Tag: backward glance

OUJTWBLP

A for sale sign went up on my neighbor’s lawn yesterday. Our neighborhood is tight, so much so that Paul and I share a driveway with these folks, or we will for a few more weeks.

            “I hope the new neighbors are nice,” I said to Paul, screwing up a smile of apprehension and hope.

            He shrugged his own hope and anxiousness.

            We decided together that in the spirit of fair play, we would let anyone looking at the place next door see who we were, their potential neighbors. Putting our best faces on, so to speak. So we cleaned up a weed patch along the shared driveway and planted vegetables: two kinds of peppers, dill, lemon cucumber, and rosemary. A sunflower and red hibiscus for the front yard.

            Then we pasted two posters on our glass front door: Black Lives Matter and a Pride rainbow flag.

            Declarations are important. The upcoming holiday, Independence Day, is all about declaration. In the original text, certain words are capitalized: Order, Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings, Liberty, Posterity.

            As any writer knows, to capitalize a word mid-sentence gives it added emphasis. This is what the founders – free upper-class, educated white men, who preserved slavery and refused non-white men and women the vote – emphasized. Still, with all of their intersectional blindness, they left us with abstractions for which we still strive today, but abstractions, which even they must have known, are not necessarily in concert with each other.

Justice and Tranquility often do not pedal a tandem bike. Order and Liberty can come to blows.

This week, as we head into a new month, a month where summer steams around our ankles and the sun presses hot hands onto our shoulders, a month where we look back from whence our country came, I’m posting some of the first I-Blame-the-Quarantine missives sent to me.

            See how far we’ve come. See how little we’ve traveled.

–KLB

Backward Glances

I blame the quarantine.
Zoom.  Not fast enough.
Google Meet.  Only if everyone shows-up.
Google Classroom. Post. Post. Post.
My life has become one big -
Wait. A positive test result.
The world stops.
My world stops.
 
Let the email build-up.  
Let the questions keep coming.
“Mrs. Pierson, how do I do this assignment?”
Read the directions.
“Mrs. Pierson, how do I log-on to Khan Academy?”
Read the directions.
“Mrs. Pierson, what sections in IXL do I have to do?”
Read the directions.
“Mrs. Pierson, what chapter do I have to read today?”
Read the directions.
 
Let the email build-up.
Let the questions keep coming.
“Will Mom be okay?”
I don’t know.
“Can a Z-Pack help?”
I don’t know.
“Do they have enough food?”
I don’t know.
“What can we do?”
I don’t know.
There are no directions.
 

–Amy Pierson, Cranston, RI, Teacher St. Mary School

I blame the quarantine for suddenly demanding that I become a homeschool teacher, an employee working from home, as well as a single parent. My little boy asks me every day when Daddy is coming home, and I have run out of ways to get him to understand that Daddy is not coming home. I brushed his cowlick down with my hand for what seemed like the 100th time that day, and the memories came flooding back. I realized this is exactly what I used to do to his Daddy 13 years ago when we fell in love. I bent down to my little boy’s level, looked into his Daddy’s eyes and asked him if he would like to look at pictures of his Daddy with me again. He quietly answered yes, and we turned off the computer and together relived the beauty and the magic of the love his Daddy had created for us all. You see, his Daddy reminded us that we need nurses all the time, but never before have they been asked to give their lives for their profession. I was not sure how much he could comprehend at 5 years old, and how much information he should be told of what this pandemic had turned our world into. As we looked at pictures together while lying intertwined on his bed, I answered his question once again, “When is Daddy coming home?” This time, I felt a peace come over me for I had discerned the way to tell him so he could understand, “See this picture of Daddy with that mask on; he was a superhero who helped many people live and feel better and now Jesus needs him.” He nodded, quietly absorbing my words as we turned the page.

–Suzanne Kronsberg

***

I pour through dozens of student emails that flood my inbox only days after our Catholic grade school’s forced hiatus.

“How do I help them?” I mutter as I’m struck by the feeling Gandalf experienced when preparing Frodo for Mordor. 

I enter my family’s kitchen, but I find it hard to not stare at the floor where my family’s eighteen year old Bichon seized only a week prior. 

I force the memory back as I look towards the ceiling praying that God provides answers I fear won’t come. 

But, my friends’ college nickname for me wasn’t “actual Disney Princess” for nothing. 

I don the crown I still hope to wear at my wedding in October to fulfil a show-and-tell promise I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

I rev up Photo Booth on my ancient MacBook and belt out “When Will My Life Begin.” 

However, I am confronted by my technological ineptitude as it takes hours to figure out how to upload it to YouTube. 

I figure, Italy is communicating hope through song. 

Though, I sing from my parent’s basement, like some weird feminine Phantom of the Opera, not a balcony. 

Yet, my mom recalls that she missed music drifting up from the bowels of the basement at odd hours. For my father, I suppose I drown out the haunting sound of barks that we know no longer exist. 

My siblings view me as the ultimate victor of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. We laugh because I can still 79% Bohemian Rhapsody on Expert. 

However, that B flat is just a bit out of my range, now. 

I have rediscovered that comforting colors of music fail to die even in dank houses on sewer-made lakes and lonely painted towers. Even scourges of the earth can’t kill song. 

So, I keep singing.

–Shannon Fuller