I have been keeping several journals-- a reading journal, a very personal COVID-19 journal, my "centering" journal (early morning response to a poem). But this is what I have summarized from my calendar for public consumption. How one woman spent her days, mostly with one man and one dog.
DAY 1
I do a live video for the
Stark Arts Council, half an hour for which I have spent 10 hours
 |
| Paul and me hiking the Towpath Trail at the John Glenn lot |
figuring out Facebook Live Video, prepping a lesson on ODES, and
creating a blog to provide materials to parents and teachers, KENDIG WRITES WITH KIDS. Plus,
hours worrying and deciding what to wear. It goes off pretty well,
and from what I can see, two people have seen it, a former student
who makes her daughter Maddie write a poem which is pretty good, "Ode to a Puzzle," and an Oberlin grad who hopes
she can use the materials later.
DAY 2
I grocery shop like always,
like never before. Usually I run to 2-3 places and shop for a week.
This time, I went during senior hours (which killed me, spring
chicken that I am) at our local grocery store and shopped for two weeks, getting some canned
goods and frozen goods I usually don’t buy. I have bought a 5-day
supply of soup for Paul and me (separate soups for our separate
diets) in case one of us gets sick. That person will shelter in one
bedroom and have one of our two bathrooms. And if that person is me, I do NOT
want to be at the mercy of Paul’s cooking. Soup. I will live on
soup.
Paul and I watch “Virginia
and Vita,” which is awful, but it reminds me of a favorite Woolf
quote that I can use for the book of poems I am working on: “‘Stay
this moment.’ No one ever says this enough.”
CANCELED: My Writers in
Residence work with Fifth graders at Our Lady of Peace (OLOP) I feel
really bad about this. My two co-operating teachers were terrific.
DAY 4- My Poetry Group, "The
811's," Zooms! It seems so thrilling, reading & responding, seeing our six faces, smaller but closer. Still, we usually treat two poems
from each person, but now find we can only get to one poem each. The lag time in speaking
really adds up.
The vet is back a second time. I thought, for the second time in a year, that Robbie was on his way out, at age 13, but as he recovers from this bout of what? "being really sick" the vet called it, he is bouncing back and acting almost like a puppy again.
Day 7
Paul and I spend a lot of time
noting how much this sheltering in place is just like our usual life:
we get up, have breakfast, walk Rob, exercise ourselves (in Sippo!
Among animals and lake and trees!), have dinner, watch TV or read, sleep well. Our health is good.
Life is so very easy for us-- our retirement checks, small as they
are, continue to come in, we can pay our bills, our health is good, oops knock on wood--
that I want to stay mindful of those whose lives were hard before,
grow harder now: immigrants, inmates, our friends with hard jobs or
jobs that just got harder, our friends (our neighbor) without jobs. I
make a list of people living alone and plan to email or call them regularly.
CANCELED: My presentation to
the local Unitarian Society! Damn!
DAY 8 – Another Stark Arts
Facebook Live video, this one on JOURNALING: NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO BE JOURNALING. I reread a lot of
my material on Anne Frank and fill this lesson with emotion-- that
dissipates as the first 10 moments go awry, I can’t get onto the FB video platform and can
see two Stark Arts people chatting about my incompetence. Ayayayay
Canta y no llores. I keep at it, get in, get on, get up, and present
my lesson. "Be like Anne Frank and the people of the Netherlands," I
say, "whose leader told them that diaries would be important some day.
Write about your last day of school, and for lord’s sake, write
about toilet paper because NO one is going to understand what that
was about."
DAY 9
Cancelled: Day 4 of OLOP and a
proposal for a literary festival that is itself cancelled.
DAY 10
The web blog I curate for the
Cuyahoga County Public Library goes out today, for National Poetry
Month, a poem and a prompt a day during April, a job I started in
November, handed in on February 1st and is posted at the library's website and sent to subscribers as“Read + Write: 30 Days of Poetry,” a small good thing for local poets and readers as
we watch most other literary events cancelled out from under us.
DAY 12
In better news, my weight is
holding steady even though I am eating an uncharacteristic three
meals a day and making desserts, mostly fruit crisps from the
blackberries, blueberries, pineapple, and strawberries I froze all
winter when the prices were good. Probably because I continue to walk
3-4 miles a day, feeling the competition from Paul, who runs 7 miles
a day. Competition that is nevertheless beyond me.
Day 13
Cancelled: I will not be
writing in the window of Appletree Books today. Nor any day in the
foreseeable future. Or the unforeseeable future, which is unseeable.
DAY 14
It has now been over three
weeks since we returned from a trip to Tennessee, during which time
we stayed in three motels and spent several days with a former
student living in a halfway house for newly released convicts. Have
we picked up anything? We have been mindful as we sheltered, the two
of us, not wanting to have carried, to be carrying. Every sniffle--
and this allergy season-- every throat tickle, we worried, but we are
pretty sure now we were not crowned with corona, we are not carrying.
DAY 15
My third and final Facebook
Live video. This one on Ekphrastic Poety. (“Ekphrastic! It’s Elastic!”)
After years of teaching online with a good platform that let me beam
PowerPoints and blip to websites for the class to discuss and
examine, this being stuck with one screen is hard for me, and
ekphrasis was not the best choice as holding art up to the camera
is…pathetic. I can hope that the accompanying blog carries me. And
I am very grateful to my local arts council for the challenge. The
Arts in Education director, Kimberly, is one of the two best I have
worked with in 40 years of arts in the schools. (The other was Bob
Fox, whom I miss.)
DAY 17
Paul and I debate whether my
cleaning help should come, and Paul solves it by saying, “The
thing is, she does clean a lot better than you.” Anybody does.
DAY 18
Canceled: My last
day of six days as a poet in the schools at OLOP. I should let go of my grieving
over that lost job now, but in the words of Barbara Kingsolver's poem in the Sunday NYT ("How to Survive This") are apt: "I'm not there yet."
DAY 26
I am invited to zoom with my
former Massachusetts group, the Kitchen Table Writers! I haven’t
seen most of them for 10 years! I am so excited! But the host forgets
to send me the link, and I can’t get in the Zoom room.
In better news, I am invited
to read with poets in an anthology of food poems I am in titled Heatthe Grease, We’re Frying Up Some Poetry.
And if that book sounds fun, you can imagine the poets! We had a poet
from Leeds, England (“He was live at Leeds,” I keep saying) and
three women from the Bay area, several from Texas, where the editors (Karen Tardiff and Jennifer Taylor) are, one from India who signed to read but never made it. Such fun!
DAY
27: Canceled: a classical guitar concert in Cleveland
Day
31
Paul
and I Zoom for the second time with three of our former students. I
can’t recall when the first time was, but I left the room that day concerned
about all of them because of their jobs that left them at risk for
contracting the virus or severe depression, but in the second call, I
realized how resilient they all have become and always were. SUCH good conversation. Paul and I also worry a lot bout the Nicaraguan
asylum seeker we’ve been friends with for the past 18 months. He has a
job out of Ohio now in management of the meat industry, a really really tough one. And then there are the inmates at Grafton and everywhere in
Ohio, cut back to two meals a day and insufficient ones at that. K
tells me her son reports that supper was 1 hot dog, 1 T. mayonnaise,
and ½ c rice. Paul and I are sending what money we can to food banks
and inmate and immigrant accounts.
Day 33
Paul's favorite line from the NFL draft going on right now:
"I'm the kind of guy who starts what I finish."
DAY
36
"The
811 Poetry Group" meets for the second time and we contemplate how we
will go on meeting even after the sheltering order is lifted because
the library where we meet-- and thus our name, 811, the Poetry
Section of the Dewey Decimal System-- is banning all meetings for the
seeable future and beyond to the unforeseeable future. Still, it’s
a good session, good poems. I share my poem, “To the Deliverers”
which I thought would be quickly publishable but have found that no,
despite tens of publications announcing they want Covid-19 poems, my
poem is not one of them. (We received 600, Rattle reports in the
rejection. But they reported 700 the week before my also-rejected
friend notes.)
DAY
38 Canceled: My dentist appointment. Yay!
DAY
39
Gov.
Dewine starts a phase out of the shelter in place order but says we should all wear masks (note: within a day, he backed down on that) and we should all stay at home another month.
And we say, yay.
I pulled this cup out of my china cabinet this week to make tea. It was one of Mom's pieces which I rescued after she died when my siblings felt that everything of my parents should be sold because "there is nothing of value there." I held onto this and the teapot that was the wedding gift from her maid of honor. 
