Hoarded Ordinaries

My students at Babson College have been working on this assignment for several weeks, and my students at Framingham State are just starting. In both cases, I asked students to read an essay by novelist Zadie Smith in which she talks about her writing craft.

Today I fell behind schedule before I’d even left the house. Morning chores took longer than I’d planned, and I left home later than I’d like. I arrived at my post-holiday COVID test a few minutes late, only to discover a long line of students waiting ahead of me. As I stood in line answering emails on my phone, my wrist buzzed to alert me to the office hours I was supposed to be holding. It’s never a good omen when you’re late to your own office hours.

Does it seem extreme to call these days apocalyptic? In some ways, Powers’ book is dystopian: he takes the political realities of the present moment–including climate denialism, anti-science conspiracy theories, and a xenophobic slide toward authoritarianism–and exaggerates them only slightly, which makes their impact that much more devastating. The world of Powers’ novel isn’t exactly the present moment, but it certainly could be.

This much I know: we live in the woods, so we’ll never be out of them. Many of us see Life in the Age of COVID as a time of unprecedented uncertainty, and we long for the stability and security of the Before Times. But here’s the troubling truth: we weren’t safe or certain then, we just fooled ourselves into thinking so.

The pandemic has made many folks acutely aware of their own mortality as well as the fragility of everything from the economy to global supply chains. But “we” were never safe or certain even in the Before Times: our lives have always hung on a slender thread, and the next moment was never guaranteed. The pandemic didn’t create this fragility; it simply illuminated it.

People plan, and the gods laugh. Countless times over the past almost-two years, I’ve remembered a passage from Momma Zen where Karen Maezen Miller describes motherhood like this: as soon as you adapt to your child’s current life-stage, they grow out of that stage, and you have to adapt anew. Everything Changes when you’re raising a small child, and this dictum applies to the pandemic and everything else because “Everything Changes” is the law of life itself.

One of my most vivid memories of pandemic teaching came one early-evening last year when I was prepping in-person classes for the next day. With a ping in my inbox, everything changed: an email announced an uptick in campus COVID cases, so the next day’s classes would go remote and students would shelter in their rooms while the college completed contact tracing.

Without batting an eye, I scrolled back through the lesson I’d planned to teach in my classroom on campus and made a few changes so I could teach from my desk at home instead. Living in the Age of COVID means being perennially nimble: plan, make adjustments, then plan to adjust again.

Now that J and I have been boosted and the weather is cold, we’ve returned to eating lunch twice a week inside our favorite pub: a bit of normalcy that feels good for the soul. I’m not sure we’ll ever return to the old normal of the Before Times: I suspect we’ll always startle when we hear someone cough or sneeze in public, and I’ll probably continue wearing a mask indoors during cold and flu season.

This year’s Thanksgiving feast was delivered today, so the refrigerator is full. I went to Trader Joe’s last week to avoid going to the grocery store this week, and we literally have nowhere to go tomorrow: no crowds or traffic to navigate.

Prepping classes takes priority over grading papers, for example, because class time is People Time: that is, time spent face-to-face with my students. I can catch up with paper-grading later, but I can’t make-up precious class sessions after they have passed.

Since I planned to wait at the dealership, I packed a bag with my iPad, a book (Richard Power’s Bewilderment), a notebook, and a packet of letters and blank notecards. I sat in the quiet waiting room, which has three desks, a handful of lounge chairs, and wifi but no TV. An older man sat in one of the lounge chairs, and a middle-aged woman with mid-length, graying hair sat at one of the desks, shuffling papers and folders into and out of a small tote bag.