Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Pandemic journal, one year later

March 16, 2020

I have asked my students to keep a Coronavirus Journal, and so I will, too. We are all shell-shocked by the turn our lives are taking. Please tell me they will see writing in the journal as “therapeutic,” to quote something one student said the first night of the course, all the way back in January – when we met in an actual classroom on campus and began something together.

March 18, 2020

This will be a journal of clichés, this Coronavirus Journal. But that won’t mean the words aren’t sincere or the emotions keenly felt. It’s just everything we might have feared about stopping our lives and hiding inside is true. We’ve seen the Zombie Apocalypse and now we’re living it. Since I shrink from anyone whose path I cross while walking or jogging, the people I see might as well be zombies -- I am treating them as such.

Let’s take a visit to the Silver Lining Room. I go there a lot, coronavirus or not. I want to read or re-read classics this year, and something inspired me to take Dante off the shelf for the umpteenth time. So I began re-reading “Inferno” yesterday and hope to finish it in a few days (it can be slow-going when I toggle back and forth between the English and Italian editions).

Appropriate, no? Dante, in this time of plague-like living.

March 20, 2020

I’m calling this the Coronavirus Journal, but it’s also the journal of my father’s illness. I spoke with him yesterday and it was a replay of the conversation from the day before. Small grievances, no desire to read, the TV is “broken” but he knows it’s just some small quirk that if someone were there would be fixed instantly. I pine for the obsessively sharp, needling Daddy. I pine for some rebuke -- enough of this fog.

March 21, 2020

On Saturday, I texted Cristiano, Ilaria, Chiara, Irene and every other Italian friend I hadn’t already contacted. Irene said living under quarantine there was like being “seppellita a casa,” buried inside your house. And they ask, ‘What about in Connecticut?’ 

Today I go to learn about conducting a virtual lesson and setting up a virtual classroom. YIKES!

March 23, 2020

My coronavirus diary exists alongside my Daddy journal.

I spoke with him yesterday and it was not the same person I knew. It was like talking to a hybrid of Mommy and a very tired Daddy. He kept repeating certain key details of his blood transfusion – for instance, it took four hours. He told me there are good days and bad and the bad ones are when he wants to pull the blanket over his head. What was yesterday, I asked? A pull-the-blanket-over-your-head kind of day.


March 24, 2020

It snowed this morning – yes, snow. Leo and I went out twice, and as is often the case, we improvised games to play. We practiced racing back and forth along the sidewalk. We tried to catch snowflakes. We ran up the walkway and jumped the front steps four at a time. We wrote with chalk on the sidewalk. He asked me to “time” him for every bit of racing he wanted to do, eventually shaving off one to two seconds from his final “result.”

Later we migrated to the backyard, where we wandered into the school fields behind the house and raced each other while running backwards (not a bad workout). We ran an obstacle course that included a long stretch behind the back shrubs, in the tiny “lane” in front of the fence.

He’s endlessly imaginative and game -- until he is not, and then I often feel a bit crestfallen. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun as I have with him.

March 25, 2020

I am in love with James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” In an introduction to the edition I am reading, Baldwin writes, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Amen!

March 26, 2020

Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my grad school class, except it’s not at the grad school anymore.

He’s above average in reading and likes Math a lot and so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t fear he will miss out as much.

Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.

He should be in school. Definitely.

But in “my home school,” he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least), he can stand up to do math problems, he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.

And yet – my "other" mind weighing in – he has not played with a friend in a week.

March 27, 2020

Back from NJ today. Listening to “Prima Pagina,” an Italian radio program where – I kid you not – a journalist methodically reads and discusses the front pages of all of the major Italian newspapers. An odd effect of the Coronavirus epidemic: I am paying closer attention to Italian news.

March 30, 2020

Second virtual class tonight. I’m in touch with my students a lot. I want them to think of my class as their refuge. 

​Leo tells me that he and Mike were talking about the toughest question in the universe and then he tells me what he thinks it is: “What’s your destiny?” Um, folks, he’s only 7.

Later, looking up from his book, he asks me, “What is mortal peril?” (He’s reading a Harry Potter book again).

I explain that peril is a fancy word for danger. And then he says, “Mortal means ... you can die?”

Yep. But I would have liked to postponed that answer, son.

April 1, 2020

I have to take Dad to a doctor’s appointment today. Meanwhile at 5:30 this morning, I was awoken by a plea coming from the stairs. It was Dad and he’d decided that he wanted to come up the stairs and sleep in his real bed, with Mommy. By pulling himself up the stairs.

He has no strength. I could see his legs beneath his night shirt – once fat with muscle, now almost skeletal. There was a touch of folly to it all, as if lack of sleep had made him crazy, and it can, so maybe it did. He’s still sleeping on the couch most nights, even though we now have a hospital bed in the living room. That’s not a good long-term solution.

Welcome once again to The-Daddy-Is-Sick Journal within the Coronavirus Journal.

We raced down here to New Jersey yesterday, and OK fine I was doing 80 m.p.h. most of the way but we still made it down in less than 3 hours. Left a little before 4. Drove over the Tappan Zee and through northern New Jersey during rush hour. Without the rush.

My students meanwhile are really responding to the Coronavirus Journal. It lives on the software we use (the Moodle). I am trying to reply to each entry and some other students are also replying, and wow, it’s like we somehow have created way more community, just via the forum. It’s so obvious and clichéd but I would never have proposed something like this had we not taken the class online. 

The power of words, the power of sharing thoughts, of admitting vulnerabilities. It’s like they were hungering for it. Almost no one is posting some brief, phoned-it-in entry.

April 2, 2020

If I zoomed down to New Jersey on Tuesday, I zoomed back even faster. There were some cars on the road but there was not a single point where I had to slow down below. Most of the way, I drove 80 m.p.h.

At the house, I tried to tidy. I paid a bill. I took care of the recycling. Tiny things that may not add up to anything. The house meanwhile crawls with detritus. A library’s worth of magazines and catalogs. Mail here, mail there, mail a bit everywhere. 

Everything is positioned just within reach ... and I sympathize.

But the chaos of everything placed within arm’s reach is real.

April 18, 2020

Daddy is home from the hospital and yesterday he tells me, “I was in a daze for 24 to 36 hours.”

Today he adds, “I didn’t know where I was, how I got there, how I moved from room to room.”

He adds, “But the speech has come back.” 

Absolutely unfathomable that my father could ever be without speech.

April 19, 2020

Leo asks me, “If you could be any imaginary creature, what would it be?” Then he suggests a mermaid, knowing I love to swim. Yep, I say. Next question: if you had to have only one eye or one ear, which would you choose?

April 25, 2020

We woke up today and cut out paper hearts to send to Beth and Sammy. Then we went out in the yard, blew bubbles and chased each other around. 

May 14, 2020

I saw Daddy’s leg wound yesterday after I returned to New Jersey. I was allowed into the examining room at the wound care center where he is treated -- indeed I was allowed to witness the treatment. It’s all insane. How the leg looks, how it is treated, the pain he feels as they remove bandages. All of it.

How to describe the leg? Like something from the meat case at the supermarket. Like a biology textbook. Like a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci of a cadaver he’d carved up.

It actually has a topography to it, like a map that shows the various elevations of the land. Large swaths of his leg are simply gone, creating highlands and lowlands – on his leg. His leg.

June 2, 2020

My father wakes up this morning and tells me, “We were robbed last night.”

Unaware of this, or rather aware this did not happen, I say, “Oh really?”

And he says, “They were convicts.”

Then he tells me bugs were crawling on the ceiling, and there was a cat there, too, along with a ferocious dog, whose attention he did not want to attract.

These insane statements began last night. He even spoke about death. How do we deal with the problem, as it approaches, he asked? Strange moments of lucidity through a tangle of confused statements. At one point yesterday, he told me to take some of his planters – I felt almost as though he were preparing for death. 

But ... why do I say ‘as though’?

June 6, 2020

We have only small things to comfort us these days. Like Leo perusing the books at my parents’ house, pulling off the shelf the books of old Italian drawings, old American drawings, picture books of beautiful gardens, and calling the collection of books ‘the Library of Poppy.’

 -30-


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