Snow day in the Sonoran desert
Good afternoon from rainy, cold Tucson (seriously — it IS rainy and cold and cloudy in the Sonoran desert today, and we MAY get a dusting of snow). Flagstaff, where I am employed, is under feet of snow with more on the way.
Yes, I feel a pang of jealousy. I always loved those first hard mountain snowfalls. There is NOTHING like them. I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool midwesterner: there ain’t no snowstorm like a Flagstaff snowstorm.
In any case, because I teach in Flagstaff, I have a snow day.
Schools haven’t quite figured out what to do yet with the virtual-learning-plus-snow-day thing, so we took a snow day. And I think that’s good.
I think kids still deserve snow days.
I think that just because they CAN be in school constantly doesn’t necessarily mean it is good for them to be in school constantly.
Nor is it good for the staff and faculty.
We need a break, too, sometimes.
Roughly a year ago today, I was dx’d with recurrent, stage iv cancer.
About a week later my dog Bernie died.
Last year at this time was a really, really bad time in my personal life.
And then you know what happened after that.
For and to all of us.
So we’re coming up on a year in quarantine.
Almost a year since I taught a class in-person.
The heart aches.
The play Angels in America, which I taught at the start of the school year, opens with a few lines from Stanley Kunitz:
In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.
I’ve taught this play for many years, but never have those words
felt more real and true to me than at this moment.
I am tired of being away from my students.
I am tired of missing my sister.
I am tired of being unable to travel.
Last week I allowed county health to inject me with a brand new vaccine
at a time in my life when my health is already precarious I really, really
didn’t want to add some mystery vaccine to the mix, but I did. Trust is hard to come by, but we need to relearn it as a nation if we’re ever going to move forward.
So I trusted the county, the country. I trusted Fauci. I trusted my medical oncologist who encouraged me to get the vaccine just as he’s encouraging all of his cancer patients to get the vaccine.
Patience.
The vaccine isn’t a magic “yay, plague’s over!” Just like Trump’s exit wasn’t a magic, “yay! America is all good now!”
Sometimes, when I tell people what I do for a living, they say, “You must have a lot of patience. I could never work with high schoolers/middle schoolers . . .”
And I guess I do have a lot of patience, but rarely think about it when I’m in the charge of young people. Really, a kid has never pissed me off as much as an adult has.
Or to put it another way, not one of my teens has ever enraged me the way in which my fellow adults have and continue to enrage me and often my fellow adult enrages me because they are absolutely incapable (or so they make it seem) of exercising patience even where it concerns the most serious of matters: our very lives.
When I moved to Arizona, more specifically Flagstaff, I was astonished by the whiteness of the place. Coming from Chicago and Milwaukee, it was odd to be out and about and see almost exclusively white faces. Of course it wasn’t long before I learned that Flagstaff also had BIPOC, they’d just stored them away in the fashion of all American cities that I’ve ever known. In Flagstaff, just as in all American cities, the day to day of life was infinitely more difficult for BIPOC — right down, as always, to education.
And as always, I see white voices screaming across the nation to open schools now.
Fuck the pandemic.
Fuck the kids who just can’t.
Fuck the families who just can’t risk this.
Oh, and the teachers, also. Fuck them most of all.
Every teacher I know — in Flagstaff, in Chicago, in Portland, in Denver, in New York — is working harder than they’ve ever worked WHILE, just like everyone else, being burdened with the immense grief and chaos and sorrow of this time in our nation’s history.
We are not being paid more to work harder.
The educators I know work harder because they know our students need us to.
Some educators are even working better — discovering what in their practice was, after all, inessential or discovering new ways to reach hard-to-reach students through technology . . .
I am writing this because I recently read an article in a local paper where a large group of white adults were threatening to use Brown v. Board to “force” the opening of schools in our area.
Yeah, that Brown v. Board.
If I have to tell you why this is offensive, why are you even reading this?
Here in Arizona, we have a number of students who live on reservations.
A bunch of my midwestern friends maybe have never seen a reservation.
Let me assure you they are not conveniently located to schools/towns/shopping, etc.
Let me assure you there are not a richness of medical resources or public transport.
Let me assure you that when the schools in Arizona are “forced” to open in the middle of a pandemic that has fucking deccimated indigenous populations in our state, the kids who will be left out will, once more, be indigenous. Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about poverty when they’re bringing you up in White Supremacy: poverty may disproportionately impact specific groups of people, but it is the poverty and not the people who are the problem.
And the poverty is perpetuated, fucking enforced, by damn near every American institution — from The Dollar Store to Harvard.
Everything is poisoned.
White people are, largely, clueless to this fact.
So they go and do shit like abuse a landmark case that is intended to protect BIPOC from the bullshit we do to kids who are BIPOC every fucking day in our American schools.
Do you know poor people? I know some poor people.
I am related to some poor people.
I’m talking about finances, here. (Financially poor people are some of the wealthiest people in wisdom an character.) Know what poor people in America often have to do? Like the really poor ones? (Of which there are many.) They have to LIVE TOGETHER. Grandma, grandpa, aunties, uncles, cousins — TOGETHER.
Do you know what that means for the adults in the home who are unvaccinated, when their children are “forced” back into school in the middle of a pandemic — moreover, at a moment when we are poised to be in the WORST SHAPE OF THE PANDEMIC EVER.
There’s fucking mutations and confusion about the vaccines and hundreds of people are dying every fucking day on our reservations, but please, white people, please use Brown V. Board to ensure schools are opened for your precious white children who are not having a good time.
Hate to break it to these “open the school now-ers”: NOBODY IS HAVING A GOOD TIME.
I do not enjoy Zoom.
I do not enjoy being in my home every fucking day all day.
I do not enjoy the thought of never being able to see this group of graduates because I’ve been teaching them since they were twelve.
I do not enjoy trying to communicate essential curriculum over the internet.
It is really fucking depressing and hard.
We are ALL fucking sad about this.
I was on the phone with my editor the other day.
I have been in quarantine, like everyone else, for nearly a year.
Between teaching and medical appointments and moving and moving to online shit, I have not had much time to dedicate to my next book. Um, books are like the WHOLE POINT of my life, and that’s how busy I am with my job as an educator: I have no time for anything but teaching, eating, sleeping and occasionally, if I’m lucky, I can carve out a few minutes while I scarf down a weird lunch (two dates and a container of yogurt) to rant on Medium.
The morning of the inauguration, my 13 year old niece in Illinois emailed me about the occasion. She said, “It’s weird how Trump just flew away.”
I responded by saying Biden’s win was good and that Trump should be “rendered unto the trash heap of history” or something like that, but then I felt sad for my niece. She’s thirteen. Her life, like the life of her peers, has been undone and flipped upside down and the president responsible for much of it just “flew away.”
THAT is HER understanding of America. America is a place white people can destroy and then just “fly away,” leaving everyone else to deal somehow with the mess. What a heartbreak. What a horror.
I did not see Trump “fly away.” I was sleeping. I didn’t want to get up until he was gone. But a few nights ago, in bed, I found some CSPAN footage of Trump “flying away.” It was one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. “YMCA” blaring over speakers on an overcast day as this monster and the handful of human wreckage still in support of him watched as he disappeared into the gray skies above DC.
What the actual fuck.
As I told someone recently, the only thing that shocks me anymore is my seemingly endless capacity to be shocked.
As Kunitz put it, we live “in a murderous time” and the heart “lives by breaking.”
My heart breaks every fucking day, it seems.
And it seems that just when I think it cannot possibly break anymore,
it breaks again. And the only way I know I’m still alive — the only way I know my humanity is still in tact, that I can still love and be loved, is that my heart persists in its ability to break and break and break.
