Tag Archives: covid19

A Sinister Blur

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A few weeks ago, a 5-year-old child brought a loaded handgun to school to show to his friends. It was loaded with 14 bullets. It never made it out of his backpack; no one save his teachers saw the gun. Thankfully, children talk and a little boy came up to a teacher on the playground and shared what his friend had told him about bringing a gun to school. The teachers sprang into action. The gun was removed from campus within 30 minutes.

That day is burned into my memory as a sinister blur; it is much more a memory of feelings than of actual events. I was tasked with staying with the little boy who brought the gun and keeping him calm. I had to interview him about the gun and why he brought it, and where he had found it in his parents’ house. This interview process was the hardest, lowest, worst experience of all of my 17 years of being an educator. The feeling of that day is akin to the feeling I felt the night that my father died: I was falling into a bottomless dark space, somewhere I didn’t know, and didn’t understand. He described it as “Batman” at first and then acknowledged that he knew it was also called a gun. He told us he played video games with his dad that were “shoot me games” and that his dad had many guns, even “big ones” all in the same spot in his bedroom. He took the gun when it was still dark outside and his dad didn’t know that his little boy slipped into his room, opened the unlocked cabinet, took a gun, and put it in his superhero backpack, under his lunchbox.

It has taken me a long time to begin to write about this new job. I am not sure where to write about it, or how. I am sure that I am not supposed to write this story here, but I am filled with the fear that schools are not acknowledging the scope of the gun problem. Gun incidents are still being regarded as isolated moments in time, rather than a web of overlapping misunderstandings that lead to injury and sometimes death. There is no conversation about how gun possession, gun safety, and gun violence are family and community issues that require discussion and listening, and acceptance that there is one thing that we all can agree on, which is: guns don’t belong in schools.

My new job as an assistant principal in an elementary school in a small but rapidly growing town is incredibly hard for so many reasons. I expected it to be stressful; there was no way this transition wasn’t going to be hard because I am learning a whole new aspect of the school system, but I am surprised at how limited the tools the schools have to respond to behavioral and mental health challenges are. To me, it seems that either you behave and you are normal, or you go to the counselor for 20 minutes and then go to class, or you go to ISS, or you are suspended. We can’t suspend children younger than 3rd grade. That is it.

Feels limited and limiting, doesn’t it? In this current mental health crisis that we are in, we have 2 counselors for 750 students. We have 1 district social worker for 7 campuses. We have almost 1000 new students that our district has gained since the beginning of the year when demographers thought we would have 250. So many of those new students are exhibiting signs of stress, anxiety, depression, violent tendencies, failure to adapt, learning disabilites, and lack of motivation.

In this ocean of limited resources and so many high needs, it feels overwhelming. Sometimes I get incredibly sad. Sometimes I feel that I can’t do the work and I need to quit like my principal did two weeks ago. I think I will make it, but I do wonder how effective I will feel in another few weeks. It seems like I am getting very little sleep because I wake up worrying almost every night. I feel that my school district-level directors and assistant superintendents don’t know what to do, and even though I can accept that, I feel angry about it.

Who does know what to do? Where are those people? Are they out there?

Time Traveling

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It all started with Mr. Yousef on Thursday.

Or perhaps, it had been percolating for a few weeks, and Mr. Yousef crystallized it in my Principal’s office, on that Thursday.

I sat at the conference table with him, talking about attendance and truancy and COVID, and I realized how many years I have been serving students in schools like my current one. I thought, in an instant, about how confusing and terrifying being new can be: you have no idea what the schools really do, or what they are like, or how the beauty at the core of them, the children, MUST be our core commitment, despite all the pitfalls and policy changes.

The thoughts led me back to Gus Garcia Middle School, in the fall of 2007: 15 years ago.

Gus Garcia has been popping up lately as it has come to my attention that a large number of those of us who taught there and who opened that school are now administrators in Austin ISD and Elgin ISD. It is definitely true that the difficult experiences at Garcia led us to leadership.

Let’s do a roll call….Dr. Melvin Bedford, once AP, is now Principal at Austin High School. Chara Harris, once a math teacher, is now Principal of Murchison Middle School. Brandy Gratten, once an English teacher, is the Principal of Martin Middle School. Ben McCormack, once an English teacher, is the Principal of St Elmo Elementary. De’Sean Roby, once Instructional Coach, is Principal of Bertha Sadler Means Middle School. Tasha Bedford, once an English teacher, is Assistant Principal of Bertha Sadler Means Middle School. Kalandra Williams, once a math teacher, is Assistant Principal of Neidig Elementary School. And me, Patience Blythe, once a science teacher, is Assistant Principal of Booker T Washington Elementary School.

As I sat in that room with Mr. Yousef, talking about attendance policy and telling him that I am known for being very, very, very aware of student attendance, I thought about those years, and why so many of us became administrators.

For many years, I have shied away from writing about the experiences I had at Gus Garcia. My issues with understanding life-work balance while working there were definitely contributing factors to my divorce in 2009. although I do believe that our marriage wouldn’t have worked no matter where either of us was working. I have shied away from it because the experiences were so intense, and so of their moment. We went through the financial crisis at that school and the election of Barack Obama; these events fundamentally changed public schools. They perhaps felt too close for real examination; I also didn’t want to upset anyone in the retelling.

But here we are, 15 years later, and schools have changed so much. In many ways they are better, and yet, the results for poor children remain the same. I wonder why that is. I have some ideas, which I will share here as the year progresses. This is my first year as an Assistant Principal, and my mentor has asked me to remember to write about it. I will.

But to go back to that meeting on Thursday afternoon with Mr. Yousef; it was one of those meetings that sends you back in time, and through time, and provides you a deep reflection on the present: that everything you have done has brought you to that exact moment in time. At that moment, we talked about truancy and withdrawing students, and I sat in that beautiful office, in that school building, and again realized that I am so lucky to have so many years of experience with which to refer.

On the day before, I was in a training for SAMA, which for those of you who are not in schools or institutional settings, is a practice of de-escalating crises that works very well. I mentioned to Wednesday’s instructor that, at Garcia, all of the teachers were trained in SAMA due to the level of need at that campus.

In other words, all roads in my mind are leading to Garcia at this moment.

It is time.

When I returned to Austin ISD in 2015 after a four-year absence, the gentleman looking at my paperwork said, “Oh. You were at Garcia. There were a lot of problems there.” I said, “Yes, there were. Whose fault do you think that was?”

Let’s dive in.

Garcia Middle School was built up on a hill, in East Austin, on the east side of 183 off Loyola Lane. It is a beautiful building that looks like a community college. The first time I went into the building, it was just a shell, and we wandered through it being told where this would be, and that. We had planning meetings in the construction trailer out front. Most of the staff had come over from Porter Middle School, which had recently been closed in South Austin.

When the school opened, it was beautiful. Huge windows let the light shine in on the east and west side. Each grade level section was painted a different color: orange, blue, and yellow. Each classroom had a plasma screen television (these were the days before Promethean boards). Each area had its own workroom with its own copier and its own computer lab (these were also the days before Chromebooks). There was a patio off the cafeteria that was planted with native plants. I was the most experienced science teacher with one year of teaching experience.

When I think about Garcia, I don’t want to enumerate its flaws and faults or describe all the things that went wrong there. To me, there is little point in dwelling on those things, and I don’t want people to feel I am pointing fingers or blaming anyone for what happened. I find it comforting and inspiring that so many of us who were young teachers there are now administrators at high-needs campuses in this area; this shows that we all learned a lot in those years, and decided to take a path that would make sure the things that happened at Garcia would never happen again under our watch.

But despite the desire to not talk about the problems, the formative aspects of my three years at Garcia keep popping up. Why is that? Is it because my time at Garcia was my first experience of true leadership? Conversely, my first experience at understanding what lack of leadership can do? Perhaps.

At Garcia, we went through three principals in one year. The first one left us in December. Before she left, she held an assembly in the gym and yelled at everyone in a voice I will never forget: it was a voice of desperation, sadness, defeat, and acknowledgment that what she had done had not worked. She was replaced by an amazing changemaker who came into that school with his giant gold rings, announcements on the PA, reward systems for students and teachers, and songs in the cafeteria. He changed everything in mere weeks. The third was a principal that no one liked; she divided the cliques and friend groups. She was challenging. She broke the staff apart to rebuild it. She was the only person in my three years there who could get the students to listen to her and only her simply by asking. She could talk to them. When I decided to leave, she asked me, “So….how is Bedichek Middle School?”. I told her that I had to learn how to teach; that all I knew was how to control classes but I needed to learn the other aspects of teaching. She and other administrators there told me that there are kids who need help everywhere. They were, of course, right.

One of my takeaways from being in Title 1 public schools for so long is that people with years of experience have opinions and observations that are priceless; they are diamonds. You may not agree with everything, but there is a truth that resonates and is useful to apply to your own situation. Ultimately, experience gives us perspective so that when big changes occur, like what is happening now, we remember and know that we will make it through this, too. Younger teachers don’t know this. I didn’t know this back in 2007 at Garcia Middle School.

I had two rooms at Garcia: first one without a window, and later, one with two gorgeous windows on the second floor that I often opened each morning because the fog would roll into the classroom and I loved it. It was a very foggy place; a hilltop that was covered in cloud in the early mornings and backed up to a greenbelt that was never named as such due to where it was in the city. In the back of the room, I had a coffee maker that some other teachers used. When I wasn’t at school, which was rare, students would open the windows and throw textbooks onto the roof of the first floor.

During transitions, why do we drift backward into memory? Does it ground us somehow? Remind us that if we survived then, we will survive now? Do the memories help us interpret the realities of this moment? It is hard to say.

I don’t know what stories from Garcia will pop up here. Will it be the time we made cricket houses in the science elective and I didn’t realize that crickets eat cardboard and all the crickets escaped to be found by the custodians? Will it be how the 8th graders self-segregated in class every time you turned your back on them? Will it be the city gang truce meeting in the library? Will it be the time that student brought a giant knife in a Jordans box to kill me? Will it be the time the two boys got in a fight and one shot the other one in the face (both survived)? Will it be how the kids stashed drugs in the upstairs 7th-grade boys’ bathroom ceiling tiles and sold them at lunch? Will it be the time I was observed by the district and a boy was walking across the tops of lab tables while another was hiding in a cabinet, and others were making and sending darts into the ceiling tiles and yet, I still received a positive evaluation? Will it be the time that I wrote a blog post about advisory that somehow was picked up by a national publication and ended up on the front page of the Austin American Statesman? Or will it be completely different memories? We shall see.

If I could share one truth about serving students in Title 1 schools with anyone who would listen at this exact moment in time, it would be this; if you are not in the schools, you have no idea what happens within them, and you do not understand their importance. The importance of the schools is critical; it is key to the future of the country as a whole. The more they get broken down, under-funded, criticized, or have unfunded mandates applied to them (I am looking at you, HB 4545), the impacts on the children and adults in the schools are massive.

I remember when President Obama was elected, when Dr. Helen Johnson became principal, when TEA came in to audit our campus, and we began to talk about this new test called STAAR. It all happened there, at that campus. So many things happened there, and I can remember so many of them vividly; they were that intense and meaningful.

At that school, I wore striped knee socks every day; I had probably 10 or so pairs. The students asked me why I wore them every day, and I told them it was because I had prison tattoos on my legs and I couldn’t show them. Would I say this today? Definitely not. But the kids loved it and thought it was hilarious. They called me “Colorful” there, not Ms. Blythe, and never once questioned how someone who had been in prison could be their teacher, let alone this tall, weird, white lady. In fact, those students *insisted* that I was not white. At the time, I didn’t understand what they meant.

What is happening in the schools this year is heartbreaking: how can there be so many openings? One of the biggest things I learned at Garcia is how I cannot solve the world’s problems; I can only hope to influence a small group of people in front of me. I learned about the importance of the students in my care, and the teachers that I could help. As our year begins, my current campus has the lowest turnover rate in our district and only has one open position. That tells me a lot about our school. That tells me we can grow; we have a whole crew of caring people who chose to stay after the hardest year I have ever experienced as a public school educator.

I wish I could take you all, the general public, the Texas state legislature, the US Congress and Senate, and bring you into the schools. You would see the needs; you would meet the students and you would see how much they need access to a high-quality education delivered by caring adults. School is another form of nutrition; anyone who tells you it isn’t critical to every child has some hidden agenda that I am not interested in understanding. I wish I could bring you into these classrooms; like the time at Garcia, when I had the most bonkers class I had ever had up to that point. The students never stopped talking: I didn’t know how to help them calm down then, and I randomly, in desperation, put on a video of Charlie Chaplin. Almost instantly, they asked, “why is no one talking?” They then completely calmed down, and from then on, Charlie Chaplin videos were rewards in that class. To that end, one day I told the students that I had lost my voice and could not speak, and they had to find ways to help me communicate. All of a sudden, everyone could raise their hands before speaking.

Schools are magical and majestic. But mostly, they are critically important to the lives of children. Throughout the pandemic, the lives of children have been an afterthought. They have not been our priority. Government leaders seemed to think they would just bounce back and be fine after all of the time away from school. Those of us in the schools understand that this concept is a false assumption; the time away was damaging to so many of them, in many ways that we, as adults, will probably never truly understand.

I thank you for joining me here and reading my ramblings about grief, life, schools, and our country. I do love it so. I love its children most of all. I hope you do, too, even if you don’t have any of your own. And I do hope you think about how important school was for you, and act in kind.

❤

Hot Days in My Mind’s Eye

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It all makes sense, in a strange sort of way. The nebulous feeling; cloudlike and hanging about in the air.

Is it the pandemic? Is it the fear of constant shortage; today it is baby food, but what about tomorrow?

Is it that all the children have stayed inside for two years and now don’t know how to go outside, how to play, how to think for themselves or learn? Is it the overdependence on testing over knowledge?

Is it the fast pace of it all; Googling answers takes no time. There iss no thrill of the chase of discovery anymore. There iss too much available at the push of a button, and all the while it grows hotter and hotter outside.

I look out my window at my front garden and my front porch. Both are beautifully dotted with plants; some are in pots. My front garden is full of roses and irises and a few trees; some loofahs grow on the fence.

Yesterday it was 90 degrees in Maine; almost as warm there as here. I don’t think that has ever happened: 90 degrees in May.

I remember the winter, when I was young and more recently, and watching Frenchman’s Bay in Maine freeze over with a skin of ice; I loved watching the short and stubby icebergs form on the beach over the course of each winter; they are blue against the black-grey of the beaches. I wonder if by the time I am 60 they will be smaller, or maybe they won’t exist at all.

I remember learning about hot and cold molecules in elementary school; cold molecules are slow while hot ones move around quickly and bounce against each other like a pinball game. Is that what is happening now? The heat is rising, both physically and socio-politically, so we are bouncing against each other, rapid-fire, without any understanding of why?

An 18-year old shot and killed ten people today, in upstate New York, because he was afraid that black people will replace white people In America as its dominant culture. He is 18; his life hasn’t even started yet and it is already over, alongside the people who he murdered. He must have learned this on the internet. How is it that the internet impacts young people so differently than we who grew up without it?

The air is still today; there is no wind.

In a couple of weeks, we go to England to sprinkle my dad’s ashes in the River Dart under the Saxon Bridge and toast his spirit as it truly becomes part of the Earth that birthed him all those years ago, in 1939.

I said to my students on Friday: Lord help the teachers of the future. I am every day battling the internet for their attention. I am battling videos, texts, and Snaps; I cannot compete with the sheer size of the moving energy of the internet and its entertainment.

Will we get rid of jobs and money like in Star Trek? Perhaps, but not for a long, long time. War continues to rage in Ukraine and so many people here in the United States can’t go to the doctor, can’t read at an 8th-grade level, and can’t afford to buy a car. The United States is confusing and terrifying; why is there a baby formula shortage and why can’t people, in this situation, make their own babies’ food?

We are losing our ability to solve our own problems. Meanwhile, the temperature outside grows hotter, a problem that we feel that we cannot solve. Entertainment grabs us and holds us for mere moments that stretch to hours, days, and years. Distraction is everywhere.

Why can we not mourn quietly? Why can we not process into spaces of acceptance so that we can change what we can, accept what we cannot, and understand the wisdom to know the difference?

I missed my Dad the other day; I was sitting at ACC graduation and his face appeared in my mind’s eye; he was old like he looked just before he died. That was it: just his face. I smiled.

This is how it is, how it will be, always, forever, for as long as it is to be.

A Little-Known Side Effect of COVID-19

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“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
― Seneca, Natural Questions

[names have been changed]

Early in the fall, my husband came home and said that one of the ladies that he works with needed a tutor for her child, who had been in an accident and needed help with relearning things due to brain damage. Being that I hadn’t really worked with any students at school and was missing them, I said that I could help.

I spoke to Alice’s mom and was told her story. It is one that you probably haven’t heard about, or thought about, but I am in no doubt has happened to many adults with disabilities during the pandemic.

Alice, like many people, has multiple medical conditions. She has Addison’s Disease and Epilepsy, and something happened last spring to cause a grand-mal seizure. This seizure led to the ambulance being called, no surprise there, but the story now takes a twist.

As part of the seizure, or concurrent with it, Alice was also having an Addisonian Crisis. The ambulance drivers, stressed out due to overwork and the global pandemic, did not listen effectively to Alice’s mom, who I am sure was also very stressed at the moment. Alice usually goes to a hospital in Taylor, the closest major hospital to our area, but due to the pandemic, all hospitals had networked and routed patients to different places based on their medical needs. Alice was taken to St David’s in downtown Austin. Alice, it is important to note, is a 20-year old adult. The ambulance would not let her mom ride with her due to COVID. When Alice arrived at the hospital, no one knew her and the doctor familiar with her medical history was over 30 miles away at another hospital. The attending physician did not recognize her symptoms as Addison-related, and did not treat her as such. Her mom was not allowed into the hospital because of COVID, and the hospital would not release any information because Alice is an adult. Days later, her mom was finally able to get information, and found out that her daughter had had a heart attack and went without oxygen for 10 minutes before she was revived. At that time, she was in a coma, and remained in one for three months.

Before this accident, or incident, use whatever label seems appropriate, Alice was working at a sandwich shop and Walmart. She was taking two or three classes at Austin Community College. She couldn’t drive because of her epilepsy, but other than that, her life was completely normal.

In about an hour, her life became the opposite of normal. After she was released from the hospital, she could no longer walk unassisted. She had no short-term memory. Her speech was different: no longer the voice of a normal 20-year old person, she spoke in a monotone. She could not swallow liquid without risking aspiration, and could not eat solid food.

Now, a year after her accident occurred, she can walk on her own, and she has me and two other therapists who work with her on her memory and mobility. She is back to reading books and texting on her phone. She loves to watch Disney movies all day long. We are working on speech and her voice: trying to get her to control her voice more than she has been. She works very hard and keeps a daily diary now and makes marked improvements every week, although they are small and might not be obvious to someone who didn’t know her. Alice lives with her grandmother, her uncle and her brother, Andrew. Her mom lives across town with her husband, and her sister goes to college full-time at a nearby university.

When I think about Alice and her experience of the last year, I am mystified about how I didn’t think about this side effect of COVID: that people could receive such poor care that they die, or end up permanently (or at least in the long term) impacted by medical mistakes caused by the stress of the pandemic. The stress is systemic, and I suspect we haven’t really begun to understand what it has done to us individually and societally. I am sure, I am positive, that there are other people just like Alice out there; people who bore the brunt of a pandemic despite never actually having the disease.

COVID has broken-down, destroyed and distorted so many aspects of life. I sit here in a classroom, typing this story, and it is mid-April. The last time I had normal classes was over a year ago. The next time I have normal classes will be: no one knows. I asked Alice the other day if she intends to go back to ACC and she said yes. After all, there is nothing missing out of her amazing brain; it just takes a lot longer to pull the information out of it.

As with all things, the only guarantee is that things will change. Alice will continue to improve slowly. Sometimes I dream about going to her house and seeing her walking around, saying hello, and hearing her speak in a normal voice and tell me all about her day. Right now she is still talking in her funny monotone which is broken up with laughter, especially when we do voice exercises which make her make the funniest sounds.

Years from now, when we reflect on these times, I wonder what we will remember and what we will forget. What will be significant to us, and what will fade away?

“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”
― Salman Rushdie

I Dream of Sweet Caress from You

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One of the stranger aspects of the COVID life is the lack of connection and, especially, hugs. We have stopped shaking hands and hugging because we are all afraid of catching or giving this disease to each other. It seems we are missing something larger than just a hug.

AF Archive/AP Stock Photo

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a paleoanthropologist and moving to Africa to study the origins of humans. I read books by and about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas. I loved the stories of the gorillas the most.

COVID, as of today, has killed 246,000 Americans and 1.32 million people worldwide. When I started writing about it back in March, that number was this boogey-man number that was thrown about by experts as our worst-case scenario. Now it seems like an undercount, or a lowball prediction.

Today I felt sad, it must be the time of the year, or perhaps just the lingering effects of the anger I felt the other night. I felt so lonely and so sad, and as if I am missing out on something living in the country and not the city. I miss my friends in Austin, but I miss them in the sense that I feel our lives may be shifting ever further apart, not just because of geography, but something else.

COVID is grating on all of our nerves. Raw, lonely, sad, disappointed, exhausted: everything feels worse than it normally would right now. I won’t share with you the various horror stories from around the country: suffice it to say, we are in dire straits. Our government seems to be in trouble and at the whim of a despotic man with the emotional age of a 7th grade boy in a fight, and the man coming in is quite wonderful but holy hell is he inheriting a mess.

I was thinking about the 90s yesterday as I was touring Lamar University: they were a totally different world. No smartphones, no white supremacist proto-fascist movement maybe trying to take the government and cast doubt on our elections systems, no global pandemic hitting us worse than any other country. It sure makes you wonder. What else will happen?

I miss hugs, and students, and sounds in the halls. I miss feeling connected to many of my friends. I miss my husband and myself not being so crabby sometimes. I miss a lot of things. I wonder how many we will gain back?

DATE: 15 November 2020

#Cases of COVID in the US = 11.1 million

#Deaths by COVID in the US = 246,000

Death Rate in US = 2.22%

#Cases of COVID Worldwide = 54.3 million

#Deaths by COVID Worldwide = 1.32 million

Death Rate Worldwide = 2.43%

All the Boats in the Harbor

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I grew up in the summers on a large island off the coast of Maine. If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you well know this. I grew up on Mount Desert Island, and lived there until about 5 years ago, when I returned to Austin, Texas.

Mount Desert Island (MDI) is a tourism community that attracts 2 million people in a normal summer; our year-round population is a smidge less than 10,000. There are many funny comments from tourists that islanders have to endure, and lately, one has been sticking in my memory.

I can see Bar Harbor in the summer clearly in my mind’s eye. There are pleasure boats, whale boats, lobster boats, and dinghies moored there, bobbing up and down in the water, as the currents and the winds shift. Bar Harbor is an open harbor so really is only used in the summer, due to its lack of protection from winter storms. Tourists often look out into that harbor and see all the boats on their moorings, with the mainland beyond, and ask: “how do they get all the boats to face the same direction?”

Whenever this particular question is uttered, we laugh, albeit inwardly. Of course, it is the water currents, not the mooring, that determine how the boats set in the water.

COVID has now been raging for months: it feels like forever. I remember I said I was going to write here every day, and that never materialized. I have now decided to be more patient and gentle with myself, and write whenever I feel that I can. There are all sorts of below-the-surface water currents at work, causing us all to drift on this invisible tide.

Right now, schools are supposed to open as normal, and there is no plan for teacher or staff protection. The President wants the whole country to re-open, and periodically shrieks about the stock market and the NASDAQ, as if that means anything to 15 million unemployed people. The Texas governor issued a mask order last week, in the midst of a fury of anti-mask propaganda. I canceled my Facebook account yesterday: well, I put it on a 7 day hiatus, but after reading articles like this one, I am fairly certain I am on the path to permanently deleting it next week. I was in a meeting last week and described the feeling of being in the Upside Down, if the Upside Down was made of molasses; it is as if we are in a crazy parallel reality where truth is not valued, science has been relegated to the side lines, and time seems to move very strangely.

I don’t know what else to say except that times feel dark, and strange, and scary, and it is very hot (at least we have air conditioning!). I have been sewing almost obsessively, and watercoloring scenes from my life for a new quilt. I will share some of those when I have a few more ready. Some memories are good, some poignant, some sad; very much like the life they reflect.

I have been emailing with an old boyfriend from 20 years ago, and I think we have been comfort for each other in these strange days. Cody and I seem to not be a consistent comfort to each other, but I read an article about that, too. I feel very grateful for my friends at this time, for my dog Oscar, for my family in England who I can FaceTime with, and for the myriad stories I can engage with on television and in books. I spend a lot of time in contemplation and reflection, thinking about all the stages of my life, and of other’s lives, and how many, definite chapters we all experience. Life marches on despite our existence in the vacuum of COVID-19.

In some ways, this time reminds me of working in the studio in Northeast Harbor very late at night in the winters, when it was so dark outside that I couldn’t see anything beyond a few feet out of the front window, where the lights shone. I remember the blackness of the branches of the trees, the sound of the winter wind, the deep glow of electric light in a sea of winter black. None of us can see where this goes or when it ends, although many of us would like to know.

Despite the looks of the boats in harbors worldwide, there is no one undercurrent pulling us in one direction or another. There is, unfortunately, tension and mis-management, megalomania, fear, the unknown, wishes, rebellion, new ideas, anger, and a bit of hope. I just bought some very bright fabric to make quilts for the many babies that I know are on their way into this crazy world.

Back to sewing. With love, P

Date: 8 July 2020

Worldwide Cases: 12,009,301

Worldwide Deaths: 548,822

Worldwide Mortality Rate: 4.57%

United States Cases: 3,110,000

United States Deaths: 134,000

United States Mortality Rate: 4.30%

A Mid-Year Reflection

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My plan to write here,  even just a little bit, each day has fallen apart. My biggest explanation as to why is being sheerly overwhelmed by all that has happened. The United States has the most cases of any country in the world, and the highest number of deaths. Our President, who was woefully inadequate before the pandemic, now has shrouded the White House in miles of fencing and barricades to keep the protestors away from him. Protestors by the thousands are peacefully marching, now, after a week of fire and destruction brought on by three incidences of racist police brutality in a row. We are all expected to “go back to normal” despite the knowledge that the pandemic still boils in our communities, and there is a 19% unemployment rate with little being done to help those people who lost their jobs; these are the same people whose lives are impacted most by police brutality and lower-quality schools that lead to lower-paying jobs.

In other words, it is a hot mess express out there.

I don’t have very many words for it all right now, except that it seems so incredibly sad, but also incredibly predictable, that this would happen in the United States after 40 years of destabilizing social programs and a destructive and addictive dependency on capital development over anything else. We have been out of school since mid-March, and all I hope is that we go back in August. No one seems to have a plan or even a specific idea about how to manage this transition, and my explanation is that schools don’t make money so they are not a priority. Isn’t that it?

My garden is beautiful and I have to look at that as an analogy for these frightening times. I have tended my garden well during the pandemic: literally and figuratively. I have spoken to friends, worked on creative projects, continued with graduate school, begun to work on school work for the fall, and stepped outside each day to plant living things. These are the only spaces of control that I have.

I often wonder about how people felt during the last pandemic. There was no information overload. Perhaps they only knew what was happening in their town or on their street. Perhaps they knew much more? I feel that I know nothing, except that my government has lost the last shreds of authority, accountability and usefulness that they had in early 2020.

There is an election in November. Even NPR is talking about the possibility of the President not accepting the results. What happens then? What will happen this week?

Gods help us.

Date: 8 June 2020

Worldwide Cases: 7,049,649

US Cases: 1,946,144

Worldwide Deaths: 409,821

US Deaths: 116,929

Mortality Rate (Worldwide): 5.81%

Mortality Rate (USA): 6.00%

An Aside

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I woke up late today; it is raining, and I always oversleep on rainy days.

I went outside to take the puppy out and check on the bees. I gathered their sugar syrup feeder jars and chatted with them, noticing that they were irritated this morning and kept flying at my head, buzzing away. I assume they were annoyed with me sleeping in and annoyed that today will be cold and rainy, again.

I walked back to the house and noticed that some of the sunflowers are about to bloom. I noticed a mockingbird scraping her bill on an old piece of oak from the post oak that we took down last year. I heard birds sing and watched them balance on the power lines. The wind lightly blew, and it was cool, but not cold.

I smiled, realizing that if there wasn’t a global pandemic that threatens not only health, but economy and democracy, this morning would be have been purely gorgeous. And it is, of course, actually that.

I wish there was more information, anecdotal or otherwise, from the Spanish Flu Pandemic. I would like to read peoples’ stories and learn how the process developed, what turns the pandemic took, how people responded, and then how it ended. Perhaps I should go to the library…oh, wait.

I was really down yesterday: worried about everything. I was sad and angry and wistful and full of grief, all at the same time. It lifted sometime in the evening when I started sewing, so that is a lesson in an of itself.

This morning, this perfect morning, I will make some toast and get back to it. I am sitting at my table looking at my favorite Mola that I brought back from my zany trip to Panama 5 years ago, I am drinking tea, I am listening to the neighbor’s rooster crow from his little cell. The puppy is sniffing and snuffling around. Cody is sleeping. I can see the roses through the front windows, and the blooms of the Jerusalem Sage as well, and beyond that, the neighbor’s giant red barn.

There is peace in these moments; in this time, many gifts.

Date: 18 April 2020

Cases: 2,273,986

United States: 706,832

Deaths: 156,076

Mortality Rate: 6.683%

 

 

 

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It feels like waiting while revolving in circles – like a strange carousel.

Tomorrow, the Governor of Texas is slated to give a speech, about what we don’t know.

Today, the superintendent announced that we won’t go back to school this year. This makes me feel sad, but I understand, I think, that it is temporary.

This is such a strange time, during which it seems that no one knows anything and people are dying right and left. Some people want the economy to get back in its groove but everyone is afraid. It seems like everyone in charge is flailing, and, in the meantime, all of us just wait.

I spent today calling students and gardening, playing with my puppy, and wondering about the world at large. I tried to decide if I should cancel my flights for the summer, or hold out hope that it may all turn out ok. I learned from American Airlines that I can cancel up to the day before and rebook anytime before December 2021. December 2021? What will happen by then?

Today’s Guide to Opening Up America Again *

*I never want to hear the word “again” used in a political slogan ever *again*.

22 million people have applied for unemployment 

 

Date: 16 April 2020

Cases: 2,158,033

United States: 671,151

Deaths: 144,211

Mortality Rate: 6.682%

All the Feelings

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Tonight, I miss my students. I miss them so much, and in tandem with that feeling, I feel fear. My fear is rooted in the worry that we have lost something fundamental, not in schools, but in our society. I am afraid that the “normal” course of things is now fundamentally altered. I just finished watching “Friday Night Lights” for the 5th or 6th time, and all of the things that I saw for those kids in the last two episodes of the show may not come true for our kids, simply because our economy as we knew it was a lie it seems, or at least, it was true only for a few.

I spent this morning talking to my friend Von about all of it, and I think we have a pretty solid plan to see how things go over the next year, and then maybe all (the friend group) try to leave the United States for greener, perhaps Italian, pastures. Everything seem so confusing and as if a giant rug was yanked out from underneath all of us at the same time. 16 million people have lost their jobs? And yet, I sit on a couch with a puppy watching  “Apollo 13” because it was just the 50th anniversary the other day. Maybe it was yesterday?

Anyway – there are good things happening. There are the birds and the bees and new variegated geraniums and the fact that our house now has a/c and heat for the first time since we bought it. Our friends and family are fine. We are getting along great, although there are stories of the opposite being true. I suspect if you didn’t get along before the pandemic, you sure as hell aren’t getting along now.

This is non-sequitor, but important. Today I received an application for Early College High School from a student who was rather well known for being a scamp earlier in the year. Then, he went to Mexico for three weeks, returned and was transferred into my class. The kid and I just got along really, really well and he turned himself around and started to take his schoolwork seriously. He passed one half of his college entrance exams. I called him a couple of times over this strange break of ours and asked him to apply to ECHS. He said he would think about it, and I gave him til last Thursday to tell me either way, no pressure. He called me back and told me he wanted to do it, and then I dropped off applications at his brother’s house (no contact on the porch!). Late this afternoon, I received 5 photos via text, which were his full-page essays that he wrote explaining his goals, his challenges, and his three best qualities. The school counselor, who received his application, wrote me to say “wow”. This one incident let me know that maybe I did something good this year, despite how strangely it has (almost) ended.

I worry about our future and our kids, even though I know I have no control over this. People say this a lot: we have no control over x or y or z, but that doesn’t change the feelings. I was listening to a podcast today and the host said that she felt we should stop saying “how are you?” because no one has a good answer, and we should come up with something else. I wish someone would come up with something else to say to me instead of “you can’t control x, y or z”, or perhaps I should learn non-attachment. Perhaps both.

Tonight, it is late and I am so tired and just hope to sleep tonight. I am having so much trouble sleeping, and so many others are, too. But, suffice it to say, I did not realize how much love I had for my students, and for the “normal” way of life until a few weeks ago. This too shall pass, but into what?

Date: 16 April 2020

Cases: 2,064,815

United States: 639,628

Deaths: 137,020

Mortality Rate: 6.64%