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?
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.’
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