culture

Coronatine, Day Thirty-one (10×5)

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Not gonna lie, this is getting harder day by day. But here are today’s ten things I love about you, Coronatine.

  1. Snow. Say what you will about snow in April, but just listen to this video. All you will hear is… the soft sound of snow and some birds. No traffic. The world is so quiet right now, as if it needed a rest.
  2. With a quiet world in quarantine, it is nice to see reports of how much air pollution has decreased throughout the world. Being able to see the Himalayas. The air quality in Chinese cities improving. Even NYC has much clearer air. Maybe this quarantine will give us an idea of how much we really should cut back; that we can survive on much less and still have a good life. And we can actually try to save the Earth we have been destroying for so long.
  3. Fabian has not been very motivated to learn English or to watch the videos online. But he finally came upstairs and sat with me for an hour, reading a whole passage in English about Ramadan, answering questions, and really understood a lot. It was a major breakthrough, and I hope we can continue this every day.
  4. Even though they bitterly argued with me yesterday about having to do so, all the girls did get up at 8:30 today as I asked. I want to have some semblance of a routine, and sleeping till noon is not working for our family.
  5. Speaking of the girls, I allowed Izzy to take Riona to the pet store to get things from the pet store for her new cat, and Izzy took her to Chik-Fil-A as well. They both agreed to wear the masks (finally!) though I need to encourage Izzy to wear hers the right way.
  6. A friend of mine suggested a Yes Day for each kid to choose something that everyone in the family has to participate in. I met with the kids yesterday, and they agreed. So we’re having our first event tonight, organized by Riona: Monopoly!
  7. My Newcomers have consistently logged into my office hours every day. Almost every student. They love seeing each other’s faces, talking over each other, and just being their crazy selves. My paras have also both been logging on, and I review each day’s work and they help translate. It takes a village!
  8. Bruce didn’t have to work today since he works this Saturday, so he’s making meatloaf tonight, everyone’s favorite!
  9. Social media. Say what you will… but can you imagine being stuck in quarantine during the 80s? With nothing on TV, no internet, and no one to communicate with? Social media allows an escape, but it also allows a connection. I use it for news updates more than anything else (I probably read 20 articles a day from news agencies I follow or that my friends post), I connect with others (even got a phone call from someone I haven’t talked to in ten years based on something I’d posted!), and I think it can add a personal relevance to what is happening. For example, one of my high school friends lives in Queens, so she is at the epicenter of the NYC nightmare right now. It’s good to hear her first-person account. My college roommate lives in Wisconsin and experienced having her ballot not counted in that primary fiasco. Another high school friend lives in Canada and verified the tweet about actually applying for and receiving help, within two days, from the government.  Social media allows you to see the human connection behind the news stories. And… I love the memories feature on Facebook. Since I post every day, I have memories going 10 years back. I love seeing pics of my girls and me on a farm in the Netherlands, skiing, riding bikes, or even a regular old Monday when we made waffle sandwiches! And my girls would feel even lonelier without their social media connections. As much as we hate it, this is a time to be grateful for it.
  10. To go hand in hand with social media, just being able to connect with the world in unique way and to EXPOSE EVERYONE who is not helping us get out of this horrible situation… I think it’s a good thing. Social media has led to an increased awareness of all different types of people in the world, and has allowed people to read more firsthand accounts of their experiences with world events, and I do think change WILL HAPPEN once this is over. So, number ten for today comes back to hope. We just have to have hope.

Coronatine, Day Twenty-eight (10 x2)

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Day 2 of Quarantine Gratitude. It’s been a pretty rough day, and I’m disappointed by online learning for Newcomers, so this is going to be hard, but I am trying here!

  1. Gas prices. I know Trump’s an asshole, and these countries are having a bidding war right now, and I should have an electric car, but these prices are eleven years old, this is the first time I’ve filled my car in a month, and it’s a relief.
  2. Speaking of cars… it’s nice to run an errand with just a little traffic. Denver has horrible traffic, and it’s been nonexistent lately.
  3. People listening to the governor. Went to the grocery store today, and they had it all set up for social distancing with one-way aisles, a line around the store, and most people were wearing masks! It was good to not be the only one.             
  4. Speaking of food: our school’s food bank, and in particular, Jaclyn Yelich. She called me two days ago because she just knew some students weren’t getting food. In the midst of a crisis, when she had to move her entire food bank to another location, she knew that some of my ELLs were getting desperate. We made a plan. She formed her delivery team, she asked me to help, and we brought food to six of my Newcomer families. She had a whole warehouse of boxes and bags ready to go for each family. This woman has worked all her life, raised her daughter, and now has given up her entire retirement to feed the families at our school, which takes more time than a full-time job. She gives hope when there is no hope.
  5. The moon. I have always loved the moon, and in high school even won an award for a story titled, “Catch Me a Moon.” In all its clichéd symbolism, its constancy is calming right now. Knowing that it’s up there, shining bright, so far from all of our problems, connecting us all with our own special glimpses of it wherever we might be in the world, is a comfort.
  6. Gardening friends. I am certainly not a master gardener, though I bought a house from one! What a joy today to receive the generous gift of an entire tray of spices and vegetables for my garden. Their petite green stems bring life to this sunny window, waiting, just like us, for the frost to stop and the world to be ready for a permanent move to a better life that is waiting on the other side of the glass.
  7. Audiobooks. In a house of six, it’s difficult to sit down and read. So many distractions and background noise. I love audiobooks because I can take them anywhere with me–in the car, walking the dog, gardening, or cross-stitching.
  8. Cross-stitching. I will never be a seamstress, but this I learned to do when I cross-stitched baby blankets for my three girls. It is relaxing and methodical, and fulfills my need to always be doing something with my hands. And when this is all over, I’ll have a pretty picture to hang! 
  9. Work flexibility. My district and school have handled these crazy circumstances very well, and they’ve offered us so much flexibility with office hours, grading expectations, and the amount of assignments. It has been so refreshing to work within a schedule that I create, which as a teacher, just never happens. It’s so nice to have time on weekdays to run errands, to fit in an appointment, and to make my own schedule.
  10. To go with the theme of weekdays and flexibility, it’s refreshing to be able to clean my house whenever I want and not try to cram the chores in between a harried workday, harried dinner prep, and a harried life. Cheers to vacuuming on a Friday morning and a non-harried life!

 

Coronatine, Day Twenty-one

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The email comes through in the midst of an online staff meeting, and a couple of teachers immediately burst into tears and soon have to log off.

That is the world we live in right now. Every bit of news is a bit of sadness, tears waiting just behind the corners of our eyes, ready for action.

I cannot cry in front of people and refuse to even fully place myself in the video meeting, posting a picture instead. Because I am always ready for action, and I have a list for this day: Home Depot to buy wood and sand, the garden center for my seed potatoes, two grocery stores to spend another huge percentage of our salaries to stock up on food before Bruce’s money is no more.

And while I am at the store, I stock up on all the things my Newcomers certainly don’t have: lollipops, candy bars, chips, pens, pencils, tootsie rolls, card stock, and colored paper.

In less than a year, they moved, with or without their families, across the world. They barely speak English. They barely know anyone. We’ve barely begun making progress towards everything from basic phonics to common expressions such as, “How do you get around your city?”

And the email has officially announced that I will not see their faces in my classroom for the remainder of the school year.

I have been teaching for seventeen years, primarily English to immigrants, but I have never taught truly new immigrants, and it has changed me. It has opened my eyes to the injustices of the world, to the beauty of the world, in a way that no other class ever has.

Everything about online learning will be difficult: those students who left their Chromebooks at home. Those who have to care for little ones. Those who are working. Almost all of whose parents are working and potentially tracking in this virus every day.

Being isolated in a small apartment without any exposure to our culture that they sacrificed everything to be a part of for… who knows how long?

None of this–going to the grocery store without a mask and gloves,  going to teach those beautiful faces, going to travel the world like I’ve always traveled the world–will ever be the same.

None of us–the immigrants who still have hope for their futures, for their families, the teachers who are trying to figure out how to teach piano and ceramics to kids who don’t have pianos or clay, the essential workers who wish they could stay home and can’t, the healthcare workers who are making their wills–will ever be the same.

So this is all I can do, tears present now. Ask my girls to help fill bags. Type up letters and schedules to print in case my students haven’t checked the online updates. Put in colored paper and card stock so that they can make hearts and cards for all that they love and all that they hope for.

And hope that we all make it to the other side of what the world has become.

Coronatine, Day Fourteen

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My elderly uncle with the ‘No Solicitors’ sign on his door happily steps right out onto the covered porch to collect the three Costco-oversized boxes of tissues that I have brought to him.

“Are you going to come in?” he asks as I creep backward, down the three concrete steps.

“You better wash your hands now that you’ve touched those boxes,” I immediately reply. “I could have it, and it lives on cardboard for 24 hours.”

He brushes me off and acts, quite nonchalantly, as if he’s been expecting me. “Thanks, I was waiting for something like this. I use five or six tissues every time I have to clean my catheter.”

What a lucky find, I think. “Well, Floyd, you’re the master of social distancing. How have you handled the Coronavirus?”

It’s true. He’s been reclusive, the middle child and only boy wrenched between six sisters, for his entire adult life. He lives in the same house he bought as a young man, the 1950s Mayfair ranch decorated exactly the same as the original owner, and “Why should I change what’s already there?” He worked as a TV repairman for as long as there were TVs to repair, and happily retired twenty years ago to a lifestyle of only visiting the grocery store and denying most social invitations from his six sisters.

But now there are no tissues in his grocery store. No toilet paper. No frozen vegetables. No eggs. No sense of security for the five square miles he drives within any given week.

He talks my ear off in the fifteen minutes I stand in his front yard, keeping my six feet of social distancing requirement.

This isn’t like yesterday when I drove to all corners of the city to deliver my students their much-needed headsets, folders, notebooks, and supplies, when their parents seemed grateful for my latex gloves and, more importantly, my brevity. “Check Schoology!” I found myself shouting too many times, “It has everything you’ll need for your life right there!”

This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: my elderly uncle, my not-so-elderly parents (who also need tissues), who I can only stand on the porch with, and not really visit.

“You’re really not going to come inside?” they inquire, and I mention Italy. We’ve all heard about Italy. My father’s mother was from Italy, still has living relatives there. “Over sixty, Dad,” is all I really have to say (my parents are 66).

And how did I manage in the Costco line today? The rain hadn’t started yet, nor the snow. It was cold, and I had my latex gloves on, plus my ski mask (I didn’t think far enough in advance to buy medical masks, so when I put it on in the parking lot, Fabian said he’d prefer to wait in the car. I didn’t care. I’m not fucking with this shit). I waited a good thirty minutes to socially distance myself, six feet back from the guy in front of me, to get in the store.

And they still didn’t have toilet paper.

This was after we visited the Mexican Envios, always open, line out the door, everyone ready to send money home to their poorer-than-any-of-us-here families back home. My boy was in and out in fifteen minutes, but his poverty-stricken father had to wait in line for three hours to get that money we sent him because this was the first day out of seven that the banks were open, and the seventh day out of infinity that he is unable to work and support those two baby girls.

Never mind that he lives in the most dangerous city on Earth with a corrupt government and police on every corner making sure you don’t go where you’re not supposed to.

Never mind that he doesn’t even have a mortgage because his house is a shack on his boss’s property constructed entirely of corrugated sheets of metal.

Never mind that however bad you think this is for us, standing in the cold in the Costco line, cleaning your catheter with the last bits of tissue, wishing you could hug your parents…

We still live here. Where capitalism, evil as it may be, allows me to trump the system and send an extra hundred dollars home to Honduras because, God, why the fuck not?

This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: six boxes of tissues delivered. Check. Three hundred dollars sent to Honduras to buy food. Check. Wondering who has it among us, and which ones will die. Check.

What else is there to say?

I planted spinach just in time for the snow to water it. Please let it grow. Please, God, let it grow.

 

 

Coronatine, Day Thirteen

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i broke free today

with packets for every kid

(delivered by me)

and to top it off

i made me a home office

for online learning

(but it still won’t work

we all know relationships

are all that will work)

Coronatine, Day Ten

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here are my children

throwing frisbees in the park

(they’ve never done this)

quarantine, day nine:

presidential rampages,

orders to stay home

just look at my son:

showing pup what he can do

with our family

card and board games win

(break news cycle doom and gloom)

We WILL get through this.

Funny (Not Funny)

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Sometimes negative energy just builds upon itself. I suppose that’s what’s happening now, even though this has been happening to us for weeks and we are just entering the actual week of Daylight Savings, full moon, AND Friday the 13th. Madre mía.

So I am going to look at the funny/not funny moments of the past twenty-four hours.

Funny: In the emergency room waiting room last night, I had to explain Furries to my Honduran son. “Some people just think they are animals, and they like to dress that way all the time, and that’s why he has on the suit and the raccoon tail.” “Oh… well his face already looks like an animal.” I had already looked away, so I had to wait a moment to steal a glance of the dark glasses, the perfectly-raccoon-shaped beard, the dyed mustache, and be ever-so-grateful that Fabian only speaks Spanish so the poor gringo couldn’t understand what he had said as I stifled my laughter.

Not Funny: After a long day of working and screaming at children for ignoring me and running seven blocks in frustration and watching my baby girl kill it in her ensemble role of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Jr., after I had just put on my favorite outfit of all time (pajamas) to settle into a stupid sitcom in my bed with my puppy who has his own water glass (Figure 1)… a loud crash in the kitchen called me downstairs (we thought the cat had knocked over one of her daily glasses).

I rushed downstairs because, as usual, all three girls ignored our, “Clean up after your cat!” calls, and found myself standing in a trail of blood that led from the knife on the floor at the kitchen entryway all the way to the sink where my son stood, trying to flush out a wound so deep and scary that all I could do was grab a wad of paper towels and scream, “BRUCE!!!!! GET DOWN HERE NOW!!”

(No, I did not actually take a picture of the bloody knife. This is a reenactment)

Funny: The mulleted, heavily-tattooed paramedic whose job at the emergency room was to walk into the waiting room and scream out his mispronunciation of names, then rush back behind the desk to reread the names and try again, most times failing on the second attempt.

“Luceeero!!” No response. Breathless rush behind the desk. “Sandra (the a pronounced as in apple, heavy Southern drag to boot) Luceeeero?” No response. Breathless rush behind the desk. “Lu-SAR-oh?” “Oh, yo soy Sandra Lucero.”

“Rizzo! … Rizzo!… ” Breathless rush behind the desk. “Roos! Roos!”

“Do you mean Ruiz? I think that’s us.” (To the side: “Rizzo? Like in Grease? Have you seen Grease? Maybe we’ll have to watch it later.”)

Not Funny: Walking into my kitchen at 9:30 pm on a Friday night after bitching and screaming at my son, after posting a blog post, after my love-hate relationship with him, after everything I’ve done, and thinking, “Is he trying to harm himself?”

Because everything that I complain about means nothing.

Because every spot of blood splattered on my wall, on my tiled floor, on my heart, means everything.

Because if I lost him now, I would be as brokenhearted as if I lost one of the three babies I gave birth to.

Because I love him.

(And he did not harm himself. He is a boy. He ran across three countries to come to my home. And he was literally trying to catch a Japanese steel chef’s knife that was falling from the counter to the floor. Because he’s a boy. And he catches KNIVES.)

Funny: “Oh, I will call the actual police on you! You think I’m part of the DPD? I don’t work for the DPD, and you need to get out of here NOW!!! I will NOT be cussed at! I don’t have your stuff and I don’t know where it is! GET OUT NOW!!”

“Miss, what’s she yelling about?”

“This guy was looking for his stuff, and she doesn’t know where it is, and she wants to call the police on him because he used bad words.”

“See Miss, that’s why you shouldn’t use bad words.”

Not Funny: “This emergency room is so calm and quiet compared to how it is in Honduras.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Honduras, everyone in the emergency room is either dying or dead from gunshots and knife wounds. Everyone is screaming. And dying. Because the gangs have ruined their lives.”

Funny: The doctor asked us to come into the temporary room until we could get to the real “room behind a curtain” that had a bed. He was the only one so far who had attempted to speak Spanish to Fabian, and even though my Spanish is always broken, I don’t think it was as broken as his.

After asking about the cut, the incident, the pain, he asked, “Está numblado?” Fabian didn’t respond. He asked again. No response. “Está dormido?” “Sí, sí.”

After he wrapped it up, he told me he thought Fabian cut a nerve, and that was why it was numb. “But you know, I don’t know why he wouldn’t respond to me. I use that word all the time, ‘numblado,’ and usually I get some response.”

Fabian and I returned to the waiting room. I must admit that, other than dormido, I didn’t know the word for numb in Spanish. “The doctor was asking you if your finger was numblado, did you not understand?”

“Like, the sky is cloudy?”

“No, not nublado, numblado, because the word in English for dormido is numb. Numblado? Es una palabra?”

I pulled up Google Translate. “Numb: entumecido.”

And we were crying laughing. Because language is so hard. And the poor doctor took the word numb and added “-lado” and it sounds like the word for cloudy skies (nublado), not a slashed-nerve finger. And because it was almost midnight by then and he’d lost a lot of blood and we were exhausted and everyone around us was wearing a coronavirus mask and he just couldn’t understand why. And it was just… funny.

Not Funny: “I hate hospitals. I’ve seen too many people die in hospitals.”

His cousin. His other cousin. His friend. His everyone-in-his-life-he-can-think-of killed. By gangs.

Funny: Me telling the story to the girls over biscuits and gravy the next morning.

“Numblado? Numblado?”

And Fabian smiling like he’s not in pain, like it doesn’t matter, like life can go on because this scar will match all the other scars he’s acquired from his life lived in poverty searching for food, searching for transportation, searching for a reason to keep on keeping on.

Not Funny: Everything I just put on this page.

And life. Life is funny. (Not funny).

But No One Seems to Care

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i share Bernie’s view

of providing for the poor

so simple, so hard

Inquilinos

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My Rohingya refugee who could not read or write in Burmese (but learned somewhat decent verbal English from the militia who murdered his parents) had to quit school, after just three months, to work full time at a chocolate factory.

My Honduran and Salvadoran refugees live lives in limbo waiting for court hearings that are mostly clouded in misery with threats of deportation.

My son awaits the opportunity to work while his cousin, his only nearby family, has to move from state to state working roofing jobs with no options for permanency because of his lack of papers and English skills.

Meanwhile, 20,000 people stood in line in 8-degree weather this morning to support our president, just down the road from my house, claiming his stance on immigration is one of the most important policies they support.

These white people (it’s always fucking white people) are simply fulfilling their American dream: If it works for me, it’s fine. Fuck everyone else.

And he isn’t my son. I was reminded of this last night when DHS came and told me that we can’t send so much money home to his destitute family, that he cannot leave the state for more than seven days (forget our three-week family vacation), that he must take extra English classes and study a vocation and be an independent tenant.

Not an eighteen-year-old boy whose vision was so focused on running for a train to escape abuse and poverty that he couldn’t see much beyond that journey. He just knew that here was the goal, here with all the money in the world… here with all the opportunities in the world… and screaming, raging racists waiting behind every third door, anxious to keep those things from people like him.

I didn’t know the Spanish word for tenant, so after the meeting, when I was explaining all the depressing news to him, I pulled up Google Translate and couldn’t help but be immediately disturbed by its interpretation: inquilino.

The word sounds wrong to me, like a sour slice of lime in my mouth, a cottony accusation. So similar to inquietude. On the same list as inquiline: an animal that lives habitually in the nest or abode of some other species. Its origins in Chile speak of servitude… submission… slavery.

“We can’t have you taking our money for a vacation. This isn’t a handout.”

I’m not asking for a handout. I already had the entire trip booked and paid for, and he could easily fit in the backseat of my Honda Pilot and lay his eyes on Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and Puget Sound, places he may never be able to see otherwise, but… OK.

I won’t use your fucking handout to take a sliver of his summer for three weeks of adventure and joy.

I won’t ever see my Rohingya refugee again because he will be working twelve-hour shifts for minimum wage for the rest of his life so that people can buy a box of chocolates for their Valentine.

My husband could lose his job at any moment because he works for a corporation, like all other corporations that are part of the white American dream, that overpays its CEOs and lays off its workers to cut costs.

But the economy is great, right? And with Democratic infighting led by billionaire Bloomberg, it sure feels like that crowd of 20,000 standing in the cold is going to win this election. So we are in for another four years of heartbreak.

We are all inquilinos. Tenants in houses not owned by us, in jobs not guaranteed to us, in a country that owns us because we are not allowed to own it.

Inquilinos. Inquietude. Indefinite. Inmigrantes.

And it would be nice if we could just be human.

 

 

 

 

Perfectly Cracked, Perfectly Hopeful

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i walk my puppy,

fight weekend grocery store crowds,

and bake a cheesecake

before 10 a.m.,

i cook raspberry compote

and finish laundry

by noon, i’m ready

to begin this Sunday cleanse

and climb out of here

the city beckons

(no, no—the world beckons

for another chance)

our democracy

and the fate of our future

rest with how we vote

(even though it’s cracked,

my daughter’s birthday cheesecake

is one of many)

let this election

be one of many chances

to give us all hope