Packing Up the Rickety Ladder

The puppies and I were running through the woods above the Top of the World yesterday when a thought unrelated to anything arose that it's time to pack up this rickety ladder.  This will be the last post.  What's worth saying?

Maybe it's worth describing my writing circumstances.  Out the screen-less window of this treehouse, the morning forest sings and squawks and hums and buzzes.  The knotweed below is lush and green but notably not occupying the expanse of yard we've rid of it over these 12 years.  The tent we pitched last night to practice camping with Tucker before heading up to Baxter State Park next week is drying. Jordy is up on the deck drinking coffee and reading on his Kindle. Cove and Kauai figure out how get up and down the ladder to the treehouse.  An occasional cluck reminds me of the neighbors, six chicken ladies in their swanky digs built by Duncan Ira and Jordan Casey this spring during lockdown.  The garden behind me teams with squash, tomatoes and sunflower stalks getting ready to bloom, while the lettuce, carrots and onions grow without thriving (RIP the cabbage starts Helen gave me).  I'm swatting mosquitoes as I hunch over my laptop on a homemade child's play table with fading hand-drawn chess squares, relics of kids' play at my feet include swords and other medieval weapons made of foam, PVC and duct tape from Camp Half-Blood days in Brooklyn, a snowball maker, whiffle ball, parachute with plastic man figure, and soccer ball.  I look around at the walls dad built from wood shop scraps, centuries-old beams reclaimed from the Baptist church in the village, and the snow-fencing railings Tucker clutched above his two-year-old shoulder height in the era of the famous photo of 3 green boys peeing off the deck.

The treehouse rope ladder that could be retracted once climbed was replaced over time with a fixed wooden ladder, angled just enough for dogs to join the troops.  Barrett Companion fell flat on his back when a rotten rung ripped out of the old rope one at Duncan's third grade sleepover party (when little Charles Palmer also got a tick on his scrotum).  The treehouse has never been the western frontier defense like our Fort Apache in Greenwich in the '70s or dad's equivalent in New Canaan in the '50s.  Good/bad guys battle it out in outer space or cyber space now.  A retractable ladder was hard to climb and not strategically necessary.  

Yesterday we put in to the Connecticut river at Sumner Falls with the intention to float to Cornish landing, 8 miles or so.  We got a late start, proper inner tubes are scarce (supply chains interrupted by Covid), and our inflatable vessels (including a slice of pizza) weren't particularly aquadynamic, and, the water being low, there wasn't much current.  So we decided to stay put and splash in the falls.  The boys found a "spiral of infinity" where a split in the flow reverses direction, then hits a rock outcropping such that the current catches, creating a large circular pool.  If you position your slice of inflatable pizza just right, it will rotate infinitely.  Reeve lay back, arms folded under head resting on the crust, eyes closed to the sun, and drifted in forever.

The thing about the blog form in the worldwide web is that the world itself becomes a possible audience, so you write as if anyone could read it.  It's helpful and distorting.  I wanted to put this public accountability to use to force me beyond lazy journal writing, the way I make declarations of marathon running or run for charity to shame myself into sticking to the training regime.  Just imagining them out there waiting for my next post would make me do it.  If I did it, maybe one day I'd get good, maybe even great, or at least good enough to matter.

I looked back to the date of my first entry – June 13, 2007.  Thirteen years and a few lifetimes ago.  I remember typing, one-handed in the dining room in Brooklyn while Jordy was in London and I was home alone with two toddlers, as if my life depended on it, as if that one post might be the last evidence of my being when the existential forensic team went looking for me.  

Since 2007 we've all been living as if the world were watching at all times, because it is (kind of).  Everyone's a filmmaker, photographer, writer.  Everyone is performing for the darkened room of infinite possible observers.  It's chaotic and relentless.  Every experience is already being edited for presentation in the happening.  The audience is mostly imagined, like the infinite armies of computer-generated orcs our heroes battle in the Lord of the Rings.  An apotheosis of cultural narcissism.  Almost no one is paying attention.   The sad truth is the liberation.

But you, dear readers, are paying attention and have been all along.  Thank you for showing up for this blog, all five of you, these 13 years, you, the same people who show up for family birthday parties and are available on the other end of the phone when I'm cooking dinner and need to vent.  You are the true audience who made sure I didn't go missing after all.  

I've tried on a lot of voices here, all and none of them mine, some of them yours.  I'd like to say I've "found mine," but I don't think I have just one.  From now on, new metaphor – I aim to be an adept rider as of so many wild horses.  I want to leap confidently from one to the next and ride where we will.

The ladder has got pretty gosh-darn (as Reeve would say) rickety at times, swaying and cracking under wind and strain.  I came at the project of my life with a lot of missing or broken rungs.  I knew it but hid it, often from myself most of all.  I thought I chose the rickety ladder, even glorified it, but it just was me, the only one I had to climb.  Worthy neither of blame nor glory.

I thought I was climbing up, as if there were somewhere to go.  Ambition, striving, affirmation, worth, achievement, success – always out in front, always above.  A railing above shoulder height I was reaching for.  Safety, I thought, I was taught, is above, out there.  

But the ladder leads also down to the ground.  This is where my soul was leading all along.   My ego is finally letting go the desperate grasp.  Silver linings of middle age, a pandemic, and the jubilee year of integration.  I have a lot to learn about the ground.  I like the feel of it.  The puppies are teaching me about it.  They show me how security lets you settle down and rest deeply.  The garden is teaching me about it.  I like the fact that the sunflowers will bloom because its their nature to do so, not 'cuz anyone is watching.  

I find the inevitability of my body one day sleeping in the earth, as Lola is below me now, comforting, not scary. As long as the wind keeps blowing and new leaves bud each spring.  I feel the company of Mr. Jimmy, Judy, Memar and Gar, John Morgan close more often, hear their voices saying "Samantha, in retrospect, this, not that."  I feel at peace with my parents and our journey into being together.   I long to live more kindly, walk more lightly, make less noise, and create whatever ephemeral beauty is mine to make beside the sunflowers, as is in my nature.  Grace comes in finding my own nothingness in the spiral of infinity.  

This feels like solid enough ground to build on for now.

Educating in Outer Space

What a year to attempt re-entry into public school teaching. 

In 1992, diploma fresh in hand, I packed my car and drove from California to Mississippi to take my first job as a high school English teacher.  I joined a wave of young idealists who believed we could renew American society through progressive public education via programs such as Teacher for America or the Mississippi Teacher Corps.  

Or so I came to understand.  Typically, my draw was more mythic or romantic.  Faulkner and history pulled me south where I was seeking some elusive understanding of our true national identity.  I landed at Ole Miss among teaching cadets with varied backgrounds and goals.  Some were Southerners, black and white graduates of Mississippi state colleges and universities making lifelong commitments to teaching careers; others were arriving from the Peace Corps, Ivy League colleges, etc. filled with the fervor of reform and racial justice.  Like everyone else, I wanted to change the world through teaching;  I just wasn't immediately sure yet of my place or how.  (First I had to survive.)

Over my three years teaching in Mississippi with mentorship from Stanford historian of education David Tyack and political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, I gained context.  In our young faith in public school reform as a lever to transform society, we were participating a long and very American tradition on the progressive flank of the battle for societal reform; to our right, corporate school reformers (led at the time by the first President Bush) aimed to privatize public education.  Whatever one's agenda or vision, our shared faith that changing schools would change society united us as Americans, even as our differences frustrated effective change.  

As Professor Tyack lays out in Tinkering Toward Utopia (with Larry Cuban, Harvard Press), reforms of the last century mostly revert to the durable "grammar of schooling" we recognize as "real school" – graded classrooms, divided disciplines, single-teacher led classrooms, etc.  Held in interlocking economic and political structures, college entrance requirements, and cultural expectations, schools have a way of resisting willful re-design.  Stagnation serves an underlying logic that eventually makes reformers moderate or leave the field, as I did.  

Twenty-five years (gulp) after leaving the public school classroom, however, I went back.  I took a long-term sub position at a Vermont high school this January (2020).   I was beginning to question the reasons I left and whether I'd made a mistake.  I wanted to catch up with the field, dip a toe, see if my older, more moderate self could fit back in.  Long-term, I was forming a vision of getting re-credentialed and teaching abroad again or back in Mississippi, maybe after the kids go to college.

I found the "grammar of schooling" predictably, if disappointingly, in tact, easing my re-entry.  I was assigned first period tenth-grade English, a full-circle return to my first job.  I gave writing and reading assignments.  We had posters on the wall.  Class discussions and poetry recitations, etc.  In this middle-class, mostly white rural community, racial and cultural diversity were more theoretical than lived.  Class differences were apparent, but behavior wasn't a challenge.  This teaching wasn't going to change the world, but I was satisfied trying to serve the status quo as a substitute for another teacher's curriculum. I was here to learn and catch up for now.  I enjoyed the chance to share a frame of reference with our oldest son, now a freshman at a neighboring high school.   It was all manageable, predictable, and so extremely normal.

Until March 13.  

The governor's order to shut down all schools came so quickly, I never returned to the classroom.  I was running a fever the last day the kids attended to gather their books, so I taught remotely from the class TV, directing our last in-person reading of Romeo & Juliet from the wall like Big Brother (fittingly, as one of the book groups was also reading 1984 at the time).   As I heard the bell ring through my laptop speakers, I waved goodbye to my students, their images glitching as they slung their backpacks, checked phones, and disappeared from view, my ground control going off duty.  

In an instant, we were thrust into outer space.  School without gravity.  Tables and chairs drifting away.  Pencils and chalk floating like so many pieces of space dust.  Time itself, as theorized, became relative.  "Sychronous" or "assynchronous" instruction?  That was the question.  My first instinct was to tether.   Our social bonds must hold us, a web through the Web, friendships and book groups and text chains, whatever it took.  Our temporal bonds too, through daily poems and morning messages reminding students of today's date, routine group and individual meetings.  "Remote," "virtual," "live" instruction ~ a rich time to explore the force of language to shape reality and reality to re-shape language.  Our microcosm mirrored millions of other teachers and students adapting new methods, "meeting" via Google, sharing screens, peering into each other's bedrooms, questioning the old curriculum's relevance to the new world that will emerge on the other side of the pandemic.  

May 31.  Meanwhile, back on planet Earth a white police officer put his knee to Mr. George Floyd's neck, taking his life in 8 minutes and 43 seconds.  Already the virus was disproportionately killing black and brown people through the compounded factors of class and secondary health risks.  Broadband was revealed as the new railroad tracks dividing school children.  It's all too much.  Protests broke out in the streets, despite the risks.  Until black lives matter, none do.  

How to teach to this moment?  More to the point, how to learn from it?   Do we have the luxury of tinkering toward utopia?  Or is that crashing we hear daily the sound of our civilization collapsing?  

Amidst the wrenching pain, I feel moments of relief.  Finally the underlying logic serving stagnation is laid bare.  Public schools have limped along, holding together the order and rebuffing change, because they serve the status quo.  Individual's efforts, leading to individual successes but inevitably to individual exhaustion, were doomed to fail.  The enduring "grammar" of schooling serving the order of race and class hierarchies would always be stronger.  Those who benefit from it most will keep in place, whatever their rhetoric.

But the pandemic is cracking that order, from the college admissions game down to the subterraneous footings of our economy.  I never imagined I'd live to see seismic shifts of this magnitude. Do we live to work or work to live?  What is the value of human life?  How do we teach toward a meaningful and sustainable existence on this planet for all living beings?

I won't return to the formal "classroom" (virtual or physical) in the fall.  I don't know what I will do next.  I don't know what kind of education will matter most for my own children, much less this entire generation, when the future of our country and the planet now seem impossible to predict.  The storyteller in me doesn't know what story to seek, to tell, what's true.  I don't know whether anything I think matters, like this post for starters  (though I hear Rabbi Finley – "everything matters" – and keep trying).  I don't even know how to wrap up this post.  

So for now, I will remind myself that learning begins at the edge of the unknown and go join the boys to explore this day.

Puppilustenfloogen

Only German possesses the word to capture it with precision.  The English translation is mildly obscene, loosely – "a flood of lustful feelings towards a puppy."  You probably know it but haven't let yourself name it.  It would sound so vulgar, even to think it.  The nose (yours, not puppy's) starts to twitch with desire to sniff.  The lips begin to quiver with longing to kiss.  The fingers flex for a fistful of that plush puppy toosh.   An electrical storm of longing overwhelms conscious thought, productive work (math assignments, blog writing, moving global capital, etc.) is waylaid by two furry creatures curled around each other on a dog bed.  Perhaps one of them yawns just so, or does that sleepy stretch where the two front legs reach straight, ears bunching up on shoulders.  God help you if he rests his head on her back, or she tucks her face under her own paw.  AHHHH!  Puppilustenfloogen!

As you would expect, German has words for the various shades of puppilustenfloogen.  For example, you know you have it real bad when you fall on your face, right then and there; this they call "swoonenpuppilustenfloogen."  Or when you take the puppies for a run, a proper public workout, and you find yourself unable to resist a squeeze of the bunchy butt drawn side-to-side by the wagging tail.  This they call "roonenpuppilustenfloogen."  As you have already imagined, when you are besieged by fall-on-your-face longing while running, you have swoonenroonenpuppilustenfloogen.  This can be very dangerous – to the puppy, your face, and your reputation.

A cozy variation tends to come on in early morning to people only half-arrived from sleep; the sight of a sleeping puppy elicits a mammalian urge to return to the primordial warmth and floaty softness of the womb.  The satisfaction of "morgenpupplilustenfloogen" is best achieved by pressing closed eyes into the soft neck fur under puppy's ears and tucking hand under puppy's belly.

A kinky variation comes about when more than one family member is overwhelmed by pupplilustenfloogen at the same time, in which case it's convenient (for the sake of not going to jail) to have at least two puppies.  This the Germans call "grupenpuppilustenfloogen."  It tends to come on late at night, such as when two puppies curl up alluringly on either end of the living room couch, attracting boys to them.  The bigger the boys, the harder grupenpuppilustenfloogen can be to identify, as the puppies can be rendered entirely invisible under the boys' backsides.   In this case, one must listen for human murmurs and sighs as evidence of grupenpuppilustenfloogen going on.  The Germans have a word for this too – "puppiloovenwhisperschplecken."

Transit

Our isolation and the continuing good health of our parents have insulated us from the direct losses.  Aunt Randi has recovered.  We've been learning to live in this moment.  The silver linings have been so luminous they've distracted me from the darkness of the clouds. 

Then on Wednesday I woke up to read that John Prine had died.  I didn't know his music well, but he sang me a good ways cross-country last summer ("Clay Pigeons").  The forever silencing of his gentle, sympathetic voice made my heart hurt in an unexpectedly personal way.  Later on Wednesday I learned my writing partner and former student Khaleel has lost two relatives in New York.  It's becoming clear how economic disparities, race, health care access – injustice in its many forms are intensifying the differential infection rates and outcomes.  Khaleel's family's losses confirmed what the news began reporting this week, that Black Americans are many times more vulnerable.  Anger complicates the grief.  I want to blame Trump for it all, but I know I can't.  People were always going to die.  Our failures created Trump, not the other way around.  We learn nothing if we let him take our inglory too. (I know that's not a word but it should be.)

I forgot how heavy grief is in the body.  I crawled under my covers and read all day.  I was late to prepare the Passover dinner.  I was feeling the unraveling of the old, the permanence of the losses, without consolations.  The graduations that can't be retrieved.  The seasons of spring sports kids won't play.  The indie films that won't have their festival premieres.  The music lost.  The family members lost.  The burial rites delayed or unperformed.  The futility of human efforts against the currents of history and nature.  I don't mean to be overly tragic or grandiose.  I know my own losses are trivial compared to others, but even this thought couldn't stop the free fall that had begun in my core.  I surrender, I found myself thinking.  Let me lay down now.

Earlier this week the kids asked to watch Earth: The Making of the Planet on National Geographic, a documentary that left a big impact on Duncan and Reeve in fifth grade.  From a cosmic explosion of light and energy settling into star dust to the origins of life through the Cambian explosion of life forms to now, we watched the history of everything on the projector, puppies on laps, pulsing images filling the living room over our own little primordial fire.  We are but a flashing instance of life continuous.

The kids wanted to do a Passover seder just us on Night One.  Despite my procrastination on the cooking and cleaning front, it turned out to be among our most meaningful and fun yet.  The boys prepared an epic re-enactment of Moses's life and the ten plagues with Reeve a most despotic Pharaoh (the vacuum cleaner brush as beard a powerful costume choice), Tucker an appropriately ambivalent but increasingly forceful Moses (move over Charlton Heston), and Duncan a convincingly quixotic God (accolades for the angry chicken Halloween costume repurposed as burning bush).  The wild beasts performed their part well in their first Passover play, resting from the excitement afterwards on the couch.  Second night we invited extended family to a seder by Zoom in which Mom and Ken, Nana and Papa, Dad and Helen, the Lehmanns, Nancy, the Hulses from Virginia, the Donahue Melgars from San Francisco, the Luckys from South Lake Tahoe, and Richard and Kat from DC joined in ritual and conversation particularly ripe for our moment.  Later we played family trivia with many of the same characters, adding Pulsifers from North Carolina, all from our dining room table.  It all feels strangely b'shereit.

Yesterday the sun gave respite from the gloominess of the week.  Jordy and Reeve took a morning bike ride; I took the dogs on a trail run.  We joined Marah, Sally, Mahmoud and Omar in Mohameddia, Morocco via Zoom, comparing our lives, cooking to occupy the mind and eating to give pleasure and variety to the days, curfew at 6pm, the kids shared the books they are reading (Wizard of Oz in French for Sally, The Beyonders for Tucker, Ishmael for Reeve), stuffed animals and real ones, the excitement of going to the pharmacy after three weeks in an apartment, the unreliability of information, the uncertainty of how we get out of this.  Yet another new adventure in our interstellar vehicle, aka the dining room table.

The afternoon brought heavy lifting and digging, prepping space for the chickens, cleaning out the tree house Dad built for the boys, moving the pieces of the jungle gym.  Trampoline time.  Napping.  As the sun sank, Facebook notified me Rabbi Finley's morning services had been live.  Jordy and I listened as I did yoga in the front hall, puppies getting into the flow before conking out directly under my downward facing dog.  By way of introducing the practice of counting the Omer, Finley challenged the omniscient and omnipotent notion of God we've inherited (from Aristotle, he claimed, interestingly).  The Kabbalistic understanding of God by contrast is not static but dynamic, not about eternal "being" but about eternal "becoming" – and broken.  To name the infinite is to contain it; theology can actually obstruct our souls' work.  It's not until our hearts break on our theologies that the divine can find a way in.  As he closed with the Misha Berech, the prayer for the sick or dying,  I found myself face up in shivasana (corpse pose) under a pile of puppies.  I could feel Jordy's body respond to Finley's prayer that those facing the end of life may feel held in the human community, may meet death with dignity, may be free from pain and fear.  Turned upward, my eyes rested on the white clouds tumbling against the blue sky, warm in the reflected light of the setting sun.

Ten Years' Change in a Week

"Ten years' change in a week," the NY Times headline reads this morning about how doctoring went to telemedicine in an instant.  Apply to our whole way of life times three weeks equals 20 or 30 years of change.  That feels about right.

All the switches flipped in an instant, like an infant taking first violent suck of oxygen from lungs.  Ebbs flowing and flows ebbing.  Households emptied by the daily drag of work, school, appointments now full of human energy.  Streets and office hives of activity now empty.  Video conferencing compresses social distance while a physical distance of three feet at Plainfield Store is uncomfortable.  A record low unemployment flips to record high.  Zoom conquers even the generation who hoped to cruise out of here without bothering, defining the new aesthetics and etiquette of culture.

This week our experimental "live" theater on Facebook Live with Parish Players friends migrated to Zoom with The Spoon River Anthology.  The production went next-level, with lighting, costumes and finessed transitions.  The audience was "in the (Zoom) room" with the performers; conversation afterwards was rich.  A perfect Saturday night gathering for 90 minutes, no driving, no stumbling on the ice in the dark.  The performers looked me in the eye in close-up.  I forgot the medium and was genuinely moved.  The creative wheels are spinning for what we can do next.

More on creativity unleashed... I've been working this week on finding a new role for WRIF (White River Indie Films).  The festival isn't happening, but we see a chance to serve as a virtual gathering place for film viewing and making. I'm composing weekly newsletters with links to the myriad of new ways to watch new release films online.  (I'm writing this down so we will remember how it was "before" when festivals fought for premieres, filmmakers and distributors guarded streaming rights, and audiences felt some urgency to move their bodies in order to see what's new.)  New still matters, but less? And geography suddenly doesn't.  Plus, Old is relevant again because shelf space is unlimited and at the moment nothing new is being made.  Curation is the name of the game.  

This was happening already, a consequence of on-demand and a.i.-drive viewing and listening?  Current to the boys are '80s music and movies, '90s and '00s TV series (The Office!).  Novelty still matters, but quality and zeitgeist matter more.  There's time for circularity.  Watch parties are a thing now via Netflix, etc.  We haven't surrendered the social aspect of viewing; we've just distanced it, which was always kind of true about movie-watching anyway: From the Nickelodeon and peep show to the megaplex, the dark theater aimed to eliminate the outside world for a more perfect suspension of reality and transportation to the imaginary.  Honestly, we've always been ambivalent about other audience members anyway – good if friends or someone you want to sneak an arm around or when their reactions amplify our own; bad when they text or talk or smell bad.  Movie theaters were dying before all this.  

And do I care?  Last summer (i.e. a lifetime ago) I came back from LA in a crisis of faith about it all anyway.  I wanted to make movies to help us love the broken world more; meanwhile, the over-cranking content machine seemed to feed escapism and an ever darkening view of reality.  I get it.  Our dystopian fixations reflect the crushing anxiety of climate change, social-media aggravated social isolation, a broken politics, abandoned by God, consolation in sharing hopelessness.  It's centuries in the making.  (I am teaching 1984 at the moment.  Good timing.)  It's just not the story I'm made to tell, and if my stories aren't fit for our times, I have other work to do for now.  Something to do with getting unstuck, moving beyond consumption of anesthetizing entertainment, toward connecting with others again, growing in consciousness, finding our way out of this mess together.  Conversing with all the prophets, from Jeremiah to John Lennon.

In this light, WRIF glowed with new purpose. The movies are the means; community is the goal.  The festival's plus factor would be the human interaction, conversations sparked by shared viewing, new filmmaking made possible by bonds forged.  And now this... It should be a defeat, but it doesn't feel so.  I'm thrilled. I feel the synapses of caring people here and everywhere sparking with activity. Where and how we will gather (physically) again is TBD, but the collective reach for good storytelling – whatever the access–to save us heartens me.  And when we do gather, we'll appreciate it all the more.  My favorite idea so far is to hold a spring screening at the Fairlee Drive-In!  Alone together.  (Personal poetry in this, having fond memories of Saturday Night Fever and other '70s classics in their first run at the old White River Drive-In.)   

Leaping forward and back.  We ordered our chickens.  People are playing board games.  Home cooking is back.  People are baking bread and sharing strategies for making their own sourdough starter when yeast isn't available.  People are taking walks just because.  Families are making music videos and performing plays in their living rooms.  The boys invented a baking contest this week.  Duncan applied learning from his woodworking class to fix a cutting board. Reeve has a new routine of morning bike rides, returning yesterday to report on the "most beautiful ride of (his) life," noting the morning sun breaking through mist on Blow-Me-Down creek and a duck with an orange headpiece.  Jordy and Tucker are making up for all the chess games and bedtimes lost these past seven years of weekly separations.  Boredom opens the negative space.  A new relationship to time.  

As the weeks pass and work carries on in the new way, it's tempting to impose structure on time, grab the old goals and ambitions.  It's helpful.  We're marking it on the kitchen wall in pencil and are shocked to see how much has already passed.  Grateful for Shabbat as an axis for the wheels of weeks to spin on, holding onto the "week" as a thing to keep us in synch with each other and the outside world.  We remember what was always true and Einstein proved – that time is relative, and we play a part in constructing it.  Freedom brings terror.  Even as we hold on to routines (=activity/[time]x[space]) created in the old physical order for comfort, I don't want fear to narrow the possibilities for re-imagining everything.

One telling place where the new time doesn't work is live music.  Zoom delays and lagginess frustrate synchronized play.  Recordings and solos work fine but remind us of what's lost in asynchrony.  Networks will get faster, delays imperceptible.  Soon thunder will move as fast as lightning. Sound at light speed. Is it too much to ask for both/and?  I want to feel the vibrations of live music in my skin again, and I want to be able to play from afar in something like "real time." 

My mind sifts what I want back, what I never want back. All seven billion minds alive on earth right now are sifting the same.  I missed so much before because it was all passing in such a blur.  The exquisite cardinal before me as I type strutting his red stuff for the ladies.  Trees on the trails I never took the time to meet.  Fields within sight I literally never noticed.  Being with the boys throughout the day.  Things I never want back – hours upon hours of driving for color-coded activities overlapping in a Google calendar, habitual exhaustion a sacrifice to the ego gratification of "productivity."  Learning shackled to school days serving parents' work schedules rather than children's physiology and social needs.  Work schedules shackled to quarterly shareholder earnings rather than parents' physiology and social needs.  Frivolous travel made fast and frequent by carbon we dare not even account for.  Impulse-purchases of plastic items in the check-out line, destined to live for eternity in a landfill.  Drive-through lines of lonely people in atomic automobiles feeding hunger for shared company with fast food that's killing them.  The substitution of consumption for presence.  

I want to sustain this connection with all living beings.  I never want to forget  our ability to act together in concert for the greater good.  I want to translate this to a new sustainable way of life on earth.  I want the equality with which this disease strikes to renew our faith in the best of our old ideas, the truths we once held self-evident, so we can see them to fruition.

We may have leapt twenty, thirty years in a few weeks, but it won't all stick however much we want or don't want it to.  Normalcy will return in some form, the parts I miss – meeting friends at cafes, performing together, voting, farmers markets without face masks, kids' sports games, museum and concert going – and the parts I don't.  Fears of change for the worse are swirling – sustained economic depression, Native American communities at risk of being wiped out by Covid19,  the election derailed, authoritarianism, the end of democracy.  While we were imagining the worst in broad strokes, we failed to anticipate the specifics.  (As one of my students said on a conference call this week, "It behooves the prophet to speak in generalities.")  Yet in a simple, specific strand of DNA has been revealed all that we've neglected.  May our creativity save us. 

********************************

Hannah Senesh's "Eli, Eli" came to mind this morning as I wrote:

O Lord, my God, I pray that these things never end:
The sand and the sea

The rush of the water

The crash of the heavens
The prayer of the heart.

Here Comes the Sun (Covid Week 2)

At 5:25am today Reeve turned 13.  He wanted to wake up for the occasion, but he's still asleep now at 7:35am, evidence enough that our early riser is officially a teenager.  Thirteen years ago we were in Brooklyn.  It had been a long cold lonely winter, as the song says.  We'd left California abruptly eight months earlier.  I knew no one in Brooklyn.  We moved houses twice.  Pregnant with a two-year old, I remember chronic exhaustion.  Reeve was born quickly, the first two contractions were already four minutes apart, earning him the nickname Rocket Reeve.  We barely made it to the hospital, and I had to stop more than once in the cold darkness between the parking lot and the entrance to contract.  By sunrise he was in my arms, enjoying a lengthy breakfast Chez Mommy as we watched the sun glint off the orange Staten Island ferry and the Statue of Liberty.  Two days later, Duncan and Jordy welcomed us home.  In those drifty dreamy first days with a newborn, we often played "Here Comes the Sun."  Holding his new baby on the couch, two-year old Duncan loved to dance his fingers above Reeve's searching face to the song's "Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah, Dah-Dah-Dah-Dah!" bridge.  Little Darlings indeed.  When the tulips rose and the cherry blossoms exploded that April for Reeve's first spring, it felt like my first too.

In June we plan to recognize Reeve as a bar mitzvah. Reeve's been diligently preparing, practicing his trope daily, weekly tutoring with Dartmouth Hillel student Ariel, thinking about his interpretation of his portion (Korah) and what charitable project he will choose.  We plan to host his party up at Salinger's barn; the tent is reserved, the menu under consideration.  With each day, though, the vision fades.  Like every aspect of life now, the vision needs re-vision.  Family will probably not be able to travel; even local family may need to keep distant.  It will be OK, just different.  Maybe even holier, helping us differentiate the essence from the window dressing.  Maybe Salinger's hill will give us just the space we need to worship together with six feet of separation between us all.   The Torah itself has never felt more relevant, a survival how-to for the soul and a people under oppression or near obliteration.

The horror in New York is closing in.  The daily stories of lonely deaths and brave frontline fighters are heartbreaking.  I'm worried sick about our friend Micki in the Maimonides ER.  It's unfathomable.  The scientific mind searches frantically to understand the transmission patterns, the risk factors, the interventions that work.  The political mind searches frantically for stimulus efforts to slow the economic free fall.  The justice mind searches frantically for how to protect the most vulnerable.  The moral mind searches frantically for answers to the impossible question of who should live, who die, as even ambulance drivers are forced to make such choices usually restricted to war time.  Not only New York, of course, it's just hitting extra close to home there.

Last night a bunch of my whacky actor friends and I tried an experiment in remote live storytelling using Facebook.  We read from Day the First of Boccaccio's 14th-century Decameron, ten stories told over ten nights in the countryside outside Florence, Italy by seven young ladies and three gents waiting out the plague.  Our country seclusion mirrors theirs, for now.  Fresh air, the songs of birds returning for spring, celestial bodies shining usward nonetheless.  We found merriment in each other's company, distraction in the saucy tales of lusty monks, old men on the prowl, and wily women who refuse to surrender their wit and wits despite the confines of their lives.  When it was over, we "met" in the Zoom Green Room for a "cast party" and learned that that afternoon one of our own actor's had lost her mother-in-law and her MIL's brother to covid-19 in Maine.

Worst of times.  Best of times.  All five of us Green Beans on the trampoline before Shabbat dinner, the waxing new moon and Venus radiant in the western sky.  Duncan wandering the house playing John Lennon's Imagine on Tucker's ukulele.  The local distillery turned hand sanitizer manufacturer.  Seeds selling out across the country.  Greenhouse gases dropping.  House, Senate, President, Republicans, Democrats actually working together.  Families pulled apart by the pace of the old life reclaiming lost time together.  National Guard enforcing stay-at-home orders.  State lines becoming enforced border crossings.  Leaning into neglected projects, playing music together, arrival in the present moment.  Time unwinds, like a rubber band twisted up by a pencil, our lives wound too tight like a child's distracted pastime, released and reclaimed.  When will this end and life get back to "normal"?  Do we want it to? ... as Jordy pondered at sunset atop the Burling fields, dogs chasing each other amidst last year's corn stalks.

What have we been running to?  From?  What has our collective and exceedingly effective denial of death cost us?  How are we changed when we stare it in the face, at closer than six feet?  Might we make our peace with it?

It seems like years since it's been clear.  It's all right.  It's all right.

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A search for the text we say on Yom Kippur to include in this blog brought up this wise writing, A Dress Rehearsal for Our Deaths.

Covid-19 Week 1

Like so many others, I feel compelled to write down what I'm witnessing.  All at once we're in a new reality.  It doesn't feel like the creep of a disease, though it is.  More like a Mt. Vesuvius or the Flood.  It's becoming hard to see to the other side.  A week ago we wrestled with quaint decisions, such as when to re-schedule our film festival for the fall; now, even if public health allowed, I can't imagine we'll find the will to hold it.  New York is spiking.  I'm so scared for my doctor friends on the front lines in Brooklyn.  I get clipped loving texts back from Micki, Emergency Pediatrics doc at Maimonides.  Masks have run out; the NY Times says they're squirting them with hand sanitizer and re-using them.  Our friends Marcella and Josh fled Brooklyn for Ohio for their safety, I assumed; now I wonder whether Marcella is managing a manufacturing crisis at their Purell plants.  God bless them all. 

A week ago I gave a test on Romeo and Juliet.  It was in class but on laptops through Google Classroom. A keen student asked if I were preparing for school closures.  Did I think we'd have school on Monday?  He asked.  I said yes, and probably for another week or more, but beyond that I wasn't sure.  Within 12 hours of that conversation, I had a 101+ fever and NH Governor Sununu ordered all schools closed immediately.  By Monday, VT Governor Scott had ordered all schools closed by Wednesday.  So Thetford Academy met Tuesday with students; still symptomatic, I conducted class remotely, teaching by telescreen (Big Mother! I told my 1984 students). The class acted out Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 5 for the laptop camera – "thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged..." We waved goodbye as their last bell rang for English 10A.  Within this week, kids in almost all states and around the world are learning from home for the indefinite future. 

Sports, cancelled.  Top to bottom.  March sadness, Duncan calls it.  No baseball opening day.  No lacrosse.  No little league.  Theater of every kind, cancelled.  Our Shakespeare-in-the-schools program at Northern Stage, cancelled.  Perry and Richard's impossible dream turned out to be impossible.  Jarvis, what happened to Esai's Table in Brooklyn?  They must be heart-broken.  All of Broadway, dark.  The Jungle, dark.  Dartmouth, a ghost town, with a few stranded souls like Long living in the empty dorms.  Students won't be allowed back until summer at the soonest (with every passing day even that seems unlikely).  Film Festivals, cancelled or postponed, up to Tribeca and Cannes.  Museums, all closed. 

I can't imagine the stress and stir-craziness for families in apartments, with small children, with troubled family relationships.  I pray they're finding new levels of patience and generosity with each other.  I feel grateful and guilty for our fortunate circumstances.  Jordy got back from London a week ago last night (unimaginable)... His were the last meetings for most of the fund managers he saw (one of whom is running a fever and awaiting testing in Ireland as I write this).   The border closed behind him.   He re-integrated on Wednesday night after a five-day waiting period at Mom and Ken's house.  We've reorganized the house for study and work areas.  We're thankful for every bit of routine we'd established Before.  The boys created their own daily study schedules.  Jordy is maintaining his work calls with Australia as they try to fly through the financial hurricane.  (Jordy gets huge points for his apparent calm.)  I'm teaching full-on through Google.  Days are full and fluid too.  The puppies are appreciating the constant presence of the pack; they get three good walks a day now, with some very long hikes.  Wednesday after picking up Reeve and Tucker's learning packets at Plainfield Elementary, the boys and I took the puppies up to the Top of the World where the sun was blazing, Colleen had left journals and colored pencils, and Mt. Ascutney posed for its portrait.  We hiked the long way down, finding a half-frozen puddle that engaged curious boys and puppies.  We lost track of time.  It was glorious. 

We lost track of time...  I have to pause on that.  It points to something about all this that's gnawing at me.  The world tipped over.  Time has spun off its axis.  Some of the words I've tried to put to this.  I see the time basis, the timeframe, what's the right way to say it? for how we've lived as all out of synch.  Synch with what?  Synch implies coordination, agreement, or subservience to a collective time signature and meter.  (Synchronous or asynchronous learning?  Ay, that is the question.)  In a moment, the relativity of time was laid bare, our role in constructing it revealed.  We've been spinning too fast too long.  I described to Jordy my feeling of the world we've made, our way of life, as that Cornish Fair ride that spins so fast the floor can drop out from under you, the problem being you have to keep spinning not to fall and you want to vomit (but if you do, it'll hit your own face from the force).  You are also powerless to slow it down.  The Modern Thought & Literature geek in me knows the disjointed relationship to time Yeats, Faulker, Wittgenstein, and so many others sensed and tried to voice a century ago.  The widening gyre has been gyrating faster and wider for a hundred years.  People have been crying out in all kinds of ways to slow it down, make it stop.  Hippies, beatniks, religious freaks, home schoolers.  Labels of left vs. right (as if reality could be contained on such a simple linear continuum) distract from the commonality of their cry.  Life can be something more than this exhausting race without end or prize.  Life, the planet, is begging us to listen to a different rhythm.

Meanwhile, we became addicts.  Jordy and I started dismantling a couple of our trivial addictions.  McDonalds' french fries.  Diet Coke.  Beverages in plastic bottles.  Anything in plastic (impossible, trying to make a dent.)  Eventually alcohol.  Trying to kick the ultimate – carbon, with a solartracker and electric car.  Tug on one of those threads and a whole way of life starts to unravel, but also an emerging freedom, levity, relief.  I'm wondering how I got here from Covid... Right, because everything we thought mattered, convenience, entertainment, lifestyle, travel is in question.  Nature is taking back our cards and re-shuffling our priorities, dealing out new hands.  Everything about how we live is open to question.  "Necessary" and "essential" activities stamped "cancelled."  We're about to learn the difference between need and want (as my dad taught us in the family's dairying days).  Withdrawal is hell, typically.  I predict we will behave badly.  We feel entitled.  I keep thinking about my friends who survived sanctions, war and exile from Iraq.  A clarity of what to hold onto must come of having so little.  Family.  Education.  Human dignity.  We don't have bombs dropping and militias roaming the streets, but I fear what havoc fear itself with wreck.  We don't know how to survive deprivation (though we've inflicted it around the world).  I'm thinking about the conditioning of yearly Yom Kippur fasts.  The fear of hunger, the curve of resentment and the wandering mind, the bliss when the hunger passes and cease of striving, resting when a soft eternity takes hold.  I'm thinking about our fascination with wartime movies, the bare cupboards and nothing but the clothes on their backs.  The dignity of death when the soul hasn't capitulated to evil.  We've always known it's possible to be stripped down to nothing, and that the meaning of our lives might not even be revealed until that moment.  (I imagine in the depths of their souls, the legions of young men gaming online would rather be tested at real war than devolve into the overweight aggressive couch potatoes they've become.)  When this passes, we'll probably return to our old ways, but maybe we'll realize we can do without, that we can orient our lives to a greater good, and that there's strength and dignity in it.  Maybe the stiff-necked people can turn, just a little.

Some things will never be the same.  Education.  It's painful but can be transformative.  Yesterday's faculty meeting online revealed the wide spread of reactions.  The modern classroom is based on a mass-assembly model from the factory days that should be abandoned.  It was never natural, and it was designed to crush kids into conformity.  Why should kids be cut off so drastically from their families in order to "learn"?  Kids, like puppies, need their pack.  They learn from elders and siblings.  Why put them in age ghettos?  Monocultures of other seven-year olds?  Why take their bodies out of learning, sequester "physical education" to one period three times a week, then punish and medicate the kids who can't sit still in their chairs?  I'm exhausted by the whack-a-mole approach, pathologizing kids and turning to an infinite roster of experts, when healthier living and learning is available by simplifying and integrating kids into our adult worlds.  Such creative possibilities... Now that ALL teachers will know how to teach subjects remotely, brick-and-mortar schools could become community centers instead.  Kids could come for art, theater, sports, tutoring, rather than locked into the bell at 8am and held hostage for 7 rigid hours.  Senior citizens could use the building in the morning for breakfast, exercise and art, and lunch, served by kids!  Adults who five days ago couldn't imagine working from home AND having their kids home for a good bit of the day ("I'd lose my mind!") now know that they CAN, and that having lunch together is nice.  Equity is the issue.  Of course many kids have parents whose jobs have to be out of the home.  Digital access is very uneven.  Home learning conditions are bad for many.  But resources could be re-distributed to address those most in need.  Classrooms could exist as learning centers for kids of different levels and learning needs, rather than marching them through by age cohorts.  There is so much that excites me about how we can reimagine learning.

None of these discoveries could be happening without the massive alternative neural network known as the internet.  If virus is the metaphor and operating principle of the day, we are vulnerable in both body and network.  But the network is also resilient, like our bodies, and has given us new ways to connect, learn and work.  It's as if we've been building this thing for thirty years, and this week – THIS WEEK – we achieved lift off.  The hive mind is buzzing as every meeting we would have gotten in our cars to attend happens on Zoom.  The carbon output is dropping minute by minute.  What must the aliens looking down on us be thinking?  What the heck made them scurry for cover?  Or, what finally made them get their shit together and stop this colossal carbon burning catastrophe?  What if travel became rare and special again?  Instead of lamenting that I have to fly to Hong Kong again this weekend, what if we make meeting by Zoom normal, and travel be reserved for seeing loved ones?  Or for securing peace treaties?  This addiction is the hardest for me to break.  I dearly love to travel.  My wanderlust knows no bounds.  But what if instead of fast air travel, I made my way slowly, bike trips?  Road trips by EV with stopovers to charge?  Already I notice being grounded has made me sink deeper into where I am.  I've explored almost all the trails I can reach by foot with the puppies, with the thrill of getting lost in my own backyard.  And speaking of the backyard, we're thinking about getting sheep to mow it!  And to fill next winter's freezer with lamb instead of buying it from Australia. We're thinking differently about our garden.  All the movements are coalescing – the movement to renew local food systems.  The urgency of universal health care.  The imperative of equal digital access.  The climate change crisis.  We have a chance to find we actually do have the strengthen and creativity we need to change.  We have a chance to learn to love what's right in front of us anew.

I told Jordy yesterday I feel like Noah when the rain starts.  That sounds ridiculous and grandiose.  I'm not the only one.  Millions of Noahs have been feeling out of joint with time, with our culture.  We've been caught in a political centrifuge.  The center has not been holding, yet we've also sensed there is no center to "go back to."  We need a new center.  We've all been rowing our little boats fast and furious.  Parents committing ridiculous crimes to get their kids into schools to prepare them for...?  Lonely souls accumulating followers instead of finding a friend?  Consumers of media instead of readers of books?  Futures trading on an unregulated exchange.  Meanwhile, our little boats, luxury cruise ships, and titanic cargo ships alike were sailing into a global tsunami we didn't see coming.  We are all in it now.