that helps them thrive instead of competing for scarce resources--the myth we usually tell ourselves about the trees.

I flipped the page and tried a technique that Jericho Brown talked about in this piece of writing:  "One such subversion that I had thought through for about 10 years—while washing dishes and cleaning the tub and grading papers and falling asleep next to one form of earthly beauty or another—was a sonnet crown that only included the repeated lines of the sonnet. Yes, I’m so angry I spent years thinking of ways to gut the sonnet."  He talks about this idea more fully in this interview.

Of course, I didn't do exactly what he did, but I had fun.  And then I tried to write a poem about wildfires and trees and could only write in cliches and bits I had already seen on Twitter.

As they often do, my thoughts turned to spiritual connections.  This morning, I got to the last page of my sketchbook, so I flipped back through the pages.  I'm always struck by how many of my images look like tongues of flame, even when I think I'm sketching something else, like a descending dove.

I'm writing in a time of flooding rains, which made me think of a different set of traditional images.  How do we see baptism in an age where we'll be fighting off the hungry seas that want to wash us away?

This week I started a new sketch not sure of where it would go--I was surprised when a hen emerged from my random swooshes.

But why should I be surprised?  Granted, I'm part of a religious tradition that has emphasized descending doves, not nesting hens.  But in my quest for more feminine images of God, so rare in the Bible, I have come back to that one over and over.

Times of societal shift often bring an interesting shift in imagery of all kinds.  One hundred years from now, what imagery will we emphasize?

A Look Back at Labor Day

Yesterday I heard on NPR's All Things Considered that we were exactly 8 weeks from election day.  Yesterday I found out that we've made our way through most of the list of names for the 2020 hurricane season--the next hurricane will be Sally.  Meanwhile, so much of the U.S. west burns.  U.S. children went back to school yesterday (or the week before), and it could have been so much better, if school districts had made this decision earlier in the summer and people had had more time to plan.

But let me think of happier things, in this post that might have been made yesterday, had my computer not been so glitchy.

--On Monday, we began unpacking the boxes of books that have been packed away for 2 years--2 years.  There were moments when I wanted to weep when I took the books out of the boxes, to weep because I was so happy to see them again.

--I didn't finish unpacking the boxes.  We discovered that the lowest shelf wasn't as attached to the wall as my DIY spouse thought it was.  We decided to take a pause to see how the other shelves, now full of books, responded.  So now the front bedroom is a bit of a disaster, but at least we're in progress to getting the books put away.

--I got to the point where the items in the remaining boxes present less straight forward choices.  Will we keep cookbooks with the other books?  What about all the music that we have?  And the photo albums?

--We had the kind of week-end that makes me wish the week-end could go on forever, full of good food, good reading, relaxing in the pool, getting chores done, making progress on projects.  I zipped through the necessary work for my online classes.  I had time to do creative work.

--The week-end had small joys:  the group of ducks that came to my car when I had parked at the WalMart Neighborhood Market.  I went into the store, and as I loaded my groceries in the car, they reappeared--this time with some younger ducks (a bit older than ducklings, but not fully grown).  I've rarely been that close to wildlife.  If I had broken open the box of crackers, they probably would have eaten from my hand--so maybe they weren't quite wildlife, in the way we usually define that word.

--We had some wildlife visitors to our back yard too--baby raccoons!  Cute as they are, I found myself thinking, please don't let them figure out how to get into my attic.

--The week-end had time to catch up with far-flung friends and family too.  There were moments when I was staggered to think about how long I've known some of these folks.  I was on the phone with an old college friend.  We talked about the fact that I have a Biden sign in my yard, about the fact that it's the first time I had that kind of sign since "the time I had the one for Geraldine Ferraro and that guy she was running with."  Back in 1984, my college friend and I had fierce disagreement about that sign.  Now we had a good conversation about current politics, even though we're on the same page.

--During one of my quicker restocking trips, I picked up a bouquet of flowers, the cheap $4 kind.  It has a hydrangea bloom, lots of small sunflowers, a huge fuchsia carnation, and some daisy-esque blossoms.  I am amazed at its beauty.

--Here is the task, it seems:  to continue to be amazed at the beauty.