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.