May 15, 2020
Dear R,
You and your words are a pillar of my sanity (I knew you would be) as the country slips into collective delusions. When I see the struggle as one between coronavirus and consumerism, I find myself rooting for the virus. Let it change us! May it block the return of the endless consumption economy, in which I, too, am complicit. For your father-in-law is right that the gods are mad – crazy-angry—and the gods are right to be mad. Micah likens the reopening to watching everyone go out and have unsafe sex. Consumer libido spilling out again. In the early days, they didn’t understand the Spanish flu; they thought AIDS was a cancer, he reminds me. We still don’t know what this thing is – and the most dangerous thing is thinking we do. No theory of the virus accounts for this mysterious Kawasaki-like development in children, a syndrome I would not have known to fear if it were not for your Mrinalini.
Everything we thought we knew so far about this entity has turned out to be false. But we are supposed to believe that we now know it is safe enough to open up?
I feel it too, of course, the urge to loosen up, let go. My mom, sad after Mother’s Day, talked about flying to Jordan, about coming here this summer. Pretending she can control her risk. Pretending she’ll endure a two-week quarantine in a vacation rental after the trip. I indulged her fantasy, but the very thought sends Micah into an honest panic. In the CDC guidelines that Trump trashed, one important recommendation has been left out: no travelling between “zones”.
For Mother’s Day here, Micah helped me fix up my side of the study: installing shelves and speakers and, most importantly, a bulletin vision board above the desk. I hung up an Egyptian hand of Fatima and two wooden masks, from Rwanda and Indonesia, and a beautiful tapestry that I bought in Palestinian Jerusalem. I overpaid out of heartbreak, and later found from the tag it was made in Delhi. Assembling pieces of my past around me, it begins to feel like something could get brewed in here.
Anyway, Covid. It’s normal now. The government buffoonery is normal. It’s fine, we’ll go out, some of us will get infected, some of us will die, what are you gonna do, it’s normal. Do we always have to balance safety and freedom in a zero-sum equation?
I am still looking for the framework for replacing the talk of privilege. Because it does seem as though the world will be split into two. Not just before and after, not just virtual and physical, but differentials of speed, access, online code-switching…. To teach in the Fall, to keep living in this world, I’m going to need to learn to see a kind of class striation and bottlenecking that the glitzy internet is so good at distracting us from.
I am learning, though. Latin and other things. Re-learning, as you say. Learning how to love. How to be there for Micah in his panics. To listen to Zia’s endless, impassioned sobs over a vacuumed-up lego piece. To hear the quiet questions that bubble up in myself. To be patient when Areté insists on eating only in the lap of a parent (usually yours truly) and not her formerly-beloved chair. She’s normally so easy-going that her occasional fits unseat me more than they should.
Got my rehiring paperwork today, which was a relief.
To be continued...
With love from my room,
May 21, 2020
Hello dearest C,
You talk about “the world split”. Ed Yong – who has been writing the best of the mainstream Covid essays for The Atlantic – called it “the patchwork”. You’re both right.
These days I am experiencing more cognitive dissonance than in the last many weeks, as we feel the increasing fraying of connections, and search out our bit of the patchwork, a place we might feel safe, while everything else opens up and goes haywire.
We are newly committed to staying home with the kids. Daycare sent out a note asking if we want to send Shai back for the summer – of course not! Mrinalini’s last day of virtual first grade is tomorrow. She won the award for best “Drama” student in her class, which strikes me as right. She’s never been great on stage, but she’s terrific on camera. This week, I took both kids for their well-visits and Shai’s two-year vaccines, and the paediatrician’s office was in violation of its own stated procedures. We have to keep the kids home, because I don’t trust anyone.
The institutions are broken. The world is broken. The US is approaching 100,000 Covid deaths. I have stopped attending Zoom meetings with indignant faculty trying to get through to the malignant, incompetent administrative C-suite here at the university. ‘It’s normal now,’ you said. I’m so tired. You’re of course right.
A friend in Tucson admits her daughter has regular playdates with the neighbour’s kid. My in-laws are plotting their return to Maine, even though they know we need them. Now, my mom is talking about going to India this fall. Oh, how I already miss the early days of the lockdown in mid-March! Days when it felt like enough of the world (ok, our world) was in it together. Mrinalini asked a couple days ago what we’re doing this summer and was less than pleased to hear “more of the same”.
In all this, reading you is the bright spot. I love picturing you in your room, made beautiful not just by the vision board but by your vision. My room is a corner of a closet, but I’m glad for it, and the cool mornings out back while the kids are still sleeping or troubling Brandon.
Sometimes, C, I think about the future when we’ll talk about this time, this year, this lockdown, and it will be past, and that future feels impossible, and I struggle to imagine myself into it. But maybe the point is not that we can’t imagine ourselves out of this time into the future. Maybe this endless present is where we were headed all along, and the real crazy thing is the fact that most of us (but not you) didn’t see it coming.
All the love,
Excerpted with permission from The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir, Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Aleph Book Company.
