April 2020 – iblamethequarantine

Wandering Window

April has been the proverbial cruelest month, in new ways dreamt up by COVID, and in Eliot’s most literal way: “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Damn, it’s rained a lot, and it continues to rain.

“Good for the farmers,” my mother used to say. Her father had farmed. She wasn’t a great gardener herself, but she liked to look at the world beyond her window. Six kids kept her from traveling much in my youth, but later in life she took to the road, west to the Bad Lands, east to visit me. Years earlier, when I lived in London, she came to visit me, and we went to Ireland together. The trip of a lifetime. She was half Irish. First born, her Irish mother gave her the middle name Carol for the O’Carroll clan from which her family is said to have sprung.

The trip was “of-a-lifetime” for me too, partly because for the first time, I got to see the place which created many of my favorite writers, and which they, in turn, created on the page. More than that, this is the only time I traveled with my mother in any real sense. I got a glimpse of her in the wider world. The last of the six, it was here I first saw her as a person beyond my narcissistic understanding of her as my mother.

Joan Carol Schumacher was a woman in the world. A woman of the world. In her own right.

We’ve yet to see: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

But here are a few buds.

–KLB

The Only Thing that Moves Is the Wind

I blame the quarantine, that I have become obsessed with these little dogs. Under a shield of mountains and sun, at the end of a bumpy road in Mexico, I spend my days hiding on my computer and watching them grow. They are seven, because two died, and all have different personalities. The smallest one likes to bark and start wrestling matches, one is lazy and just wants food, the others fall in a spectrum of troublemakers and snorers who will soon be running around like real dogs, but still blissfully unaware of all that’s happened.

I blame the quarantine that I am looking at things more closely, that time (now more than ever) has slowed to a halt, with the only thing that moves us being the wind. Days go on in a circle like the sun, with shadows falling and trees dipping in the weather. The puppies eat, I clean their dish. The puppies pee, I wipe it up. This book I’m reading has said it’s important to keep the nest clean. Which is mostly the mother’s job, but heck she’s got seven kids. I’d be feeling exhausted too.

I know they’d be fine without me, but would I without them? I love the way they see the world, all big hands and feet, loud noises and sunshine. It’s really that simple. Just the here and now, and nothing else. I blame the quarantine, but to be honest, I would have fallen in love with them either way.

–Larissa Runkle, I’m currently holed up in Hidalgo, Mexico with my partner and two other friends. We arrived months ago to do some climbing and then the owner of the hotel was kind enough to let us stay during quarantine

Empty

‘I blame the quarantine’

That’s what everyone seems to be saying these days, myself included. We’re locked up physically, some mentally, and even though I keep telling myself that I’m better off than most, I know that I suffer just as much as most.

My screen is my life now, I work, talk and live in it. Who knows? Maybe by the end of this I too will become an empty screen, expressionless and emotionless. I sit on the couch looking outside, I eat and then I sleep, I guess this is life now. I watch my oblivious dogs doze off in the garden and I wish to be them, to remain in the present without that drifting mind that curses all humans.

I stare through screens into other worlds, other homes. The homes of my friends, who joke and laugh just like me but deep down we’re all the same. We’re all tired and weary, trying to pursue our lives but being shackled in places where we used to find comfort.

Who knew that our own homes, where we used to long to go, the green grass on the other side would one day turn brown. At least I have family although many are in solitude yet I wonder if its better to be alone or to see the blankness on others faces.

We all look for someone to blame but find no one except ourselves and others. Fights occur, bonds are remedied in an endless cycle. But at the end of the day we all find someone, something to blame. So I, you and the rest of the world, we blame the quarantine.

–Lucas Camara, I am a twelve year old boy, originally from Spain but living in Belgium

Slow

I blame the quarantine for preventing me from hugging my grandchildren and my daughter. Seeing them through the window of my iPad is not satisfying. I see their cute little faces pushed up against the computer screen and then they flit off out of the camera’s view to play. In the background, Charley practices her ballet and Dylan fights and conquers yet another dinosaur. I yearn to touch them. But, I also blame the quarantine for allowing life to slow down. Although I’m a retired public school teacher, I still teach part time, run a writing group for Cancer survivors and tutor. I take care of the after school activities of my grandkids one day a week and, as a result, I’m as busy as I was when I worked full time. There is something to be said for being forced to slow down. I’m meditating every day, something I’ve wanted to do for years, but never had the time. I’m reading more than ever the books that previously only got occasionally dusted. I’m actually cooking! In June, I’ll be married for 50 years. When the kids were still living at home, I cooked every day. However, that was a different type of cooking, if you can call making macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets cooking, at all. Now, I’m Cooking. Real food.New recipes. I blame the quarantine for limiting the variety of ingredients that I can use, but, still…..I blame the quarantine for reminding me after all these years that if I had to be quarantined with someone, I’m glad it’s my husband. We are grateful that we have a roof over our heads and food on the table. We can, hopefully, blame the quarantine for the rejuvenation of our Mother Earth and give her much needed time to restore the health of our sky and seas.

— Claire Harris Tunick, Tenafly, NJ

Plan/nt/ing

Yesterday, I did two things. First, I canceled my plane ticket and hotel for a July trip to London. I was to be presenting at the International Creative Writing Conference, which is not happening now. I was also planning to do some research for a few essays about when I lived there for a few years in the eighties.

Of course, I’m bummed not to be going this summer. Slowly, all my plans for the summer are dying as are most folks’ plans. Of course, planning is all about the future. Through one lens, the future gapes: a black hole of uncertainty.

The other thing I did yesterday was plant vegetable seeds: arugula, spinach, carrots, basil, yellow squash. Seed sowing is inherently chancy. Soil conditions, seed quality, fertilizer, sun, water – all have to balance for anything to grow. Some seasons, you stare at dead earth, wondering what happened. Other seasons, fruit hangs heavy on the vine.

This morning, I said to my husband, Paul, “Here’s the daily sprout report. No sprouts yet.”

Today, a couple of windows into the future.

–KLB

Inevitable

“I blame the quarantine”. Everyone said it. “Keep yourself safe” they said, “stay inside”, they said. And everyone agreed without question. And regrettably; so did I, at the time. But now 2 years on, as one of the world’s leading journalists I have uncovered the ultimate truth. I know it may seem far-fetched, but this is more than a theory, more than a concept. In fact it’s a revolution.

It was in summer of 2021 that they discreetly made the decision to leave democracy as a thing of the past. And now in this new reality of dictatorship, I write the sad story of how the world crumbled and fell into the hands of the corrupt.

The government manufactured and unleashed the virus onto Wuhan, China. It was developed to spread rapidly, becoming fatal to a portion of humanity after a year. Little did we know, quarantine would fix nothing; it was to continue until humanity was cleansed of anything considered impure by the government. This shocking possibility came to me back in 2020 during a time where it was nothing but “just a harmless flu” to most.

A lawyer called, informing me of my newly deceased father. A will came days later, stamped with the official government crest. The symbol of my age old enemy. A letter was enclosed in the envelope among heaps of files. The letter revealed that even after our years apart, he still entrusted me with the most important information on the planet. “They intended to wipe out all who are weak and vulnerable, it was their plan from the start”. Those who were deemed impure would die…and they still are. This needs to be shared with the world; we must cease this sickness before it is too late. We must prevent the seemingly inevitable.

–Olivia Page, age 13 & Emily Lincoln, age 13

THE NASDAQ JUMPED 200 POINTS YESTERDAY

I wouldn’t say I blame the quarantine, but my roommates and I are digging a grave in our basement. We won’t need it right away (we’re young and strong and still able to create value for shareholders), but eventually it’ll come in handy. The concrete was the hard part. Chipping away at it with pickaxes like railroad workers of old. We brought a TV downstairs and put on the news to motivate ourselves. Death toll, community spread. Pundits speculating about how many Americans should be executed to boost the Dow.

I should clarify that the grave has little to do with the virus and more to do with what the folks on the TV aren’t saying. About a nation-sized machine that feeds on blood. About the scale on which our hearts are weighed against bars of gold and the hearts are always heavier.

We hit a pipe and cold water sprayed out, smelling of lead. I think it would have drowned us if it had kept flowing, but someone shut it off before it got the chance—a kindness which muddles the metaphor a little, but I guess I can forgive it.

We switched to shovels then. Dredging thick muck and tossing it aside. Water sloshed against an outlet and the TV died and the cord caught on fire. We were all thankful for that.

We’re nearly finished now. The hole isn’t six feet, but should be enough for the three of us. We thought about separate graves, but what’s the use in that? When it’s our turn to feed the machine, just dump us in the hole and cover it so we don’t spread anything. But please remember to put coins in our mouths to pay the ferryman. No room in the afterlife for freeloaders.

–Shane Inman

Mask No Mask

I live in what’s called, by real estate agents, an aspiring neighborhood. It’s a racially, linguistically, economically mixed neighborhood. In the Guatemalan or Salvadorian or Peruvian bakeries, restaurants, and stores on my neighborhood’s main street, most folks smile indulgently when I sputter out the few words of Spanish I know to try to convey that as a white woman I recognize I am the interloper here. I like it when they laugh in my face at my efforts. Usually it’s good-natured, but even if it isn’t, theirs is exactly the right attitude. I hope they’re thinking, and saying among themselves, “Learn the damn language if you’re going to live here.”

I drove down my main drag recently, which is less than a mile from the public college where I teach, and the college itself is now a covid testing site. Every person, big and small, tiny and tall, every person, to a person, was wearing a face mask. Of course, over 40% of the covid positive tests in RI are from the Latinx community. Another significant percentage is from the African-American community.

I had to be on the upper-crust East side this week too, around Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, where stately homes, fashionable restaurants, and the beautiful “Boulevard” reside for the joy of predominantly white folks. I found myself raging that, to my eye, 95% of people on the very-peopled East-side streets couldn’t be bothered to wear face masks.

“What, do they think, their spit don’t stink?” I raged. “What, are these too-cool-for-public-school richie-riches waiting for their goddamned, diamond-studded masks to be delivered to their doors by one of the front-liners working for Prime?”

“Put on an effing face mask!!” I shouted through my car window.

Neighborhoods matter. Neighbors matter.

–KLB

Essential Window

“No. Stay right there. Don’t come any closer. What do you want?” I asked the question, directing my frustration at the man.

“I just need a dowel rod.” He answered, his lips quivering. This man is going to cry over a freaking dowel rod. I thought.

I had blocked off the aisle of the DIY hardware store. Denying him access to the items he sought. Before travel restrictions I was a manufacturer’s rep, servicing items in this establishment.

Considered an “essential business” I was angry that this company had tagged me as an essential supplier. So I was stuck. Don’t get me wrong I was happy to be working, but I felt frustrated that possibly my life or at the very least my health was being jeopardized by people who don’t understand what essential needs are.

Maybe the Governor should have been more clear as to what essential needs actually are. Food, fuel, medicine definitely. In this place plumbing and electrical supplies, sure. But dowel rods. Come on.

“How are dowel rods essential, man,” I screamed at him. “I’m not catching this thing for a stick, stay there until I’m finished. Forty five minutes then the aisle is all yours.” I returned to my work.

The man broke down completely. Fell to the floor and began sobbing.

“My mother is in ICU, they won’t let me in her room, the only way I can communicate is by signs and I thought I put it on a dowel so she could see it… I don’t… I…”

I just watched for a moment, stopped what I was doing and walked the box of dowel rods the length of the aisle and handed them to him. I apologized.

I guess someone should have been more clear on “essential items”. I blame the quarantine.

–Clarence Miller (Butch)

Wrong Answer

Just as the police led the man across the street away in handcuffs, a coroner’s van drew up. Beside me, Deborah sucked in her breath.

“So he killed poor Kim. I told you I thought he was abusing her.”

So she had. For some reason, it irritated me. “Hindsight is twenty twenty. Besides, we don’t really know what happened over there.”

She stared at me, and when she spoke, shock made her voice shrill. “You’re not defending him, are you? It’s pretty obvious he must have killed her.”

Weeks of confinement together had frayed my nerves. Something dark and violent inside me craved validation. “These are difficult times. We don’t know what happened, or why.”

She sighed. “No, I suppose we don’t know the exact reason. Does it matter, though? He’s alive, and she’s dead. That has to tell you something.”

Did it? I considered my answer. As I thought about what to say, I watched the fear grow in her eyes. They were fixed on me, as if she was trying to read my thoughts. Seeing her so nervous made me feel powerful, in control. She took a step back from me. It was exciting, knowing I could have such an effect on her.

Even as I spoke, I knew I was destroying everything we had together. At that moment, it didn’t matter. With all the tension which had built up inside me, I couldn’t help myself. Swallowing against the sour taste in the back of my throat, I said the words.

“I blame the quarantine.”

–Ray Beere Johnson II, Woonsocket, I am legally blind and on the autism spectrum – although not diagnosed until well into adulthood – so I am a bit out of the ordinary, even under better circumstances.