Unsanitary

Once our son’s pediatric oncology nurse teaches us how to wash our hands, we will never again use the melted and misshapen bar of soap in the clammy puddle of cloudy water. We will cringe at the sight of the limp, damp, terry cloth hand towel provided in other people’s bathrooms. 

Our child died. It wasn’t from opportunistic infections or carelessness. It was from cancer. All of the germ fighting things we did for him so that he could sustain the strong treatments we hoped would save his life remain with me. There were times when he had zero white blood cells. He still died but at least we controlled the things we could. His death is 100 percent, but my regrets around him are zero. 

So when a pandemic hits, it’s like riding a bike.

While other people are still moving in slow motion, I leave my old life behind without looking back. Everyone is immunocompromised when it comes to COVID-19. The implications are massive and unwieldy.

Soon my hands develop eczema from all of the washing. This too, is familiar. I take the recommendations of epidemiologists and  then embellish them all  for good measure. My doorknobs gleam. 

I don’t game the rules, finding a little loophole here or there. 

Before my child developed pediatric cancer, I was just like the rest of you. I call other parents, unscarred by chemotherapy regimens or pint-sized caskets, civilians. 

Civilians live in a place I can observe but not access. You do not have flashbacks of the moment your child died. You do not have what psychologists call intrusive thoughts that come uninvited, superimpose that death onto surviving family members in crystal-clear details that can only be described as hyperrealism.

Make no mistake. I have no desire to edify or initiate you. I don’t want you wearing my shoes or walking in them. I want you cosseted in innocence because the alternative is just too tragic.

But this pandemic is a beast of unnatural proportions. Would it hurt you to be a little more careful, watchful, aware? Of the children you’ve been gifted? Or, while you are at it, yourselves? 

From the archives:

Before, then, wide open

Rending

The sun it did rise again

Memoir

You throw open your front door wide in invitation, but soon I’ll come in the side entrance. Everyone knows who is company and who can just go around the back. 

You’re generous with yourself. You show me around. You don’t apologize for the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, or the baskets of clean, unfolded clothes waiting at the base of the staircase. 

Things are lived in but there are moments of exquisiteness. Photographs on the walls, unframed works in progress curling at the edges. The teapot you pour from passed down through generations. There’s a story for each of these things. You tell me the stories.

The soft sciences advise us that self-disclosure creates intimacy. There is something disarming about you. I’m intoxicated by your candor. Your command of language is breathless if a bit audacious. You are a page turner except when you’re not.

Occasionally, you get mired in the details. You look deeply into yourself, your heritage, your process. Even less frequently, you forget that my eyes, ears, self are still here. 

During these times, I look at you full on. You don’t mind my staring the way most people would. You have the kind of wide set eyes and cheekbones which invite words like breeding and society. Your folks have been here longer than mine.

There is no denying this lineage, not in the serviceable overalls you wear for comfort, the handcrafted farm table your husband made himself, a ferile, unladylike manner, age creeping about your eyes. The paint spattered, broken-in loafers you wear around the house cost you a pretty penny thirty years ago.

Because you married above your station, your offspring are even more finely drawn, their countenance begging for the artist, even - especially - luminous while just being messy, insolent children.

You engage me once more, knitting your story together. You connect all back to you spanning land, time, elders. You do this directly but also hold back with intention, allowing me to fill in the blanks. There is absolutely nothing reciprocal going on here. 

Still, I am rapt. I participate by noticing the uncanny, the apples not falling far from the tree, an apt metaphor with an orchard blooming right outside.

My own story, told in drips and drabs for a tiny audience, if you can even call it that, is held in suspension. With you, it’s clear who is who, who is the teller and who is the recipient. This is not a conversation. 

A familiar unease takes up residence in me. You serve up one picture, one report card, one remembrance too many. I soldier on. I finish what I start. 

Unlike some people with a pinnacled purpose, wanting to teach something or help the world, you hold no such elevation. Here is what you’d say, if you talked about it at all. This is about me and mine and nobody else. The applause and prizes serve as buttresses and for the time being, hold you up. 

Our visits have an arc, and like all things, come to an end. It’s been a sprawling, weighty chunk of time. I’ll fill in the hole you leave behind with more of the same, but cut from a different cloth. Somehow, there will be less talent but more grace. One of your brethren will have an expanse of story paired with economy of words, a balm for my own exhausted, not charmed life.

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
The Book
Rations

Accelerant

I never actually wanted to build a campfire.

But I’m on a beach with the air getting cold. There’s a rough hewn circle with a few logs. I have a lighter. All the kindling I need is up for grabs, in the woods. 

As if in a dream I build the fire. I’d been resistant to the idea but the ease is almost shocking. Soon I’m sitting in the warm glow, as the night grows darker. It’s a tidy fire, but the heat and smoky, woodsy aromas are real.  

You see me sitting there, tending my little fire. You don’t want to put it out. You don’t walk away either. You don’t join me in my quest to keep my fire contained.

You spend some time fanning the flames. You pour some gasoline on there. It’s scary but also beautiful. I don’t know what you will do next.

All I can really do is watch. I’m frozen. I watch you and I watch myself watch you. 

After all that effort you bring buckets of water over. Things turn grey and acrid. The ground becomes boggy under our feet.

By the time you leave, nothing is left of the glade. It’s scorched earth. In the end, water won, but not before you burned down the trees and blackened everything surrounding them. Thick smoke rises into the sky. Whatever this was, it’s over. 

I’m wearing flannel but feel naked. My hair smells bitter. It will take many shampoos to wash this night away, and even then, there will be a tinge.

Slowly, without Interface from me, the rectangle of earth will replenish itself. Seeds will blow over from trees unscathed by you. Hardy, adaptable plants will sprout here and there. Soon there will be lush overgrowth.

I’ll plant some trees to move it along. Some things will be the same as before, but most of it will be different. The collaboration between myself and regeneration will not be for nought. I don’t have to worry about you doing this again. It’s clear you aren’t coming back, and my belief in that is full and whole.

From the archives:
The Book
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Tweak

I broke the pact I made
I failed at one, two, three - all the tries

I discarded everything then gave up for a time
Choosing to lay my focus somewhere else

Never became maybe
Maybe then yes - okay.
Here is my unexpected truth
All I really needed was a container


From the archives:
(untitled)
Rending
Hydration

Scissors

The paper cuts easily
The fabric frays in the beginning, then catches a break
It’s smooth sailing from there
When I get to the kindling, there’s some effort
I put my tool aside and use my hands
The dry ones crack sharp while the others shed and bend
It takes a while, but I do my best

There’s stuff here not worth mentioning
They lay untouched as nothing I have
Or nothing I can be
Can do a damned thing about them

Then there’s the spilt sugar
The wind comes, hot and sure
It makes quick work of the clumsy hand
That laid that sweetness down
The flies and hot water left hungry, myself spared

From the archives:
The Book
These Are My Subjects
Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Before, now, then wide open

These are my relics: wallet, backpack, sneakers, backpack, sunscreen. Squeezing into a party, my shoes left at the door, my back pressed up against a wall close to the air conditioner, talking closely, very closely. Rush hour that seemed to last all day, letting one, two subway trains go by, but being packed in anyway. The long Starbucks line where a man my age stares at me and I remember that while I am not everyone’s type some find my arrangement of features and my countenance much to their liking. A well attended memorial service.

You already know what happens next. The hand sanitizer, the homemade bleach solution. We’re all in this together, until we look more closely and realize, no we are not and never were. The science is there but it keeps revealing more and more. There are no good assumptions anymore. The only way to stay ahead of it is to stay inside.

I’m nothing special to this virus. It doesn’t care that I’ve already had unbearable loss. It doesn’t care that I love my husband and children. It is like I can see it. I’m not even stir crazy.

I clap and cheer and then I stop. My mother did me a great service by instituting rules around thank you notes. This got internalized rather than rejected. But even she would not ask you to send the same thank you note again and again.

People outside of my apartment are bored. I don’t understand.

Everything hands can touch is spic and span. I imagine the fragile lipid layer of the virus dissolving as I clean. I take stock at what foods have come into my home, much of it substitutions, whatever was available, or a surprise. Every morsel of it is precious.

I hold and console. I make space for the others to do their work. I ask for protection to do mine and it is granted.

There is one day that I realize that the only person I am not mad at is Andrew Cuomo. I get more sleep and better sleep and that resets me.

Ambulance sounds remind me that I’m lucky.

When other people are assholes I look for the helpers. When I am the asshole, several people decide that it’s better to be kind than to be right.

I had already engaged in a reinvention and now I’m called upon to reinvent the reinvention. I’m going to have to ask perfect to be quiet for a while.

People say, back to normal or new normal. Neither of these things are reasonable. There are times in life where there is an actual dividing line. This is one of them.

Vacations, trips out of town, restaurants, and plans of any kind are for other people. There is a magical space inside their heads that doesn’t need to know where the nearest hospital is. The sense that things are clearing up, getting better, or that the virus is going away is like believing in unicorns. Rainbows happen sometimes but not because we will them to.

I say goodbye to how things used to be. I don’t even know what will be useful or useless after this. When I think of what it could look like for me at some yet to be determined time it looks like a white canvas. A clean, large, brand new blank slate. Like the first day of school, only better.

From the archives:
The Book

Hydration
The High Cost Of Being Me

Secret Service

Until I trust you, I don’t trust you. This is my default and I come by it honestly.

When something bad happens I become watchful. That is exactly how I am right now, during this global pandemic.

Fellow citizens are usually good people but they are impulsive and unpredictable.

Before the global pandemic, I covered a lot of ground. I rode the subway everywhere. I took photographs all over NYC while waiting for traffic lights, running errands, going to appointments, and commuting to work.

Now I go out very rarely and when I do I need my full brainpower to navigate congested streets full of people. I do not want to catch COVID-19 from a fellow citizen, remain asymptomatic but contagious and spread it around my household and my building. I don’t want to be sedated and sucking air from a ventilator. I do not want to be with fellow citizens who are losing their damned minds because it is 65 degrees and sunny.

Even before lockdown I stopped taking photographs outside. I turned my attention to stuff I could photograph inside of my apartment. That way I don’t have to be aware of my surroundings or dodging fellow citizens.

Constraint can be good for art. It has been - most of the time. I post the good, the great and maybe in retrospect the mediocre to bad on Instagram daily. I like to share my practice.

One day I had an idea. For the first time, I longed for fresh air. I wanted to photograph outdoors. I also thought that this might be a good thing for Jeremy. He’s a photographer. too. We are on the same page with COVID-19.

The plan was to go outdoors together. We would walk single file on the sidewalks and into the park. We would be spotters for one another and that way we could concentrate on our photography rather than fellow citizens. It will be like having the Secret Service, I told him.

This is not our first rodeo. When you’ve cared for an immunocompromised toddler, a global pandemic is like riding a bike.

Jeremy was gifted a period of time. While he was photographing my only job was to watch from all angles to see if fellow citizens were headed our way. One time, as he bent to get a different angle on a subject, I told him we had to move along. When the spotter tells you to move, you’ve got to listen and act immediately.

In the park, my Secret Service detail involved scouting emptier parts of the park, away from vectors on bikes, the brazenly unmasked, and the coughers. When I was on duty I did not look at my phone or become distracted.

Then it was my turn to have a protector. All of the time spent photographing inside the bathroom and out the window had a way of informing this work. I could keep busy in a very small area. There are no trees or grass inside of my apartment. That was enough to keep me engaged.

We didn’t have free reign, but that was okay. Like I said before, constraint can be good for art.

As we walked home, we took a circuitous route in order to avoid fellow citizens clogging the sidewalks. We walked single file at my insistence. The breeze and air invited us to do this again. We will.

You can follow me on Instagram at to see my recent photographic series called Shelter in Place and Protected Photographs. I also have pre-pandemic imagery there too.

You might also enjoy:
Best Case Scenario 
I suffered for their art
These Are My Subjects

The Book

Somebody wrote something no one else did. It wasn’t easy to find.

Looking as hard as I did made me question the idea that there is a book for everything.  But I didn’t want to have an orphan for a problem. I didn’t want to think that no one wanted to write about this.

Then it arrives, not just being itself but the newest, latest, updated version of itself. This book makes me a student again.

All of the notetaking skills I perfected in 10th grade come back.

One day I ask myself, what is my truth? My answer is sure and clear. He wrote the book, but the book is nothing without a reader.

I get out my composition book. The first pages are neat, then things go to chicken scrawl. My writing edges out of the margins crawling along them.

If I want to know my truth I look at my notes.



From the archives:
Hard Fall
Careful Words
Hospital Corridor

Listen
I understand now
What will take you weeks to know
I implement now
What you will stumble and scramble to do
Someday hence
Tripping over everybody else
Grasping at empty
In thin, tired air
Worsted, wishing
You’d listened then

From the archives:
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
The sun it did rise again