Notes from Home

Everything is from home now. Here are some notes on the social distancing happening in my hometown.

1. A local radio station is playing Christmas music. This is not comforting.

2. My parents keep refusing to stay at home and let me and my sisters run the errands since I'm a teacher and they work in grocery stores so we are likely already exposed. They keep just...going to Target. Going to the book store "one last time before the shut down." Getting lunch out.

3. My sisters are literally on the front lines of a major amount of White People Behaving Badly. They work at a well known upscale grocery store, each of them at different locations, and their days are filled with women demanding to know where the better lettuce is. Well-dressed men arguing that they need 10 packages of chicken when the limit is 5.

4. I picked up Leo's work from school today. We had a 15 minute window by last name. I was the last in his classroom. "All these little desks have emptied out today and I..." and his teacher couldn't finish her sentence. Here's a teacher who loves her job and her students. I envy that, and I am so sorry for what is happening.

5. But we ended on a bright note, each of us knowing we were walking through this fire and at the end of it would have so many new skills to use in our classrooms. Yes we will, for sure. It's just going to be a long road.

6. The proposed return to school of April 6 has probably been negated by the city and county ordering a stay-at-home mandate until April 22.  State testing has been cancelled. I wonder if I will go back at all this year.

7. We were the last customers in a little donut stand that's been open since the end of WWII when GIs returning from the war were given pamphlets on how to start up their own businesses and donut shops were one of them. We have several around south city. This one was shutting its doors until further notice and we bought their last donuts. I wonder if they will reopen.

8. Driving through the city to run the last errands before the shut down, Maggie and I played "they'll come back/they won't make it", a grim game where we point to businesses and debate if they'll make it through a month of being closed. Tire places and chain restaurants will make it. Most other places won't. We stopped playing when I pointed to Roseborough Monument Company with their sample headstones in the side yard. They'll make it.

9. The unreality of being on the shallow end of an exponential curve makes it feel like a huge overreaction. Then I read reports from Italy and I self-correct.

10. Rosie our little bichon-poodle mix is having the time of her life. All the coziness and fetch she can handle and never in her crate. She will be spoiled by the time we go back to normal.

We will go back to normal. And I will never take a night at the bar or a night at the movies for granted again.