Dispatch from the physical distance

Physical distancing is most conspicuous in the cities. In such places, where space is a luxury, this pandemic confers a weirdness in the streets as everyone tucks away into their cubbyholes. For me, living in a semi-rural, small New Hampshire town, where physical and social distancing is a matter of cultural heritage and curmudgeonly pride, life on the streets feels almost normal. I go for my runs and encounter a person here or there, raking the yard, chainsawing big logs into littler logs; I exchange curt nods with occasional dog walkers or other runners, but mostly, I’m alone. Yankees of the countryside are accustomed to that, and for long stretches of my runs I forget there’s a pandemic at all, until there’s a little glitch in the matrix: a woman follows up a “Hi” with a “How are you?” and slows a bit, and looks like at me as if expecting an actual response. A middle-school aged girl out running with headphones stares into my face for several beats, as if starving for human countenances that are not her family’s. A man came to appraise our house for a loan re-fi, and he warily passed through the rooms, startled when any of us appeared. Flustered at these moments, I avoided both close approach, but also eye contact, partly out of lack of practice in interactions, but also momentarily confused about what forms of contact, what forms of intimacy, were no longer permissible. On the backroad that runs by the goat farm, there is a concrete lawn ornament of two children on a bench fishing, both with blue masks over their mouths and noses.

I read a lot of news, and most of it is from and about cities, of course, since that’s where most of the people are, and most of the death. People encouraging each other to join in the 7pm applause and cheering for the first responders, but where I live, the people are so sparse that you might as well scream into the void. There is the usual backyard gunfire at its usual sporadic intervals, signifying nothing, but not much else carries far enough for the neighbors to hear.

Mostly apocryphal stories circulating online purport to show wildlife returning to the empty city streets. Most biologists who study these creatures point out that these animals have been there all along, just no one was really paying attention. In our yard, I spend hours and hours raking and weeding and preparing for the growing season, and the animals I see are the usual ones. The deer that always brazenly eat the daylilies are doing so now. The robin that flails at his own reflection all day long in the basement window has us for an audience more of the day than usual, but is indifferent to everything but his rage and the need for food that pulls him away a few times an hour.

We are sheltering here to protect our physical bodies, and those of the rest of society. We are mitigating risk, and trading full sanity for bodily safety. It’s a fair and reasonable bargain, and my body ticks along as usual, carrying laundry, running, eating. My mind, on the other hand, is in a paradoxical retreat. Never much inclined to social interaction, it seems to want less and less of it now. The zoom meetings requested occasionally by students elicit dread for full days leading up to them. An email asking me to “please call at your earliest convenience” makes me want to crawl under a table. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to do strange things like watch my tomato seedlings. Their progress is imperceptible, of course, but I stare at them like you watch an infant sleep, mesmerized by the rhythm of the breathing, terrified that it might stop, believing in your magical thinking that by your vigilance you are keeping them alive. Sitting by a window, not able to answer emails, or look over student work, or do anything useful, I watch the sliding passage of the shadows my houseplants cast on the walls and floor for long stretches of lost time.

My son, my friends, send me funny or weird videos to watch, and even the fifteen or thirty second ones come tagged with “watch all the way to end,” and I scoff, thinking, “Who can’t manage to get through an eighteen second video?” and then find I can’t. My morning meditation feels pointless now, with the narrated prompts I mostly ignore as my mind twitches and jumps. He says to “visualize that tiny spark of light in the very center of you” and I cannot summon it, despite having done this a million times. I try again, but I cannot bring the spark to mind. I repeat and repeat, and the image that comes instead is of myself, crouched in the center of my chest, prodding a cold ash pile in the woodstove and looking over my shoulder at me, shrugging as if to say, “There’s nothing to be done.”

I have the capacity for focus, just not on anything I am supposed to be doing. Overcome with anxiety and inexplicable dread at the prospect of responding to work emails, I instead sat at my dining room table for two hours drawing an oyster toadfish’s every skin fold and wrinkle. I want to spend my time among the living, but only the kinds that are indifferent to this disaster. The ones that perhaps note, in passing, some perturbation in the human nations, but have other, pressing concerns.

On a run last week, I saw a heron at the edge of the swamp by my house. I stopped to watch it for who knows how long. It stood completely still for a while, minutes, hours, days. Then it moved away slow along the muddy edge, beaked as a plague doctor, as impassive.

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Doing laundry in a plague time

Idly watching the world joke and fight on the internet, as the schools closed, I saw factions form. Some hopeful people wrote about all the deferred work they would now have time for. Some people shot back that they should shut up about it because those of us with kids now had to try and work and also homeschool our children and the last thing any of those people are thinking about is increased personal productivity. As my own students in my college courses readied themselves to try to learn from me online, in the intellectual equivalent of a field hospital, I heard from them, again and again, the same things: that though they now had, ostensibly, so much more time and freedom, their focus was shot. They couldn’t seem to sustain attention for anything but the simplest tasks. I began to think that those of us pointing to homeschooling as the reason we couldn’t be productive at work might be missing the true cause, which runs deeper, which has nothing to do with whether you live with children or really anyone else at all, which is the tearing asunder of something we had not thought we could lose.

I can manage perhaps two hours a day of mental effort before I am forced to turn to mindless tasks. I have been working through our massive backlog of laundry. My husband and I have not been in to work in three weeks, but still, work clothes are working their way through the process. Dress pants and button-down shirts are being overtaken, in my folded piles, by our new daily wardrobes, the bagged out jeans and stained sweatshirts. Nothing is public facing anymore.

I am supposed to work, but my mind refuses to attach to anything that isn’t virus related. There is no news from elsewhere. In the paper, most everything is pandemic related, but whatever isn’t I skip over as if it were irresponsibly frivolous: political campaigns, terrorist attacks in East Africa, some form of peace making with the Taliban, all homogenizes into irrelevant patter. I want only the wailing of sirens, the beep of an EKG. My friend John died last week, but of an ordinary thing—a sudden heart attack. The news strikes me bodily, but then is subsumed by the flow of pandemic news. He died, but not of this, so there is not space or time for him.

I take in information ravenously, but find my thoughts growing rare. My mind is not quieting so much as receding from me. I have been looking at acoustic maps of the daily, vertical migrations of plankton in the oceans. At night, the undulant mass of them rises to the sea surface, and then is driven down again by the sun. I think of the Latin species name of the little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus, “the mouse-eared one who flees the light.” My thoughts and ideas flee from me. A dull lassitude has settled in my mind. A hooded darkness has muffled the world, wherever it is, outside my house, my yard, these three other people here with me.

I make video lectures for my students, and from my clothing, you’d think they were all from the same day. Same hoodie, same fleece jacket over it. Only the varying dishevelment of my hair and the type of light coming through the window hint at the passage of time. My attention is fractured, my focus lying in glacier-blue nuggets of glass all over the road after an accident has been otherwise cleared away. Words are growing inaccessible, and instead, I find myself drawing. Every day, I feel compelled to make a picture, the way I used to feel about writing before it began to slip away from me.

A little less than a week ago, I developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19. They have been mostly mild: a transient fever, fatigue, aches, a dry cough, shortness of breath. The line between somatic and psychosomatic blurred and then disappeared as I sat on the couch one evening, and began to feel desperate for air. I stood up, trembling, staring hard at my fingernail beds for any hint of cyanosis. Panic, the only perpetual motion machine, fed on itself, its symptoms the same as those of genuine dyspnea and deadly decline. My husband asked what to do, if he should call for help. I foresaw an oxygen mask, intubation, the frantic clawing of someone in respiratory distress. I forced myself to slow my breathing, terrified more of the hospital, the last place to be if you can possibly help it, where there are too many bodies, too few beds. I pulled air into my lungs and slowly stopped trembling. There’s nothing to do but ride it out at home anyway, and I’m alright. Just tightness in my lungs, and pausing at the top of the stairs with my hands on my knees, catching my breath.

My need for mindless occupation became clear when I had finished every last item of laundry in the house. Pulling the last, matted stratum of socks from the hamper, I said out loud, “Ah ha! I finally got to the bottom of all this!” and suddenly, viscerally, missed my students, their range of reactions to my poor puns and wordplay: the genuine laughers, the polite laughers, the eye rollers, the impassive-too-cool-ers. I won’t see them again. Some of them, ever, some not for months. In some ways, I am well suited to the isolation. Profoundly introverted, I am not suffering for lack of social interaction. I find myself needing to hide somewhere in the house away from my family just to be more fully alone sometimes. But I cannot pretend this is ordinary solitude, of the kind when I work at home, in the blissfully empty house, while everyone is at school or work but me. Torpor and dread coexist somehow, converging to annihilate my capacity to think. I can eat, drink hot drinks, dig and rake the yard until I wonder why I’m so tired and realize six straight hours have passed. I can keep in contact with a few friends, but the conversation is hard to sustain. We mostly send each other pandemic memes; the equivalent of sitting, unspeaking, on the same park bench, people watching the same people. We aren’t sure what day it is. I thought it felt like mourning, but we haven’t mourned, as the losses accumulate. We can only grieve. Mourning is a social act, public, externalized. It is grief brought to the surface. The grief is irretrievably sunken right now, far down deep in darkness while we all carry out whatever is supposed to happen today. Everything but what is strictly necessary has migrated far from us, has been made inaccessible, has been suspended, so deep that the acoustic map can’t tell the mass of it from the seafloor itself, just beneath. Sometime, we’ll have to begin dredging.

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On privilege

I ran track all through high school. I was a fairly talented sprinter, but feckless in training, and especially loath to do long conditioning runs, often sneaking off and hiding in the locker room until the rest of the team was almost done and then melting back into the crowd as if I’d been along with them the whole time. In spring, we were outside, but during the winter track season, all our training was done in the dirt-floored “cage,” an uninsulated brick building with a clouded glass roof. It’s since been demolished, though I have a little bottle of its dirt harvested before it made way for the brand new field house that stands in its place now.

The track in the cage was pitted and dusty, and the banked corners dim. We breathed a mix of fetid adolescent sweat and the dust kicked up by the long jumpers and the heels of everyone faster than we were as we circled and circled.

Sometimes, we would do exercises where we sprinted the fifty yard width of the place with a tire hooked to us via a rope attached to a leather belt. We dashed, giving it everything we had, and the extra weight was meant to build strength and refine our form, and it probably did those things, though what I remember was the noise of the skittering tires, and the bodily inertia of the first few strides as the weight sullenly dragged behind me, and my muscles strained to cover the short distance I’d normally sail over.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about what it means to say that someone has privilege. Brett Kavanaugh, the writers write, is the apotheosis of white male privilege, he is the word made flesh. And then other writers, and people I talked to, or people online, asked just what about being born white and male was so privileged? Poor white folks protested, “No one ever gave me anything. How’s that privilege?” and I thought about that, and it seemed to me that the error at the heart of all this lies in what we conjure when we conjure up privilege. Kavanaugh most certainly qualifies: rich, prep-school educated, close to power and the networks of plutocrats, he had given to him privileges that the vast majority of people don’t receive. “Privilege” has that air of excess about it, of access to frivolous resources, toys, experiences, that regular people don’t get. There’s loftiness to privilege, and if not unfairness, than at least inequality. Rich people are privileged. The rest of us are regular people, we figure, though the definition of who’s rich turns out to be surprisingly hard to pin down.

It’s no wonder then that the white folks I talk to, the white men especially, rail against the idea that they’re privileged, that they’re somehow the rulers of the whole world, gifted dominion over everyone else. And they’re right, at least in some cases; they aren’t rich, they don’t have access to powerful people, they’re just getting by. No silver spoon in their mouths. How can it be that they’re privileged?

So I started to think about those who lack what we call privilege, be it the white kind, or the male kind, or both. The things that white people are granted automatically are not riches, or political office, or a life of leisure. Men don’t universally get handed money, or a house, or a couple cars at birth. The birthright we mean by privilege isn’t an unfair birthright at all, in fact. It’s just that men, that white folks, are granted the basic human rights that everyone should be granted. Privilege, in this context, is not more than average, or wealth and luck beyond what’s typical. To have privilege, really, is to possess the full complement of human and civil rights we all should expect. It’s the expectation that what we have to say will be listened to and considered on its merits. It’s the expectation of bodily safety and autonomy. It’s the expectation that we will be judged on the content of our character, and not as a caricature of a race or a gender. It’s being able to have a bad day, or say something we regret, and have it judged as just a bad day, or a regrettable word, and not confirmation that, “just as we all suspected, she’s irrational,” or “there you go, I told you They were like that.”

White men don’t have more than they should, they have what we all should. They are free. The rest of us are bearing a weight. Some more than others, but we’re dragging something behind. We’re used to it by now, and sometimes we forget it’s there, except when we get a glimpse of what could be. When we find another one like us, or an ally from the outside who wants to listen to what we have to say and wonder what it would feel like. Then we remember our fetters. We remember all the things roped up to the belt, all the things we drag. Every catcall; every time the boss called us “honey” or “sweetie;” every street or parking lot we realized we couldn’t walk through, not with the light fading; every time we needed to “calm down” or “be less hysterical,” or maybe try again when we weren’t on the rag; every hair that rose on our necks as we triangulated the distance between us, and a man, and the door.

We used to do repeat after repeat of the tire drag sprints. Our lungs and legs would be burning as we ran and ran with that weight. You get used to it. You make accommodations, adjust your form, increase efficiency in the face of the extra burden. But it was the end of those workouts that I loved. After all those repeats, we were allowed one sprint with the tire unhooked. It was only our ordinary strength and speed we had back, but released from those bonds, God, how we could fly.

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Of mountains and migrants

Ask me what my favorite holiday is and I will tell you Independence Day. I don’t like cookouts, fireworks, or parades though, so my celebrations typically consist of walking myself to a contented exhaustion on public, federal lands, while contemplating John Adams. The Saturday before the 4th this year, I was driving when I saw, by the side of Route 125 in Barrington, New Hampshire, two people holding cardboard signs. At first, I thought they might be looking for money, but as I got closer, they didn’t look that part. They were representative of the average state demographic: white, over 60 years old. They were a man and a woman, he in jeans, collared shirt, and ball cap, she in a long skirt and long sleeved blouse. Stopped at the light, I read their simple signs. He held “Pity the poor immigrant” and she “Families Belong Together.” Neither of them waved to the passing cars, or had any facial expression. They stood side by side, quiet, gnarled, and knobby as two knuckles. As the light turned, I beeped my horn, and the woman raised her eyes, unsmiling, wondering, I think, if the person beeping was expressing support or opprobrium. I raised a thumbs up and she stoically returned the gesture.

I thought about them as I continued north, and about the marches going on all over the country as my playlist of songs went on, and then unexpectedly in the mix, was Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” My gut twisted up as these final lyrics landed:

Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest

I sometimes I think what an accident of birth it was that I was born American, and I suppose in one way it was, if you think souls wander the Earth and then settle into babies wherever the winds deposit them. But that’s not what I think. It wasn’t an accident that I was born here; I am the assembled traits of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic over a span of centuries. French-Canadians come down through Maine, Irish, Italians, and English, all bearing their parts of me. Some were driven by hunger, some by poverty, some comfortable at home, but suspecting even greater riches might await across the ocean.

When I was a kid, we studied local history in school. Growing up in Massachusetts, that meant Pilgrims, and Puritans, and the women from my county killed for witches, and the mills. We went on a field trip to a mill museum somewhere along the Merrimack River, with massive looms lining a cavernous brick space. My classmates jostled and joked and got the side eye from our teacher, but I was fixed to the spot, listening to the clamor and clatter of the machines, and becoming convinced that my ancestors had been mill girls in this exact room, with the sun coming in just this way through the windows, big to maximize light, and thus, work time. I held myself apart on that trip, thinking about the lives of those company girls, lives constrained, whatever ideas, thoughts, wishes they ever had lost to the past.

Ever since then, I have gotten swamped, from time to time, by thoughts of all the human enterprise, invention, intellect, and curiosity spent in liquid phase since there have been humans subjugating other humans–salt sweat watering tobacco fields, or sluiced away in gray washwater, spent in spit to moisten a thread, or the tip of a radium tainted paintbrush in a watch factory. Childhoods are liquid phase too, different from the adulthoods all around them, unpredictable, unfixed, special, like mercury, alone among the metals in being something other than a solid at room temperature, skittering in beads across the floor. All the public health experts I hear on the radio talk about kids being resilient, but with limits. Kids stressed too much for too long will suffer long term, often permanent, consequences. The kids separated from their parents at our border are some of these. The experts tell us that every day counts for these kids, before the harm becomes irreparable.

Every year, for the 4th of July, I read the Declaration of Independence. It strikes me differently each time, the high minded ideals, the weird list of grievances, the occasional whininess. This year, I came up short at this line,

“He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States, for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

Astonished to have never noticed it before, or to have forgotten it, I read it over again. Choking off the flow of immigrants takes its place as one of the usurpations of a tyrannical king alongside taxation without representation. There are dark elements to this without question: the colonies sought white Europeans to settle the frontier, drive out the savage natives. Twenty years after the Declaration, the higher ideals would warp and devolve into the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, among other things, made it harder for immigrants to become citizens, and allowed the President to deport non-citizens deemed dangerous–a nebulous prospect in any century. Still, from the outset the colonists knew their economic prosperity relied on a constant influx of immigrants.

Much of the time these days I cast around trying to think of what I can do. Reading an article about a young Salvadoran man making an illegal crossing into the United States at great risk and expense, I found myself wondering again about the waste of it all. The money, the lives, the quicksilver childhoods, the makeshift graves in the desert, a woman in an immigration court asked if she had any questions half whispering, “Only, when will I see my little girl again?”

The day before the 4th this year, I went hiking in the White Mountains. I chose a route up  to Middle and South Carter mountains. From the top, you can see across to the Presidential Range: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison wreathed in intermittent cloud.  It was an astonishingly humid day, with a risk of storms later in the afternoon, so I was up the trail early, but even so, the sky started to darken. Having already made the summits I’d aimed for, I hustled down into the trees, trying for safety in case the weather closed in. The views to the Presidentials occluded, clouds sailed up from the ravines and scraped their fog hulls on the ridgeline as they passed, wetting the summit rocks where I’d been.

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Dispatches from a purple state: ambulance driver, ambulance rider

Yesterday, I donated blood. The Red Cross has been hounding me for my precious Type O blood, and the phlebotomists scanned me, vampire-eyed, hoping I was big enough to make a double red cell donation. I am nowhere near big enough, so they settled me onto the stretcher for my plain old whole blood donation. Lying there, a healthy person being ministered to by kind people in scrubs, immobilized and hooked in to the spiraling tube running out of my arm, I considered that right then, I was indistinguishable from a sick person, from the people who will lie in a bed somewhere and receive my plasma, my platelets, my red cells.

When I was done with the donation, I got a $5 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card and a packet of Oreos. It got me thinking of what the real compensation is. Why I give at all. I looked at the sloshing pillow of my blood bag as it was packed away in a cooler, and thought of all the places it might end up. The system relies on that, on people like me thinking of the people who need the blood. The Red Cross puts out their stories and photos: billiard-ball headed children with leukemia grinning, showing their missing front teeth; police officers hit by cars while helping people on the side of the road. Simple stories with clear morals. But the fact is, my blood cells may end up in the vein of a drunk driver who plowed his truck into a crowd of school kids, or someone who blew up his kitchen cooking meth, or not in anyone’s vein at all, just thrown away, expired or contaminated.

Before the election, I had a feeling which way it would go. I heard enough from my Trump supporting neighbors to think he had a very real shot. I picked up a book called Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild at our library. It’s a sociological exploration of the worldview of conservative folks living down in Louisiana. The parallels are inexact, comparing them with New Hampshire conservatives, but there is a core there that I recognize. Toward the end of the book, Hochschild writes a parable that captures what she calls the “feels like” story of the American conservative. It’s the way they see the world, this country, not based so much on fact or evidence, but just on gut. The story is that we’re all standing in one enormous line waiting to get to the gates of the American dream. The line is slow moving, and the gates are far off, but we’re patient people. Rules-following people. Then, out of nowhere, after we’ve been in line for years, we catch sight of people coming up in our peripheral vision. They’re line cutters, and they slot themselves in, and we get pushed back. They’re black, they’re immigrants, they’re women, they have disabilities, or they’re gay. They’re getting college educations and jobs and buying houses and they didn’t have to wait like we did. It’s not that we hate them or want to hurt them, we just don’t think it’s fair that people who were lazy, or late-comers, or didn’t follow the rules, should get rewarded at our expense.

I hear a version of this around me all the time here in New Hampshire too. “I don’t have any problem with black people/immigrants/gay people/women. But their issues aren’t my concern. I just need a good job and I need to put food on the table. I can’t be worrying about these special interest groups.”

There’s no amount of facts, or evidence, or scientific study that can change people’s gut level feelings about the world. I can’t demonstrate with data that you aren’t standing in a line. That our democracy isn’t a deli counter. But if I can listen to the “feels-like” story of folks who see the world otherwise than I do, and try to understand it, then I also have an obligation to tell the feels-like story I have. Like all such tales, it’s part upbringing, part experience, part creation myth. Here goes.

We’re all traveling. We’ve got places to be. Some of us are headed off on vacation, some to work, some to school, all trying for the American dream. Some of us are riding in Audis, some in Suburbans, some in 1989 Toyota Corollas with two different colored doors, some of us on the bus. Some are on foot; can’t even afford a bike.  From far off, we all hear sirens. An ambulance and a fire truck come wailing up from behind. We all move aside. Even though we’re not arsonists, we didn’t set the fire, even though we didn’t hurt anyone, even though we’re late for work, late for another job interview, trying to get to a sick child, all trying to make it somewhere. We move aside because, though we can’t save those people ourselves, we also can’t get in the way of someone who can. We move aside because it’s only for a moment, and for all the shit that’s happening in our lives, someone else’s house is on fire. We’ll be back on the road soon enough. It doesn’t matter who’s getting loaded into that ambulance today, whether it’s a kid who got hit by a car, or an old woman who fell on her walk, or a feckless diabetic who refuses to take his meds or change his diet and is crashing again. We get out of the way, knowing that right now, someone else is in grave need, and any day, it could be our house on fire. Our kid bleeding.

The nations of the sick and the nations of the well are not separated by any great wall, or bleak no-man’s land. The blood donor and the recipient look the same until you get really close up. We rub up against each other all the time, and all our lives, we wend back and forth between the countries. We get sick, we get hurt, we get well, we heal, even if imperfectly. We care for our dying, then we die. Our willingness to make allowances for the sick, or the hurt, or the disabled counts on our knowledge that we may be in just their place soon, it counts on our ability to see that the sick, the hurt, the dying are not foreigners. It relies on our capacity for empathy. It hangs on our definitions of “us” and “them.” It is built on how we define “you people.” It relies on us learning that there is no line we’re in after all. That’s much too orderly. We’re all thronging around in a vast messy crowd. We’re all jostling, arguing, we’re all asking for a hand, offering a hand, offering a fist as circumstances demand. And the folks you thought were edging up on you and cutting the line? They’ve been waiting all along too. Only they were waiting in darkness, and you never saw them. And their houses were on fire.

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Trump and the beginner’s mind

 

Last week, I tallied up how much time I spend teaching, grading, or preparing to teach. It was a shocking amount, partly because the number of hours was so high, but also because it doesn’t feel like that much. I love my job teaching sciences at a community college, and, with the exception of grading, it never feels like work.

Most of my time as a teacher is spent asking questions rather than offering answers to them. Working my way through a stack of lab reports, I scrawl the same, “How do you know this?” or “Why would that be?” or “Is it?” across paper after paper. In class, it’s “Does that solve the problem?” and “Can you back that up with evidence?” and “Does your explanation make sense?”

“Would it?” “Is it?” “Why?” seem like more than half the words I utter in a day at work. Asking these questions is how I find out what my students know, but less in a sense of facts or terminology. It gets me to how they think, and I am often surprised. Things I take for granted, they often have never seen before. The assumptions they make, or the holes in their understanding astonish me sometimes, not because they are dumb, but because they are beginners. The farther you get from being a beginner, the easier it is to forget how you felt as one.

On Wednesday morning, I walked into class to silence. There was none of the usual chatter and joking. There was what appeared to be a pool of vomit outside the classroom that public safety was steering people around until it could be cleaned up. I teach in  Massachusetts, which had gone, predictably, deep blue for Clinton. Most of my students sat quiet and stunned, though not all. One confessed his fear about the future under Trump, and another snapped, “The country had already gone to shit. Get over it.”

I told them all I just wasn’t equipped to manage a room full of people yelling and talking over each other, so we shifted back to the science at hand, and I pretended to feel normal for them.

Most of the work day, I moved among disappointed Democratic voters. I work in a blue state, but I live in a red town in the purple state next door. In the aftermath of the election, I have seen reams of analysis pointing to the retreat of either side to their respective corners: conservatives to the rural counties; progressives to the big cities. The result is that most people can then live in a comfortable bubble where they only ever hear their own values echoed and reaffirmed to them. The “liberal elite,” they say, can’t hear the other side, marginalizes them, dismisses them all as racist and sexist xenophobes.

I grew up in Massachusetts, but the town I live in now in New Hampshire is Republican 2:1. I have been both within and without the blue bubble. I know what it’s like to be able to presume the political views of everyone around you and be just about right. I went to school out in Amherst, in the Happy Valley, a land of communes and radical vegan stores. There is a great deal of comfort in feeling you are understood–that other people looked over the whole messy situation and concluded the same as you have.

Now, where I live, I assume most of my neighbors disagree with my politics. Chatting with folks around town, I cautiously test, tap the conversation and listen for the solid and the hollow spots in it. There are some like-minded people here, and a lot of differently-minded people. I have opportunities to find out why, looking out over the same  country, we see such different things.

Since the election, I have heard plenty of things that disturb me. Students have said, “Who cares anyway? Politics doesn’t matter,” and “Whatever,” and “We just shouldn’t talk about politics. It’s too touchy.” I can’t abide by that, and I tell them so. Our founding fathers would be ashamed of us for that. I’ve heard idle and not so idle threats to move to Canada. I’ve heard people giving up. But worst of all, I’ve heard people on the winning side telling the other to “Get over it,” and “Stop whining.” People comparing the election to a football game where your side lost. Big deal. Move on with your life. I’ve seen people mocking those posting online how scared they are. I’ve seen eye-rolling.

I know a lot of good people who don’t vote the way I do. Who have genuine policy disagreements with me, but who are kind and generous. But I wept over these election results too, and felt waves of nausea, and above all, fear. I genuinely hope this new President does not follow through with what he said he would do all along. I hope he turns out to be a centrist, that he has inventive ideas that only a complete neophyte might have. I cannot root against the President of my own country. I have to hope for his success. I am approaching his Presidency with my beginner’s mind, asking questions whenever I can, rather than offering explanations or answers.

Red town, rainbow flag

Here’s my first: If you came across a stranger crying on the stoop outside your work, what do you do? Do you ask what’s wrong? Ignore him and shuffle past? And now, what if you came upon a friend sitting there crying? Or a co-worker. An acquaintance. I know it’s awkward to ask someone why he’s so upset. Easier to walk on by and figure he wants his privacy. But I struggle to believe you would push him aside with your foot and tell him to “Get over it,” without knowing what “it” is. Lost job? Cancer? Dog died? Mom died? Aren’t you at least curious?

I am really puzzled by why “get over it” has been the response of so many of the people I know who voted for Trump. When I have asked why they find it so easy to dismiss our concerns, I have gotten many variants of, “Oh, he’s not actually going to do any of those things he said.” Maybe he’s not, but all along, his supporters pointed to how he “Says what he means, and means what he says,” as a selling point. And we took him at his word. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought he was playacting and talking a big game about turning all the tables over and ransacking the place. I hope you’re right, but I fear you are not. And it’s fear, not hope, that keeps people up at night.

Maybe the difference is that, all along, conservatives have had no faith that government can do anything at all. Surely, the fecklessness of our Congress would give you cause. But if you want to know why progressives are clutching our guts and huddling together, it’s because we always have believed in the immense power of government to change people’s lives. What chance we ever had to put some drag on the climate change juggernaut, we see that slipping away. The hundreds of thousands of people, including military veterans, here under DACA who face Trump’s promise to start deporting them on day one, the fragile protections we have on abortion rights, and same sex marriage–these things are life-altering, some life shattering. So how is this “just like a football game that your team lost?”

I want to know more. I want to learn more about why my neighbors, and former students, and current students voted for Trump. It is not strictly necessary that you show any interest in my views in exchange, but it would help. I am reserving judgment on the new President’s actions until he’s actually made some. But I am not just sad because my team didn’t pull off the win and now it’s time to go home. I think about when we were kids, and my father used to say to us, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I’m not offering quid pro quo listening. I’m not saying you have to listen to me if you want me to listen to you. I want to understand how we got here.  I’ll go first. Tell me what you know.

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To my government after Umpqua

When I got word that a shooting had happened in the science building of a community college in Oregon, I was sitting in the science building of a community college in Massachusetts. In interviews, people always say, “I never thought it could happen here.” I have not labored under such a delusion for some time. It can happen in first grade classrooms, in movie theaters, at the mall, the post office; it would be a fantasy to think any of us are safe.

Safety, of course, is not, and should not be, the highest goal of society. I cannot, I know, have both perfect liberty and perfect safety, and they often vary inversely. I value my privacy and my liberty, and I will make certain concessions for them when it comes to security. But this government can no longer claim to offer us even a modicum of safety from gun massacres. If any one of us is not killed that way, it’s sheer luck and chance, not the reasoned and careful actions of our representatives, that kept it from happening.

At a vigil one night after the Oregon shooting, one speaker, alluding to the gunman, urged listeners to “never speak his name.” As if he’d been an act of God, a flood, or a tornado. As if we are powerless against the force of it. And yet, even hurricanes get names. And yet, when someone named Mohammed commits an act of violence, the name is all we can focus on, thinking that the name, in those cases, is the explanation. We let slip our confirmation bias: that Muslims are prone to this sort of thing, and when they do it, we are vindicated in our opinions. We have the reason. We have the solution you all seem to like best: more anti-terrorism theater.

What is your solution for me? My students talked about the shooting in class. One woman said, “It should be same as the street. If you know everyone got a gun, nobody going to fuck with anybody else.” Except they do, and they die. So if your solution is for me to carry in my classroom, I refuse. What else do you have?

In cases like Umpqua, the rote response is, “Mental illness, that’s the trouble here. It’s not the guns.” But if it is mental illness, then where is your clamor to fix that? Where is the uprising to pass legislation making sure everyone with a mental health issue is found and can get the help he needs? People who commit suicide are mentally ill or unstable in some way too. The depression that leads a person to attempt suicide is a deep, deep one, but we know guns are the trouble too. Suicide attempts with guns are fatal 85% of the time. Suffocation is fatal 69% of the time, and all the other means, including jumping off bridges, fail to even break the 50% mark. The mental illness matters, but the means matters too. The difference between 69% and 85% is a lot of lives saved, and a lot of time won to try to get better. I’m weary of hearing the equivalent of “stuff happens.” You say it’s all mental illness? Mental illness is not intractable, but you same lawmakers who refuse to move on guns also fail to get Americans the mental health care they need. If you showed such paralyzing cowardice in any other line of work where lives are at stake, you would be out of a job. An ER doctor, a nurse, a police officer, or firefighter who locks up in the face of a crisis is a failure and a liability. What about you? How much “stuff” has to happen before it seems worth changing to you?

We have new locks on the doors in our science building. They were installed last year as a defense against an active shooter. For several weeks, we all repeatedly and accidentally locked ourselves in or out of classrooms. We have the routine down now though. When the lock is set, a small red display is visible from outside the room reading “SECURE.” When the door is unlocked, it reads, in green, “UNSECURE.” I still have a mental hitch when I see this. Green means go, green means ok, green means open, green means good. But the word on the door is “unsecure.” Green means complete liberty, and no security. Red, the stop sign, the halt, the “do not pass,” that is security. I teach at a community college, and these are congenitally open places. Everyone can study here. Everyone can walk into my classroom or my office and talk science, or life, or jobs, or family. I can’t wall them off. I can’t hide in my office and slip the bolt to secure. I wouldn’t even if I could. Some of you think that we, the students and faculty, should do a better job of rushing and tackling the shooter. It’s moot, what happens when he is already in the room; my security should not be defined at that doorway. You need to define it where you are, with all the powers vested in you.

I cannot fathom what you are waiting for. This is our own twisted version of Niemoeller’s poem: “First they came for the moviegoers…the grocery shoppers…the first graders…” And yet still, you do not speak up. What are you waiting for? Can you still not see yourselves, your children and grandchildren in these dead? Is it only when they come for the lobbyists, the corporations that will rouse yourselves? My weapons are poor, and not at all lethal. They are only my words. But we will come for you with these weapons. Now, tell me, how are you going to defend yourself?

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We weigh their lives too lightly

Since the grand jury in the Michael Brown killing elected not to indict the officer who shot him, I’ve tried to think of what I might write here that hasn’t been said already, and said better.

This morning, my seven year old son and I ran a 5K race in Andover, MA. A throng of more than 9,000 runners, walkers, stroller pushing parents, and dogs wearing race tshirts packed into Shawsheen Square for the start. The police had blocked off the race route itself to traffic, but parking is always tight in a charming New England town, and cars were lining the streets for two miles out from the starting line. It snowed yesterday, but the DPW had worked hard to clear all the sidewalks. Despite that, hundreds of runners were walking in the streets, already narrowed by the cars on either side. Some were oblivious, texting or talking and jostling. Drivers laid on their horns and yelled profanities, and some of the more belligerent runners called back. Runners and drivers are often at odds, and on race days, the runners often feel some kind of safety in numbers, or a protection conferred by the official nature of the event. I watched runners stride along the median line flipping off drivers lined up behind them. Not everyone was engaged in this behavior of course, but the fact is, sidewalks were cleared and available, and a great many people chose to walk in the middle of the road instead, blocking traffic.

It got me thinking about Michael Brown. In the months since he was shot, there have been so many protests in the streets in Ferguson that I realized my mind had somehow cycled backward in thinking about the day he was killed in August. I had begun to picture the protests in the street, and Michael Brown as part of them, and the officer pulling up into this tense and charged situation already primed. But that’s impossible. Michael Brown was not killed in a protest over Michael Brown’s death. He was killed because he was walking down the middle of a street with a friend, and when the cop pulled up, things escalated.

I’ve read over and over the news reports and the testimony to the grand jury, and I keep thinking the next time I read it, I will see clearly what happened. Whether what this officer claims is entirely true, I don’t know. Whether Brown punched him repeatedly in the head, whether he was charging at him or surrendering to him, I don’t know exactly. But what keeps nagging at me is how it ever got to that point. Walking down the streets in Andover, Massachusetts, the crowd, like most road races, mostly white, the houses beautiful and their gardens too, there were people walking down the middle of the street obstructing traffic.  Blonde girls, little kids, teenage boys from Andover’s crew team. Imagining the police pulling up and asking them to get out of the street, it’s nearly impossible for me to picture a scenario where that all ends in a teenager’s body left in the street for hours. I’ve seen teenagers mouth off at the cops, I’ve seen teenagers tussle with the cops, swing at the cops, run from the cops screaming profanity. These are not smart things to do, and I’d tell my own kids not to behave that way because it’s rude and I don’t want them to get arrested. But not because I’m afraid they’ll get shot.
What a whole lot of us have taken away from this killing and the aftermath is that black lives don’t seem to matter like white lives do. That black boys are not seen the same way as white boys. If a white boy in Andover lay dead in the street after a cop shot him in the head, I don’t believe there is any possibility on Earth that that cop would escape indictment. Perhaps you do. If you really see no difference in how all this would go down in a town like Andover and a town like Ferguson, for a white boy, or for a black boy, then you probably aren’t racist, but you are profoundly naive. Since Michael Brown’s death, the world has gone on, and teenagers have died in all manner of tragedies. Not only black ones of course. A 16 year old boy fell asleep driving his family to Disney and when the SUV rolled over, five of them were killed, though he, the driver, buckled in, lived. Comments on that news story condemned the family for letting him drive, his parents for not buckling up themselves or belting in their kids, but few blamed the boy. He fell asleep, and now his family is dead.  Sixteen year olds make mistakes, and adults are supposed to try to keep them safe.

Twelve year old Tamir Rice was carrying a pellet gun in a Cleveland park. Dispatch received a call reporting it, and the caller said, “It’s probably fake. He’s probably a juvenile, you know?” Police pulled up to the park and one of them jumped out and shot the boy as the car was still coming to a stop. Not even time for him to raise his hands. There were long comment threads on that story’s coverage saying, “That was so stupid. That kid should’ve known.” and “What did he expect, waving that thing around?” It’s these comments that chill me. A twelve year old boy, a sixteen year old boy, or an eighteen year old all do stupid things all the time. It comes with the territory. But we have a different set of consequences for those boys dependent on their color. White kids can be stupid, or be jerks, or do dangerous things and we don’t teach them growing up that the police might shoot them for it. Black boys have to be taught that. For them, being stupid, or being a jerk, they have to be taught, is very possibly a capital offense.

I know cops have to make split second judgments all the time about threats, real and perceived. I also know about how frightening it is to feel boxed in by someone. I’m a 5’1″ woman. I am outmatched physically all day, every day. I have been alone in isolated places with people I did not trust and whose behavior stood the hair up on my neck. The decision to run? To walk by and smile, hoping to defuse? To scream? Change my path abruptly, or try to look casual about it? It all has to be done in a moment. But this officer had choice after choice to make, and every time, he turned away from Michael Brown’s humanity. What grips at my heart is that black boys and brown boys coming up have to be told that the world will come into interactions with them assuming they are dangerous. “He was like a demon,” “an animal,” “a savage,” it’s hard to tell which testimony in these cases is from 2014 and which from 1863. And given that, it’s hard to believe in the progress we all want to think we’ve made.

I walked down the sidewalk with my son to the starting line and tried to give the traffic the right of the way to which they were entitled. But as he grows up, and makes his choices, and elects, sometimes, to do stupid things, or mouth off, I know that I don’t have to have that talk with him–teaching him to be obsequious, to make friendly eye contact, but not too much, with the clerk when going into a store, not to pull up his hoodie even if it’s cold that night. As I listened to the national anthem at the start of today’s race, I looked down at my son, who will grow up as a white man, free to walk down the middle of the street and be a jerk if he likes. I love this country, and I love its promise, and its aspiration. But we must ever look to become a more perfect nation, and in this respect, in what we tell our black and brown boys, we fall far, far short. Michael Brown’s mother lost her son. And if she had any faith that this country weighs his life the same as my son’s, it must be entirely gone now. This is not her fight, or not hers alone. It’s not only mothers and fathers, it’s a quintessentially American fight. We are an optimistic people, and I would never drive that out of us. But our optimism must not take the form of rosy naiveté. It must take the form of determination that we can right these wrongs. I don’t know how to do it, but I’m certain that bowing our heads and lowering our eyes and stepping out of the streets and back onto the sidewalk is not how we’ve ever fixed anything in this country before.

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Observing the fast

Last week, a Jewish fast day, 17th of Tammuz, coincided with a day of Ramadan. Several groups got it in mind to take advantage of this and make the day one of mutual consideration and solidarity between Jews and Muslims in light of the cascade of horrors going on in Israel. Some of the groups called it simply a fast day, and others called it a hunger strike. Reading about it, I got hung up on this difference as I considered joining a friend for the event. If a fast day, then its purpose would be more inward looking, meditative. If a hunger strike, then a public performance designed to draw attention. It was muddy from the start. My Muslim friends and colleagues were fasting anyway, but none of my Jewish friends normally observe this particular day. And as for me, a secular humanist of Christian cultural heritage and a non-believer all around, what was I doing here? If I fasted for a day, what would I accomplish? Was this self-deprivation as self-indulgence? Finally, I decided, why not try it? I wouldn’t die, and I might learn something. Besides, although my readership is small, I think of myself as a writer, and this is an experience I might approach with journalistic interest. So here we are.

On the day itself, I had failed to utilize the strategy of waking up before dawn for a meal, so when I woke up on July 15th, I already hadn’t eaten in ten hours. It doesn’t take long for the brain to get clouded. On the way to the boys’ swim lessons, Simon asked if he could go to the playground. “Yes,” I told him, “You can play for a couple…” what? what kind of units is it? Days? Hours? No, minutes. Minutes is right.

Once you are hungry, it doesn’t so much progress throughout the day. The stomach goes through its usual cyclical processes, churning on nothing, informing the brain of this, and then comes a combined wave of nausea and longing for food. You chew your thumb and notice your eyeballs are sluggish in their sockets and having trouble tracking people’s movements. Then it passes and the sensation of hunger abates, and you feel almost as if you’ve mastered it. When it rushes back, you realize, you’re not the one in control.

As I passed through these repetitive phases, it became clear to me how like grief hunger is. At full force, it makes me distracted, panicky. I can’t focus on anything. I want very badly to eat, decide that I will, and remember all over again that I can’t. The times when the hunger comes as a persistent knocking, nausea, a flood of saliva. Trying to speak to normal people who have eaten lunch and a snack feels like a performance. I am not quite following what this woman is saying to me. I lost the thread and now am trying to guess the right reaction. Am I raising my eyebrows the right amount? Is this the right thing to do with my face? When I speak, my fluency is degraded, and I cast around for words.

While my husband and sons ate supper, I stayed upstairs, distracted by even the clink of a fork against a bowl. I tried to read, went online, made the profound error of looking at a food blog. After I read to the boys and put them to bed, I still had half an hour or so before sundown. Watching TV and knitting were not sufficient to the purpose. Several times a minute I looked at the clock. I got up, and went to watch night fall. A storm had been through and the street was still steaming. The maples were bowed in dripping canopies. When the wood thrushes and veerys had begun singing forty minutes before, it had been a torment, knowing how close I was, but not quite there yet. At this time of year, in these latitudes, it does not get dark until long after sunset, but the light does shift in the long gloaming. I watched things grow granular and the light diffuse. By now, I could eat again.

A few days after the fast, I was packing for a family camping trip. On my computer, I had up several tabs. Between “Pillsbury State Park” and “Recipes: Kale Chips” was the tab reading “Through Lens, 4 Boys Dead by Gaza Shore.” I left the tab up all day, opening it from time to time and looking at the picture of a dead boy on the sand, ashen skin, legs twisted up under him, the soles of his bare feet visible at grotesque angles. What had the fasting day done for these boys? Nothing. And for me? Over the course of that day, how many times had I thought of the mothers putting their children in the ground, and far worse, the aftermath? How many times would I have thought of them otherwise, had the hunger not been coming and going in its fierce waves?

In the end, I fasted for the same reason people travel, or walk the length of the Appalachian Trail, or read. To be out of one’s own head for a time. To learn something about a culture that isn’t yours. To find out what you find out. I realized I’d been being quiet about what happens in Gaza because I’d believed what people had said to me–“You can’t understand. You’re not a Jew. You can’t understand, you don’t live there. You have no idea. You don’t understand.” I admit to not fully understanding all the nuances of what is happening there. But there is not a lot of nuance to dead children. If there are severely disabled adults dead under a pile of rubble that used to be their home, if there are four boys lying dead on a beach in t-shirts and swim trunks, something is terribly wrong. I am not naive and I understand about Hamas, and terrorism, but this is too great a price. I am not a Jew and I am not a Muslim, but I am a mother, and that is my proper tribe. If anyone tries to pat me on the head and tell me I don’t understand about Israel again, I will not quiet down and concede the point. I am learning the history, learning the nuances, learning the names of the players and the geography. It’s not an easy task, but it is far easier than learning how to reclassify enemies as fellow humans. Unless that is done, I fear for Israel, for Gaza, and for all those living with their anxious guts clenched every day as they do what I am doing–plan a summer holiday, make snacks for the trip, look again at the crumpled bodies.

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Snowy owls and the social order of chickens

This can seem a quiet time for bird watching. Winter is, literally, quiet; there’s no dawn chorus of songbirds trilling for mates, no high pitched begging by disheveled fledglings of haggard looking adults. But winter does bring certain rewards, and this year, it’s partly in the form of an incursion of Snowy Owls from the north. There are so many of the birds that a trip to the New England coast is almost guaranteed to generate a sighting. Sure enough, when Malcolm and I went to Salisbury Beach last week, we spotted two of them. The first was hunkered down on a rock at the water’s edge. After half an hour, it took off, swept low over the sand and landed on a jetty 200 yards off. There is stayed for the rest of our walk. There were two photographers trailing the bird, both with expensive looking cameras on tripods and telephoto zoom. They followed it to the jetty and set up next to each other, their cameras trained on the bird from the best angle like twin cannons.

The photographers watch their quarry.

Owls, being predators, don’t do a whole lot most of the time, and sure enough, the bird sat atop the jetty staring out over the water. Occasionally, it would swivel its head and cast its dire gaze toward the photographers. At those moments, there would be flurry of audible shutter clicking, and then, when the bird looked away again, silence. I was, like many bird watchers, delighted to see this bird; it’s the first time I’ve ever seen this species. I felt compelled to stand and watch it for a while with my binoculars, though it barely moved. I found myself stealing glances at the sea ducks off to the left. Diving mergansers, Gadwall awkwardly picking over the rocks, and a Common Goldeneye struggling to choke down a whole sea urchin. This eye-watering feat took several minutes to accomplish, and when it was over, I looked back at the owl, feeling somehow guilty at not wanting to watch it much more.

Returning home, I checked in on our flock of chickens. They’re in close quarters these days, unwilling as they are to walk in the snow, and we introduced a new hen recently, who had worn out her welcome at my father’s coop for criminal behavior. On placing her in my coop, she underwent what resembled nothing so much as a gang’s ritual jumping in. Before her feet even touched the floor, the knives were out. The older hens in my flock started posturing, wings down, necks stretched up high and feathers flaring around their heads. The new girl made some nearly imperceptible movement and the old girls were suddenly leaping at her, jumping in the air and driving their feet at her eyes. She attempted to fight at first, but quickly realized she had no chance, as three birds pecked her comb bloody and gouged at her back. She tried hiding under the waterer, the feed bin, and in an old bucket they sometimes use as a provisional nest box. Everywhere she went they waited for her, and if any part became accessible, they launched an attack. Two or three girls whose social positions are somewhere in mid-flock hurriedly excused themselves and fled to the outside pen to wait it out. A perch was knocked awry, feed was spilling everywhere, and a clod of dried manure flew at me, striking my neck and slipping down inside my shirt. By the time the fracas eased, the new hen was cowering, flat to the floor, her face pressed into a corner of the coop, her breathing just barely perceptible.

Two degrees out. Negotiated peace and the queue for the morning’s warm water.

Now, several days later, things have settled down, and everyone is settled onto a rung of the social ladder. Though their methods of enforcement are brutal, there’s something recognizable in chickens for this. It reminds me of a high school cafeteria, with its sharp demarcations between tables of jocks, drama geeks, beautiful people, the untouchable castes. There may be no overt violence, but there is a humming current of tension, of lines constantly being drawn and redrawn, tested and reinforced. Watching the chickens is like that. A subtle tap on the head to remind a subordinate that it’s not her turn to eat yet, or the nightly scrum for the warmest position on the roost, the omega always on the outside, one half of her body exposed to the cracking cold.

Though there is little more quotidian than chickens, there is something compelling about watching them. And while the owl was stunningly beautiful, it was also boring in its way. We are social animals ourselves, and concern ourselves almost constantly with the social strivings and failings and negotiations of other humans. What wonder, then, that I find little affinity with a stunning and solitary predator as it sits, alone on a rock, surveying the sea? A beautiful and a rare thing, but with no use for our sorts of social anxieties or aspirations, because it has no use for society.

Though they be humble, there will always be something compelling about chickens. I can admire a lone owl on the windswept beach, but I can see myself in the chickens, strutting, or creeping, alpha or omega, uneasy truces and manure flinging battles, and hopefully, at day’s end, a simultaneous, sometimes companionable rustling of feathers on feathers as we hunker down against the cold.

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