Running from Coronavirus (Part 11)

Well, it finally found me. A little over four years since Covid came into the world Covid came to me. On Monday evening I started feeling a little iffy, or icky, or punky and thought, hm. I think when I wake up tomorrow morning, I'm going to be sick. Indeed I was sick when I woke up, but it wasn't the morning but the middle of the night, about four hours after I went to sleep. I woke up with a fever, sweating. I got up drank a bottle of Gatorade, and then some water, went back to bed where I tossed and turned until about 10AM the next day. At that point I took my temperature, ate some fruit, and went back to bed, where I stayed the rest of the day, getting up in the evening to order some food, watch an episode of Shogun, play a single game Catan, and then back to bed where I stayed for another twelve or so hours sort of sleeping, sort of not sleeping, reading, and drifting to and fro amongst sweaty half thoughts and fever dreams. My fever peaked somewhere around 39.5 °C, or 103 °F when I had the wherewithal to sit up and take note. I took a Covid test in that first morning but it came up negative. 

The second day was a similar experience of debilitating all day fever, though I went into the day hopefully, thinking that I had the flu and that it would tail off, which it kind of did. A little. I had a meeting over Zoom that evening with some folks back in the States and I didn't tell them I was sick, not wanting to derail the conversation. Anyway, eventually I was sweating profusely, wiping my brow and neck and sneaking in sips of orange juice. Immediately afterward I drank a dose and a half of Nyquil and returned to bed.

It wasn't until the third day that the fever started to lift such that I could look at a computer screen well enough to send out a few necessary emails. This was also the day, later in the afternoon, that I took another Covid test to find out that yes, in fact, this is Covid. That night I laid in my bed reading terrifying stories about long Covid and how Covid changes the brain and how long it takes for it to typically pass. By the fourth day (and I am writing in the fifth), all of the initial symptoms of fever had mostly disappeared and I started to feel like myself again. Today I went running and feel ok but am still testing positive, however faint the line on the little plastic rectangle that diagnoses me. Yesterday I had a complete loss of smell and taste but already, today, it's coming back a bit. I think. I imagine. I still feel a bit achy and have slight amount of congestion but am holding out hope for a negative diagnosis by tomorrow morning such that I can have 24-hour head start to begin my last seven-week course of the academic year in person. With a mask on of course. 

**

To finally get Covid comes as a kind of relief. Ah, I can say. This is what it's like. Covid. Uh Hm. Of course. Of course, this is also not what it's like, the strain of Covid that finally found me, according to the China CDC (as found in another source that I will not link to here but you can google it if you want to know more), is the JN.1 variant of the Omicron variant. So there you have it. Covid, formerly known as Covid-19 or Coronavirus, as I called it back in 2020 when I started to write about it, has come a long way. I'm lucky to not have gotten it when it was younger and more powerful. Like me these days, it's a little bit slower and not as effective. That said, that was a nasty ass fever and though I had gotten a bit lax on the vaccinations, my last one coming in May of 2022, in the future I'm definitely going to get some Covid booster shots. And a flu shot too while I'm at it. Like that Foreigner song I Want to Know What Love Is, except replace love with not feeling sick as hell and completely screwing up this week long break that I had plans for. But as I said, it could have been worse and hopefully the faint lines on the Covid tests are not followed by a disappointing recursion or relapse, but a seamless fade into normalcy. 

To finally get Covid has also triggered reflection, thinking about all the time and energy that I spent trying not to get Covid. I thought about the early days of running out of China with Jo and Dave, of running back the US, to Indiana and Cloud, to Wisconsin and my parents, and then back to China. I thought about those early days of trying to live, to teach online, holding my breath in elevators, or dosing my hands in sanitizer after grocery shopping. I don't feel silly or ashamed for any of that, but amazed at our heightened sense of focus and purpose and how the world shrank so quickly in the enactment of ritual, a new normal and then some. And masks. And gloves. How clear some of those memories are of everyday life, the radical uncertainty that propelled us: the beach house in Australia, the student apartments in Indiana, the yellow house in the dead of Winter and the empty flat at the start of Spring. Hand sanitizer in the glove box or the door pocket, and there were crumpled masks in all my pockets. And yours. And Zoom. And Fucking Zoom. 

I remember watching Chris Cuomo and his brother, the governor, go on in their reassuring explanatory prose. I remember prepping for the faculty meetings over Zoom on a stranger's formica kitchen counter, trying to figure out how we were going to keep things going, Kathy's assertion that of course, we'd do that. I remember drinking a flat white for the first time on the beach of Coolangatta, two hours after getting off the plane from Hong Kong. Such a beautiful warm day, and the ocean, the three of us still humming with the excitement of our escape. I remember sitting with Jake and Mary-Lou on the back patio of their sweet little house and the zoo keeper who sold me medicine. I remember Indiana, and shopping at Pay Less as if our lives depended on it, cooking, and joking around in the kitchen. We were lucky to have one another. I remember going over to Rachelle and Aaron's tiny house of dogs to watch movies and I remember the brightly lit second floor flat and the brilliantly quiet deadbolt of the student apartment door, trying to close it as quietly as possible when I would sneak out for a cigarette. I remember Zooming with my buddies and playing Catan online with my nephews, sprawled on the sectional couch in the yellow house. Long late winter afternoons and teaching over Zoom in the evenings. AirBnB. Every day there would be more conflicting news, more uncertainty, more predictions, more cancellations, and more instructions. At the same time, everyday was a little bit easier as we figured out how to live like this. Every day that first half of year Covid was mind bending, from January to June, but I don't exactly remember the rest. 

**

It took a minute to get back into China where in October of 2020 I endured a month long quarantine. I can remember this but don't. There was nothing interesting about it but the metaphor of the quarantine event itself as the perfect birth canal into the police state that was Covid era China, RIP December 2023. Please show your health code in the name of peace. And it was for awhile, the glory days of 2021 China, while the rest of the world struggled, China relaxed, and vice versa in 2022. The first thing my mother asked me when I told her I had Covid the other day was, are you okay? Did they lock you up? They don't do that anymore here mom, I reassured her. But anyway, here we are, out of the soft focus of nostalgia and back into the political reality of international such and such. Which is where Covid is destined to go, unremembered as an unprecedented time of radical change but a political talking point to distract us from how deeply transformative the past four years have been. Many had someone who died in the most horrible ways possible, alone and afraid in a soulless hospital; others, like myself, splintered into anti-social habit patterns of various forms of tech addiction, distrust, and loneliness: there wasn't enough touch to go around and the CDC would rather we not anyway. Schools, at least in States, went online and that seemed to have been a mistake, memories of my nephews, young boys barely able to punch the buttons on the simplest videogame sitting at their grandma's kitchen table, tasked with Zooming into class on laptop computers. I don't get it. I mean, I get it. I mean, I don't think anyone needs me to write a laundry list of terrible things that Covid hath wrought. 

But from my perspective, Covid has taught me a lot. For example, I know what a spike protein looks like. I know that airlines have a lot of regulations. I know that Anthony Fauci is well spoken, though after awhile it seemed like he was always saying the same thing. I know how quickly people like me, white collar and educated, can adapt to living indoors and through screens. And I find it alarming how quickly our preferences can change. I don't know if this is real, but it's a rare occasion that I have a random conversation with a person I didn't previously know. I swear it used to happen all the time. I can't figure out if it's just me or "them," or some kind of unstudied social convention that has mutated, like Delta or Omicron. Or social media. Or getting older. Or being lonely and unhappy. It's hard to say. And it's hard to separate any of this from itself, Covid, Trump, China, The Internet, Me, You, etc. All of it, at the same time, and incredibly loud. Meanwhile, it feels like I am standing here with an expired firework in my hand. Or maybe a melted popsicle. Or a cigarette that burnt out quite a while ago and lost in thought I forgot that I was holding it in my hand. I can't speak for anyone else, but I've learned a lot from the experience of Covid. What exactly, and however, I don't know. 

There's the facts and the knowledge about how to protect myself from this abstract concept of Covid-19, and then there's all the ways that I've been primed and pumped full of fear over these years to not do this or not do that; all the tiny little habits of mind that I have learned to protect myself with, be it ideologically, biologically, professionally, or personally. By the time I got Covid it wasn't a thing any more, which to me means that it was never about Covid itself, its virus-ness, but always about the institutions and systems and data banks and markets and politics and countries and regulations that Covid infected. All of this too large and immense for any of us to understand yet the only language I have to understand why any of this happened is in the language of these faceless machines. But don't get me wrong: I'm not mad. If you give you me a vaccine I'll take it. If you tell me to lock down I'll do it. And if I need a health code to enter, just say so. They tell us we can't go back and I believe them. In fact, I agree with them. Pre-Covid is as unimaginable as Covid was as imaginable pre-Covid. Not the imagination of science-fiction pandemic politics, which I think were adequately dreamed of, but how the every day has changed, the paranoia and the hesitation and dissolution of community. What happened during Covid is already an overgrown ruin of a memory, due for excavation. I offer this shovel full of dirt. 

Four Anecdotes

I was attending a book release talk and I slid into the middle of one of the rows, long rows with fifteen or so seats such that to get up in the middle of the talk would set off a chain reaction of others needing to stand up. A colleague was also going to sit in the same row and she had chosen to sit on the end. I said, "come to the middle, it will be easier for folks to get in." She did and sat next to me. We exchanged pleasantries and I noticed that she was wearing a mask and that she also had dark circles under her eyes. I asked if she was sick and she said yes. She then asked if I wanted her to sit further away from me and I hesitated, but said yes, thank you. As the presentation started I could hear her coughing and I remembered that I had mask in my coat pocket. I fished it out and put it on and didn't look her way for the rest of presentation. 

*

On basketball night, the first basketball night since the month long winter break, one of the people on our team had arranged for the local fire department to come and play a friendly match. None of us had played any basketball over the break and we were worried that the firefighters would beat us badly. Warming up before they arrived at the gym, we joked and chatted, imagining how large and strong they would be. We talked about asking a student to set a fire outside the window of the basketball court in the middle of the game, such that they'd all have to run  to put the fire out and spare us the humiliation of being beaten by thirty points. When they arrived they arrived as a team and in unforms, straight backed postures and in formation, blank expressions on their faces--all business. But when the game started it became clear that we were much larger than them and that nobody on their team, asides from the fire captain, was particularly skilled at basketball. We beat them by thirty or so points. 

*

Over the winter break my girlfriend who was visiting had borrowed a bike from a colleague at work. She never ended up using it, as the weather got too cold and the air was too polluted to make going for a bike ride seem like a good idea. The bike sat in my apartment for about a month, taking up space. After she left, the responsibility fell to me to return the bike. The bike was too small and I found that I was putting off returning it. I'd rather ride my own bike, sleek and fast and fitted to my size. The other day, however, I had said that I'd return it on that day and so in the morning I raised the seat and rode back to campus. I sat low on the bike but it was comfortable. A mountain bike with large tires and a springy suspension system. I pedaled casually and nonchalantly, feeling like I was riding a BMX bike or a low-rider, like Lil Mike and Funnybone on Reservation Dogs. I felt cool. 

*

On the first day of the semester I went to eat lunch in the cafeteria. My class was going to start in thirty minutes, so I hurried over from my office and walked up to the third floor where the Chinese food was served. I didn't see anyone I knew or felt comfortable sitting with and so I headed to the small tables by the window that overlooks the library. Laying on the ground in front of my table was a brown piece of paper. I picked it up and found that it was 10,000 Japanese Yen. I set it on the table as I ate, thinking that maybe whoever had dropped it might come by looking for it. But nobody did and after I finished, I put it in my pocket. Later, in class, I told my students about the money. I also told them that a friend of mine once told me that it was bad luck to pick up money from the ground. 

At the end of class I used the story as a prompt for two freewrites: the first about luck and the second about money. The idea was that I wanted them to feel contrast, between the ease of writing about one thing over the other, that falling into a groove was not only dependent on the writer but on the choice of topic. And that its important to make note of when things seem to get easier. Over time, with enough notes, we might be able to develop better strategies to help us write. A "know thyself" kind of thing. At least, that was what I was going to talk about but we had run out of time. On their way out, I asked my students which was easier to write about and they all answered "luck." 

Shootings

 Late on Sunday night I got a text message from an old friend asking if I was ok. They had seen the news about a shooting in Charlottesville. Yes, I'm fine. In bed. I looked up the news and saw that three students had been shot on the UVA campus. Classes and everything else was canceled on Monday. And Tuesday. And as the news leaked out and details emerged we all learned more about yet another act of ridiculous gun violence in the United States. The following Monday four people were shot at University of Idaho. The past five years that I've been in China, I'd read about shootings in the States and over breakfast in the university cafeteria would watch coverage on CNN (until they stopped showing CNN in the cafeteria). As an American I'd feel embarrassed and sad. Also bewildered as the problem seemingly only got worse, gets worse. 

On Monday I received twelve text messages from different folks around the States asking if I was ok. I am grateful that people were thinking of me, though its a bit strange when I get more attention for being in the vicinity of shooting than when its my birthday, a week earlier. In 2013 when I was a PhD student there was a shooting at Purdue, one student shooting another. The campus was locked down or "sheltering in place" and I sat in the library reading until the all clear text was sent out. To my memory I don't remember being asked much about it by others. It didn't make the national news as this UVA shooting did, which I guess is partly because these men who got shot were on the football team. The Purdue student was a graduate student TA in physics. 

What struck me about the text messages, so much that I called a friend about it to confirm if what I was feeling/thinking/seeing was based in reality, was that they all seemed to follow a similar pattern. Something like, heard about the shooting, are you ok? Again, I am always happy when someone thinks of me out of the blue. Not complaining. Love my friends and family. But the similarity of messages was striking and it made me think about conventions, that all the shootings in the US, which seemed to get worse and more dramatic, especially during the peak Trump years (though of course they were there before and will be there after); that all the shootings have contributed to the emergence of mass shooting rituals, what one is supposed to do and say when these events happen.

I point this out not to be a cynical asshole, though perhaps I can be this too, but that being away for so long is occasionally disorientating. It's hard to say how much has changed here in the last five years but there are things I notice that seem new to me, which in this case is a form of care that I hadn't experienced previously. An outsider's perspective is a precious thing. It doesn't last long as one acclimates and normalizes whatever one encounters. On the bright side of novelty, I also hadn't experienced Fall in central Virginia before, which is amazing. All the colors. All the changes. 

**

Post-script, December 1st: a few days after I wrote the above there was another shooting near where I'm living, this one in a Chesapeake Wal-Mart. Yet another man choosing to buy a gun and shoot people as a means to express his grievances. I read yesterday that the governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, is pushing for more funding into mental health services. Of course, that's what needs to happen. The privatization of the mental health industry across the US has been detrimental. When I lived in Indiana, another red state, a good friend of mine who is no longer with us had a psychotic break. This is a longer story, but the short version is that during the peak of his break he was wandering around the streets of Lafayette in bare feet yelling at others and himself as folks in this state sometimes do. Instead of being taken to a non-existent Indiana public mental health facility he was taken to jail for a week. Instead of helping him to find a way back from his break he had the shit beat out of him by both inmates and jailers and was put into solidary confinement. This is not how to treat those with mental illness. He was never the same since then and passed this last September. I miss my friend and am angry at how preventable all of this was. 

Youngkin's pledge to put more money into public mental health is a good thing. However, when asked about gun controls he spouted the typical Republican response, that now was not the time to be thinking about regulation but the time to mourn. Utter bullshit. The Chesapeake Wal-Mart shooting is a text book case as to why we need more gun control: the deeply repressed man who did the killing bought the gun hours before. It should not be that easy for someone who is having a bad day or week or month to obtain lethal weapons. It's as simple as that. For sure if there were more mental health services available or more generally, if there was more care (mental, physical, financial, educational, spiritual, etc.) available in the United States; for sure that could have made a difference. But there isn't because powerful Republican white Christians believe that people need Jesus more than they need government. In lieu of this fantasy, more laws on guns will save lives. 

Names

At the radio station two of the three people that I've shadowed suggested that I get a DJ name. Their motivations for this are clear: that as women, it might not be a good idea to put one's identity out there as faceless creepers sometimes gather. I witnessed this first hand in the studio, as a man called one of these DJs three times in the two hours of their show. The other DJ who I was shadowing late at night simply did not ever answer the phone. The third DJ, a man, was the only one of the three who used their own name, though I can't recall if he ever used his last name. I can't actually recall him ever referring to himself but this information is out there on the station's website, the name of a person's show and the name of the person. 

I was thinking about DJ names and what mine could be, that it might be easier to use an alias, DJ Food Lion or DJ Visiting Scholar or whatever. But whatever names I could think or or were suggested by friends were not names that I felt attached to. The crux of the matter is that my first name, Tyler, has never really felt like the right name. My middle and last name feel "right," but I've always had an ambivalence about my first name. I don't know what this feeling is exactly, or where it comes from, but introducing myself by my first name always generates a twinge of anxiety. Picturing myself saying it produces a twinge of anxiety. Seeing my name in print also conjures a twinge, though it's a twinge of disassociation more than anxiety. 

This twinge has been around for some time. I've said to a number of folks at points during the last fifteen or so years that I didn't really like my name or feel like it was my name. Certainly, I've never had the guts to claim a new name, to commit to a public declaration that that I didn't like my name. To do so would gum up the works of my relationships, public and private, and generate conversations that I don't want to have. I imagine though that after a period of questioning, my old name would fade away and whatever the new name was would take it's place. The problem, however, is that I've never found a new name that I liked, or a name that resonated with me loud enough to go through the efforts of changing my old name. 

More than that though, I wonder if I would develop the same kind of negative sentiment towards my new name. I brought this up with my therapist the other day, unsure what to make of this feeling of "name dysphoria" but taking it as a potential inroad to another, possibly insightful conversation. Predictably it lead to a conversation of past associations with the act of saying my name. A common experience when I was younger is that I would need to say my name twice because a person would not be able to hear my name clearly the first time and even if they did, that it would quickly be forgotten. I don't know how many times a person would guess that my name was Travis or worse, Trevor (a name that I associate with paragons of whiteness and privilege), and then I needed to correct them. 

There are two possibilities here: the first is that my feeling towards my name and saying my name is carried over from past experiences. Past experiences that are one part my perceptions of others and one part others perceptions of me. Psychology, and that experiences are embodied and reiterated into sensation each time encountered and like all creatures, I habitue myself to optimize encounters with my preferred feelings. This is the most likely explanation. Another possibility is that my name is in fact the wrong name. That I am actually not Tyler but someone else. This explanation presumes the existence of a second world, one where my true name resides, waiting for me to discover it. This part of me is not entirely rational but it makes valuable connections nonetheless. While I do occasionally take comfort in mysticism I have a hard time defending it. Meaning, I could not seriously argue that the sublime or nature or God or the gods know my true name. Names are not genetic or biological, but functional and ceremonial, I tell myself. They matter but not to the thing itself. 

In China people often think my name is Taylor but whatever, I can forgive them for this since it's China and being in China as a foreigner affords the freedom of not being someone else. Taylor, as in Taylor Swift, a known entity. I think of some of my Chinese students who seem quite malleable on the topic of their names, that it doesn't matter to them if I call them by their Chinese names or English names.  Whatever you prefer to call me, they say to me on the first day of class. "I'd prefer to call you by your real name." The assumption I often encounter while working with Chinese students is that it's easier for me, the foreigner, to remember and pronounce English names. I guess this is true, especially in the short term, but it also seems to me an open acknowledgement that the teacher/student relationship is a performance. My desire for authentic exchange with students, whatever that means, is hindered by this acknowledgement. 

My name, it seems, should be an authentic expression of who I am. This is the dream: one day I will open the flood gate that keeps my true self from emerging. That I will discover the key memory in therapy or that I will meditate away the pin that holds my defenses together. Or I will meet the right person and suddenly the way will open up. All of these things are possible but until then I will do my best to mitigate my cynicism. Taylor, Tyler, Trevor. I'd prefer to call you by your real name if you know it. If not, that's ok. I don't know mine either. 

Trust

Today I was thinking about trust. I'm always being asked by my phone to verify my identity. Recently I started to use online dating apps to meet people here in Charlottesville. Nothing has really come out of this aside from one in-person meeting in the last six weeks. This person took the bus to the coffeeshop we were meeting at and when it was time to go this person took the bus home though their apartment was a fifteen minute walk from the café. I was walking that way to get to my own home but it was important, I suppose, that I didn't know where this person lived. The underlying assumptions here was there was a possibility that I am an axe murderer and therefore, it is a bad idea to reveal too much to this stranger (me) in case something went wrong. 

Trust. I don't expect the birds to trust that I won't try to harm them, or the squirrels. I am not to be trusted by these animals but I can understand, and can smile in the face of their fear because I know that I am not interested in harming them and can also understand that they don't know that. Whenever I encounter a snake I tend to jump, even though I don't think of myself as being scared of snakes. When I took my computer in to get it fixed I needed to create an account that required me to verify my password. I needed to first create my account and then needed to log into this account again. At this point, instead of creating my own passwords for the many log-ins I must perform to gain access to even the most basic forms of information, I just let Google come up with something for me, something like JKJ!8987vUll3. Trust is proving who you are. 

On Thursday I will shadow one of the DJs at the local radio station as part of my training (I'm volunteering at the radio station), a late night radio show from 11PM-1AM, and they informed me that their partner would be there with them. It's hard not to think that this is because I am not be trusted, that I may be an axe murderer or a rapist. On the one hand I can understand this. Trust. I can understand that axe murderers exist and that I could be one of them. On the other, it feels like distrust has been encouraged as a default setting (note the passive voice, has been and the absence of the agent). I've been out of the United States for the last five years  more or less. I've missed living in the Trump years along with the two-ish years of Covid business. I wonder how much this period has conditioned us to distrust each other. After all, you might be; I might be, some kind of MAGA Lib Tard Incel. I might have Covid and not know it, or know it and not care. You can never be too careful. I also wonder how much the internet's algorithms have worked to affirm the idea that there are far too many bad people in the world who will do bad things to you given the chance.

I'm not a woman and don't know what it is to feel threatened as I walk down the street in the way the women might feel threatened. I cannot evaluate the truth of another's fear. Yet, I know what it is to feel threatened. I know also that there is a grey area between what I am projecting onto the world and what is actually there. I know that anxiety, excitement, discomfort, and pleasure all live together and are such good friends that they wear each other's clothes. I wonder what kind of a world we live in when my friends who have children are careful not to let their kids wander the neighborhood without parental supervision, as we did when we were children. I wonder, are there more axe murderers and rapists in the world? I don't know. At the same time, even as I write this I worry that simply articulating my thoughts on the matter might raise red flags, that they only reason I am writing on this topic is because, I am, in fact, an axe murderer and/or a rapist. Trust. 

Trust is not easy. There is trusting others and there is also trusting oneself, as the confidence experts like to say. While there are times that I have been brave, I mostly consider myself to be hiding in various ways, way that are born of distrust. Distrust of the other, that they will not understand what I am talking about or why. Often on my mind is the Holy Grail of who I might be, that is, a person full of confidence and unafraid. This way I would be able to express myself fully to all, to always be ready to ask for what I need. There are times when I have reached for this ideal and was met with shame or silence. There are times when I have reached for this ideal and was met in kind. This is trust, at least for me. Today I got a haircut and the man who cut my hair put his hands on me in a suggestive way. He was looking for touch and I certainty can understand that. I was not but I admired his forwardness. I did not know him, but I would not imagine that he would think to harm me.  

Running from Coronavirus (Part 10)

In 2020 I escaped the lockdown but not in 2022. Kunshan, where I live in China, is a city of nearly a million that borders Shanghai to the West. It could be considered a suburb of Shanghai but it is technically an 'administrative' part of Suzhou, a city of 10 million further west of Kunshan. From March until early June, Shanghai was locked down. The Kunshan lockdown started about a month later and lasted until the first week of May. I left China on the 9th of May, just as Kunshan was beginning to open up. 

Beginning in April, The Kunshan lockdown consisted of compounds disallowing the folks who live there from leaving, but for once every two days to get groceries. There were also daily testing requirements that were carried out by health professionals who set up testing booths in the compounds.

The Kunshan lockdown was preceded by a lockdown in neighboring Suzhou that started in March, though by April their lockdown had ended. Thus, with Shanghai locking down mid-March and Suzhou locked down, there was a sense of inevitability that eventually Kunshan would be locked down. I don't remember exactly how many cases were found in Kunshan but it was relatively few, something like four or seven. These small numbers, when I would tell folks who didn't live in China, usually provoked a laugh that such a small number would provoke such a strong reaction. Covid zero-tolerance, or, as the Chinese government has labeled it, 'dynamic Covid zero,' required such measures. The alternative would be to let Covid run rampant which would be devastating in terms of the Chinese health care system. Hundred of thousands of people would likely die. One thing that I think is both a cliché and possibly one of the most important truisms when thinking about why the Chinese government implements particular policies is that China has a lot of people who live together in dense urban areas. On a normal day the hospitals are busy and chaotic. The way that Covid has overrun most health care systems by tying up resources would be multiplied tenfold in China. Simply, letting Covid run wild is not an option if safety and security are the most important priorities, which I think, arguably, is what the Chinese government subscribes to. The Omicron variant, however, with its improved ability to spread, has made these lockdowns less effective as a means of controlling the infection rates, putting the legitimacy of the severe lockdown policies into question. 

From an experiential standpoint, the lockdown was a bummer but survivable. Five weeks is not a lot when compared to the three months of lockdown in Shanghai (which is still ongoing for folks who live in a compound where they found positive cases), but it was a formative experience. The first two weeks were the most frenzied, where groceries were for the most part out of food. Like everywhere else in the world, people bought large amount of food such that shelves were empty. 

But that didn't last long. Kunshan is relatively small by Chinese standards. Though some kinds of food were hard to find, such as Western foods like Cheese and butter, vegetables, fruit, and meat were available in the grocery stores after a couple weeks. In my complex I could still order food out from the small number of restaurants that were still open and making deliveries. Within the complex people exchanged food, set up small buying groups, and otherwise found ways to collaborate on getting what they needed. Since I lived alone my food needs were relatively easy to meet, whereas, I'd imagine that feeding a family of five or more was significantly more harrowing. There was a week when I worried about about eggs but eventually found some and then found more than enough. One day I walked over to the large chain grocery store and was lucky enough to find a single block of cheese which, in addition to what I already had, met my cheese needs for the rest of the lockdown. From what I understand cheese is still hard to find in Kunshan these days. 

Asides from grocery stories and a few restaurants, all of Kunshan was shut down. With my friend Jun, I took long bike rides around the city, riding though empty streets to Kunshan's parks. We could leave every two days with a special pass that was signed by the security. For those resourceful enough, some folks would acquire two of these passes and thus be able to leave everyday, the off day of one being an on day of the other. With all the rules and regulations in China, one learns ways to get around them. 

Meanwhile, university classes moved entirely online, which was not all that big of a deal since everyone, students, faculty, and admin, have been dealing with variations of Covid shutdowns for the last couple of years. Life, then, in Kunshan during the lockdown was a relatively smooth. Restrictive and oppressive yes, but as far as material needs, all of mine were met. I watched a lot of television. Would go running within the closed loop of my compound. The weather was more or less perfect for most of those five weeks in the Spring, flowers blooming with temperatures in the mid-70's. The problem was not, as usual, the material conditions but the threat of the Chinese government taking one out of one's home for the sake of maintaining those materials conditions for the majority. 

Running from Coronavirus (Part 9)

This is a continuation of a series of posts that I wrote in the Spring of 2020, when I left China at the outset of the Covid epidemic. At that time is was called Coronavirus, which as a name seems kind of antiquated. In Chinese its name is 新冠, or Xīnguān, 'new crown,' literally, referring to the spiky shape of the virus and the fact that at that time, it was a 'novel' corona virus. Once again I've left China to be back in the States, escaping not so much the virus but the lockdowns implemented over the course of this Spring. 'Running' is still an apt verb. This time, however, I will be in the States for a year before heading back to China as I have a pre-tenure sabbatical such that I don't need to teach or do service for my university. Right now I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, staying at my parents house. All summer I will be taking trips, visiting folks that I haven't gotten a chance to see for the last 18 or so months before I head to Charlottesville, Virginia in August where I will be a visiting scholar in the religious studies department for the 2022-23 academic year. That's another story, but I wanted to revisit the some of the questions that I was writing about a couple years ago; specifically, the question of which Covid response, US vs. China, has turned out to be the most effective. 

From the late Spring of 2020 until the Spring of 2022, Covid in China has been more or less absent. There were some cities that had a smattering of cases, mostly cities that bordered other countries such as Myanmar and Russia or places that were receiving international travelers via airports such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, etc. After my 2020 layover in the States, I came back to China in the Fall of 2020, September 30th to be exact. After quarantining a month, two weeks in a hotel and then two loose weeks in my apartment, I went back out in the world and resumed a mostly normal life. I had to add a few health apps to my phone and occasionally wear a mask but asides from that, life within China's borders was much like it was previous to Covid. That said, because it was so difficult to get into China, including getting a visa, a reasonable flight, and by the Winter of 2020, passing a battery of Covid tests to get on the flight; because it was so difficult to get into China my university was adversely affected, where nearly all of our international students could not get visas to get (back) into China and many of our faculty who had left at the outset of Covid were not able to get back in, usually because of the strict visa restrictions placed on spouses and kids. Online courses, hybrid courses, and Zoom became the new normal and to this day, two and a half years after the initial outbreak, this is still the norm for our internationally focused university. We felt and will continue to deal with the impacts of Covid for the foreseeable future. 

Meanwhile, in the US, lots of people died. I don't think it's necessary to go deep into the reasons for this, as anyone reading I assume is well versed in either the news coming out of the US or lived through the experience first-hand. But, briefly, I'd say that political polarization, the Trump administration, comically selfish insistence on individual rights, confusing public health communication, and mass media hysteria all contributed to the massive failure that was the US-American response to Covid. Yet, in the States, things have for the most part returned to normal. Masks in some places and vaccination requirements, but people are more or less back out and doing the things they did before all this happened. I write this from a coffee shop, the only folks wearing masks are the folks coming in from the outside to pick up an order. And Madison is a blue city, one where folks generally went along with all the recommended health guidelines, including getting vaccinated. Whereas, in China, emerging from its second major lockdown, there is no foreseeable end to the unflinchingly strict Covid policies. One the one hand China has done supremely well with combatting Covid but on the other, China's zero-tolerance policies have made it nearly impossible for China to 'live with' Covid and reopen its borders.

Mineral Point (Part 12)

Last night I dreamt about my father. We were on a rooftop, his bachelor pad in the reality of the dream. He was telling me about how my mom taught him medicine after she had gotten back from Tokyo. None of that corresponds to the reality of actual events. We were laying on our backs like two friends watching the clouds, the roof under construction. I asked him where he learned to repair roofs and he said wistfully that he only learned how to start to repair roofs but never how to finish them. Though it was my father in the dream none of it felt like my actual father. In the dream I wondered why he was telling me these things, talking to me like I was his buddy and not his son. It felt a little awkward. Earlier in the dream I was walking through the hallway of a derelict institution, cluttered with unused office equipment, dimly lit, and I encountered Maggie and Kitty Girl, cats I used to live with, sitting on shelf at the height of my head. I snuggled them with head and hands and Maggie spoke to me with her mind. I could understand everything she said but couldn't remember when I woke up. Nothing about that interaction seemed strange. 

Dreams about my father are typically not like the one I had last night. A week ago I had a dream where I was giving a short lecture on teaching in an outdoor shelter, night time, obviously a subconscious enactment of my job duties as of late. My dad was there in there sitting next to me, listening and watching. I wanted to know what he thought about what I had said, whatever it was, but nothing. Silence. This is a typical dream where my father appears. Mute but present. In the dream last night he spoke but it didn't seem like his voice. I wonder in the dream a week ago, what would I do if he actually spoke? What if he addressed my wondering? If approval finally came would I believe it, or would it seem like it came from another, someone I didn't recognize. 

**

My dad was born in the South-West corner of West Virginia, the Appalachian mountains. When he was a kid his family moved to Pikeville Kentucky, the Eastern part of Kentucky, still in the Appalachian mountains. Don't fact check me on this as I'm terrified of my sister finding out that I am writing about our family. Eastern Kentucky has historically been a poor and 'underserved' part of the country. Before the civil war is was known as an area to run away to, remote coal mining country where if you did something wrong on the East coast you could disappear into the hills. In the civil war Eastern Kentucky was both the north and the south, fuzzy boundaries meant that families and communities took sides depending on their affiliations. Famous family feuds such as the Hatfields and McCoys came about because of the civil war, where after the war was over the families on opposing sides kept fighting each other, reliving the trauma of the war through later generations. In WWII, when the G.I. Bill benefitted most of the United States as young men went off to fight and then came home to go to college, in Eastern Kentucky the coal mining industry and its importance to the war effort dictated that those young men say at their jobs mining coal, and thus, not a lot folks had a tradition of going to college. In contemporary times Eastern Kentucky, like a lot of rural poor places in the States was devastated by the opioid epidemic. It's a part of the US where poverty has been entrenched for some time, Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands a somewhat famous account of Eastern Kentucky's history for those interested in the larger picture. That is not to say that my father and his brother were poor, or rich for that matter. My grandmother worked for the coal companies doing administrative work. My great aunt, my grandmother's sister, owned a motel where my dad lived as kid. His father left the family when he was a teenager. Again, don't quote me on these things. This is history as I remember being told. 

My dad went to college at Berea. Berea is a special kind of Liberal Arts college, small, old (founded in 1855) and the first to racially segregate in the entire country and one of the first to admit men and women during the 19th Century. Tuition at Berea was and still is free. Every student, however, has to work and there is a long tradition of arts and crafts in the town such as weaving, wood working, and helping run the school. It's a special place, its abolitionist and progressive roots, and for my dad it was part of a program where talented kids without the means to go to college could go to college. He studied journalism and worked at the paper. After college he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to the Congo where he lived and left before his term, which I believe was due to political issues. He moved to Wisconsin with my mom in the very late 60's, lived in a few different small towns before settling in Mineral Point. In the early 80's they moved to Madison and a year or two later divorced. My Dad went back to Mineral Point and my Mom stayed in Madison. I was around the age of 4 when all that happened and don't really have any significant memories of them together. Once my mom told me that she felt sorry for how all the trouble affected us but I tried to reassure her, that it couldn't have been any other way, versions of 'it is what it is' and that while it's possible to think about alternative paths, as a kid I didn't really question any of it, didn't feel that I was missing out on anything. I got to live in a small town and on a farm and go to good public schools. These are good things about a bi-furcated childhood.

During the summers in Mineral Point I'd typically go to swimming practice which started at noon and then go hangout with Adam and his brother Matt at their Dad's place for the afternoon. Ted, Adam and Matt's Dad, was a painter and artist but made his actual money from an inheritance and various investments and business he oversaw, most prominently a rock quarry. Ted built houses as well out the limestone rocks from the quarry, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque prairie style homes, first on top of the hill next to the quarry and then after him and Cathy divorced he built a house at the foot of the hill and then later, across the road at the top of the next hill, the hills and valleys of the Southwest Wisconsin. When we were kids Adam and I would play around the quarry, though frankly there's not much to do with rocks and heavy machinery when you're a kid. Later, in high school we'd go there to smoke the pot we'd take from his dad and my dad's stash. About five years ago back in Mineral Point the quarry had been mined all the way to the ground, the view from the top of the hill now level with the road at the base of the hill. As I became an adult, Ted became a father-like figure and a mentor of sorts, someone who I could talk with about my Dad and keep me informed about the situation (information that I could then pass on to my brother and sister) with the farm once our relationship with Susan soured. Despite their occasional annoyance with each other, Ted and my Dad were good friends and Ted looked out for us kids in a sense when my Dad got sick. 

As kids, Ted's compound at the base of the hill was a good place to spend summer days. I'd play Sega Genesis with Matt, usually a game called Star Control and play around in the creek which ran behind the house. The house itself was more of a compound connected by a sea of deck, two buildings, one with two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen, etc. and another building where Ted painted, did his music, and kept his computer, an advanced for that time desktop Mac that I used to play Kings Quest and Sim City on. Adam and I would run around playing with his BB gun or look at his dirt bike magazines or watch Indiana Jones on VHS. Down the road was a big warehouse that Ted owned and rented out that we'd sometimes roam around in, glorious days of no parental supervision whatsoever. We'd ride bikes up to the Five Points store to buy candy or play catch with baseball mitts on the seldomly traveled road in front of Ted's place or work for some paltry sum of money that Ted offered us in exchange for performing menial tasks like painting the deck or cleaning the fountain. In the evening my Dad would swing by on his way home from the Power Company, pick me up, and take me back to the farm. Knowing now what I know about kids and parents, I suspect we weren't as free as we felt, that someone was paying attention to where we roamed but it didn't feel like it at the time. All of it idyllic in retrospect. Of the three of us kids, my brother, sister, and I, I was probably the one that had the deepest connection to Mineral Point and post-college thought about moving back there. Were that a possibility I would have made different life choices, and mostly likely would never have ended up moving to California, working as an adjunct for so long, getting a PhD or coming here to China. 

Mineral Point (Part 11)

Getting at the motivation to write, to tell these stories about my dad and Mineral Point and life in my early 20's was prompted this summer from when I started to write about playing basketball in China, about the story I wanted to tell about the tournament I played in last Spring. In my notes I had started to write about how I got started playing sports and about swimming, which lead me to some more notes about the summer swim team in Mineral Point and to thinking about moving between Mineral Point and Madison and a bifurcated lifestyle; about being in two places at once and maintaining two identities, one for my mom and one for my dad. Like Ghostbusters, never cross the stream or else risk annihilation. Shift. Like a lot of this kind of writing though, I set out to write about one thing but the momentum of what I actually write ends up taking me in another direction. I mean to get back to basketball but am still trying to dig into this phenomenon of perception, to outline some of the contours of why I see and act in particular ways such that I can tell the story of that tournament in a way where I can maintain if not a moral high ground then at least a reasonable response to the situation. As if I can control the way that a story is received by providing enough backstory.

This habit of speech and of mind has been with me for as at least long as I have thought to reflect, that often instead of getting straight to the point, instead of saying the thing I mean to say, I provide so much backstory and contextualization that I forget why I started in the first place. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning before you reach the end. This is more for speech than writing, though it takes on a slightly different form in writing, depending on the kind. A blog and its essays forms are more speechy whereas a work email keeps the equation simpler most times, writing to colleagues or students; that our roles clarify our relationships to each other and therefore I either am asked or ask others, no explanation necessary. Or, we assume that we understand the larger context since we all work together, no explanation necessary. But when it comes to a situation where I am not sure how much the other needs to know, a situation where I feel the need to justify my actions or beliefs, which sometimes feels like all the time, I contextualize, assuming that if I say what it is I have to say directly then the other person is likely to misunderstand. This then is a kind of pretentiousness, a pre-rhetorical habit that probably comes out of past experience, one part paranoid projection and one part necessary defensive measure against a conditioned belief that speaking my mind will get me into trouble. 

To be direct then, writing about Mineral Point is about writing about death, or specifically, my own death, a thing that I have been worried about since my early 20's and possibility that what he had is what I will have. One aspect of being in China is language learning, an ability that has been empirically demonstrated to be a factor in delaying the onset of dementia. Exercise as well has shown to contribute delayed onset. Whether or not my thoughts at that time, now vestiges, were simply projections spurred by self-indulgent existential quandaries or justified response to uncertainty (I should also mention that 9/11 occurred shortly after I returned to Seattle), this idea that I have a limited amount of time was particularly salient during that period of my life. Therefore, I figured, I better pursue poetry because I need to leave something behind, that I need to get to it and get to it now. That, and when I met Poet Liz during my last year of college there was literally nothing else other than poetry than anyone had said I had talent for. I've always thought that if my dad had been cognizant that he would have been critical of my decision to pursue poetry, would have asked me to hone in on something more achievable. God, I missed him so much. I wanted to ask him what he thought I should do, should be doing, how to go about it. A few years before he was diagnosed one day I asked him what he wanted to be as an adult when he was a kid. He said he still didn't know what he wanted to be, yet, he was, I thought, and admired him for this. 

Mineral Point (Part 10)

On the upper-floor of the Barn there was a wood burning stove. It wasn't essential since the Barn had central-heating, but sometimes in the winter my dad would fire it up, just for effect. The black cast iron stove was set close to West facing wall and a shiny metal stove pipe ran up from the exhaust, through a portion of the exposed ceiling, then bent at 90 degrees, extended, and exited through that wall. One morning that Spring I heard a clunking, waking me up. It kept happening and I got up to look for where the noise was coming from, something to do with the stove. I couldn't imagine what it was. Maybe a branch had blown into the chimney and was banging around in the wind. I went and got my dad who assessed the situation and began dismantling the stove pipe, taking it apart near the elbow. A bird flew out of the pipe, small enough to have found its way down the chimney. A chickadee is normally grey and white with a black beak and head, a touch of tan on its sides but this one was all black and covered in soot. We opened the window and shooed it out.

**

One morning my dad came up the steps. It was a little bit before seven. The Barn's steps were simple wooden steps, slightly wide, slightly deep, and not too steep. The trudge up the stairs echoed in the empty rafters and so one would always be warned that someone was coming. He had gone to Wal-Mart that morning and bought the movie Gladiator on DVD to watch with me. That meant that he left the farm before six, drove to Dodgeville, bought the movie when Wal-Mart opened, and then come back to share it with me. I was sleeping. He was excited and I felt bad to tell him that I wanted to sleep a bit more and asked if we could watch the movie later. Or the time I was in college, a sophomore, and he called at five in the morning just to chat. Dementia messes with one's sense of time, the rhythms of the day, what's appropriate and when, to whom. 

**

One morning he came up the stairs with a copy of the day's Wisconsin State Journal. I was sleeping. He was excited and started to read the headline but stumbled over the words and stopped. He tried another headline and the same thing happened. I sat up and asked him what was going on, why he was reading me the newspaper, if something had happened. At that moment he seemed to realize that I was sleeping or trying to sleep and left me to it. 2008, a poem-like thing:

An alarm clock is one way to wake up. There are others, like gradually, with the sun rising in the East, to be shook awake by your step brother, or by you mother in the early early morning. To be sleepy until one jumps in the water; to sit on the warm grate while the freezing cold festers. Mornings like these.

 

I could wake up from the sound of a garbage truck, from the need to pee, a dream where I'm looking for the bathroom, an elbow touching mine. I could wake up from voices, a roommate or a couple walking by, a bright afternoon sun and the sudden feeling of sloth. I could wake up because I'm cold, wander through a house looking for blankets until someone else's parent hands me one. I could wake up in a tent, to rain, or wake up on a train going south, on my way to Los Angeles. I could wake up with drool on my pillow, with a boner or with a crick in my neck. I could wake up with the realization I've been sleeping on a wadded up t-shirt, dreaming that a biker had just stabbed me in a ballet studio. I could wake up with a dream in my head or a Stereolab song and listen to it on my way to work.

 

I could wake up from the a-tonal hum of a tea pot, in a panic, in a sweat of anxiety about teaching and work. I could wake up as a wire strung between fence posts, humming or laughing at a joke in a dream, goofing with friends. I could wake up in a foreign country, in a closet converted into a bedroom, look at the wall and not know where I am, a single moment stretching out in my memory. I could wake up to my father trying to read a newspaper headline, or a bird trapped in the stove pipe. I could take a nap and wake up twice in a day, wake up sick, and wonder what it feels like to not feel sick, shake Tony and wake up from the dream. I could wake up to a friend's voice wishing me a good day, wake up to my own voice wishing him good luck.

Or the time that Spring my friend Molly had come out to visit for the weekend from Iowa, where she was finishing up her senior year. We were sitting in the Barn, talking and figuring out what we were going to do that day and my dad came up the stairs with two tennis rackets wanting to play. I said something like, "Dad, Molly is visiting. We're going do stuff in town. Let's play after she leaves." And he got upset, saying that  I was always busy and didn't have time for him. Reacting to his sudden anger, I asserted again that we'll play when Molly leaves, forcefully and with a look on my face, an angry bird. It was embarrassing and unfamiliar. It was like I was scolding him, as if I was the parent and he was the child. Driving away from the farm I spoke to Molly, saying, see, this is the situation. It's strange, a cliché, and I don't know what to do with him, that he is not quite my father as I knew him and therefore I am not quite the son I know to be. 

**

It was always difficult to communicate what was going on to everyone but for Susan and Ted and the folks he saw on a regular basis, folks that had seen the decline first hand. Even my brother and sister didn't quite grasp how quickly he was deteriorating. That Spring in DC, sitting in a Mexican restaurant waiting for our food I talked a little about what we were doing on the farm, that dad was getting bad and that if they're going to spend time with him they should do so soon. They responded with annoyance, not about my father but about me; that I, the baby and youngest child couldn't possibly say something that they didn't already know; that it was not my place to make recommendations or judgments. These pre-dementia family dynamics reasserting themselves, our defensive biases and habits shaping the means by which the present moment arrives, reaffirming again and again that it's not the ideas that matter but the ethos of the person presenting them.  

My mom lived in Madison, about an hour from Mineral Point down the 151. My friends Aric and Aaron were still finishing their undergraduate degrees at the university, five-years to graduate as an engineer and I'd go into Madison on the weekends sometimes to see them, sleeping at my mom's house. She'd ask me how he was doing but I didn't quite know how to answer that. What I wanted was for her to ask me how I was doing. I wanted everyone to ask me that. I was mad at her for a long time after this period, an anger that I couldn't begin to articulate until years later. Being in Mineral Point and spending my days with my dad, no job, momentum, and somewhat isolated put me in a mood, a mood that followed me back to Seattle, then down to Portland and then to Providence at Brown for poetry school. It wasn't until the summer that I had graduated and started to see a good talk therapist twice a week with the last vestiges of my grad school health insurance that I came to realize how much that Spring had impacted me, how much a sense that I couldn't talk about those experiences had been fossilized.

Of course I could talk but most of the folks I knew didn't seem to relate to my experience, still mostly unknown even to myself. The early onset of my dad's dementia meant that the timeline was off, that in another twenty or so years I may have gotten a different reception though I'm skeptical that anyone can really understand another's hardship, whatever its nature. Though perhaps this sentiment merely demonstrates the particular strain of cynicism that lead to my silence in the first place, this cynicism a vestige of some mysterious civilization that had to fortify its walls against a long forgotten barbarian invader, its defensive encampment leftover from another era. But I could not blame my friends for not understanding my situation. I could not blame my mother who had her own issues with my father. I could not blame my sister and brother for living their East coast lives. And so I blamed myself for how I felt, that my mood was a result a directionlessness. That my loneliness was a result of my relationship with Amy. That missing my father, wanting to ask him for some advice, what to do, who to be; that this sense was a result of weakness, a fault of my own making. Like a sestina, kneading the dough,

There is a connection between when I started to write, or at least become aware of the desire that writing was something I wanted to do, and to my father's illness. It's difficult to make this connecting explicit. There were times during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnosis, when he would call to chat at five in the morning, or appear unannounced at my dorm room on a Tuesday afternoon, a long two hour drive from the farm. Later, watching him fold laundry, each item, a t-shirt or a pair of socks was put into its own pile so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly folded clothes. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning before you reach the end. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother told me over dinner.

 

I began to think about the past and make revisions to my memory and the logic of events growing up. There was a time in Seattle after I had come back from helping take care of him, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about his disease and our relationship constantly. In retrospect I think this could have been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it: no funeral or artifact, no sign that anything real had happened.

Mineral Point (Part 9)

That Spring we also had a new litter of Jack Russell puppies that I took care of, puppies we sold. In addition to Sterling, the alpha Jack Russell that we bought as a puppy in the Summer of 1991, we had two female Jack Russells: Nell and also that spring had bought Tuck. Nell had the puppies about a week before I arrived and Susan set up a little fenced in area in the lower floor of the barn. Nell could jump over the fence but the puppies couldn't go anywhere. Jack Russells, popularly known at the time as the kind of dog on the television show Frasier, are small, short haired hunting dogs that are known for 'going to ground,' meaning, digging wildly into the ground looking/hunting for ground-dwelling cuties such as badgers and gophers and dens of foxes. Sterling was good natured, a friend to all, dogs included, and literally rippled with muscle. His balls and raw masculinity were always present, his studliness. He was not a dog that one could pick up and hold. He'd squirm out of your arms and didn't seem to care much about being cuddled. But he was sociable, attentive, always ready to engage but also always receptive to what we asked him to do. Andy, the Airedale, who was about three times the size of Sterling always deferred to his alphaness. Andy was his larger and stupider sidekick and companion for further adventures around the farm. 

The newborn puppies were about the size of guinea pigs. It took a couple weeks for them to open their eyes. Near the end of my stay, when the puppies had gotten a bit bigger, had grown legs enough to waddle around I took them out with my dad for pictures one day, sitting in the sun in the grass. 

In the first picture you can see the top of Sterling just above my dad's right thigh, Andy looming in the background. In the second, Nell making sure her brood is being handled appropriately. Not too long after I left the farm, maybe a year, Nell disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to her, but disappearance is one of the dangers for farm dogs. Pros and cons: farm dogs can always go outside and do their thing. They can roam without limits (though of course one has to train them a bit when young to not go too far) and live a bit closer to their working dog roots than a dog can in the city. However, sometimes they get into trouble, exploring places they shouldn't. Susan speculated that maybe some coyotes got Nell, one night when she wandered off. Or maybe she wandered down the to road and was hit by a car. There's no way to know. She just disappeared. 

Tuck (not pictured) was an all white Jack Russell with a light coat of thin curly hair that gave her a bit of an aura. She was a too young to have puppies when I was there, not too far removed from being a puppy herself. I don't have any digital pictures of her but she was a joy, my favorite of the dogs. Running and playing and letting herself be held. Nell was a dog I didn't know, a dog that my dad got when I got into college. Andy and Sterling though were my old friends. When Susan sold the farm and moved to North Carolina to be closer to her children and grandchildren she took the dogs with her, Sterling, Tuck, and Andy. Because the entirely of our relationship with Susan ruptured over the sale of the farm and the court case, my sister suing Susan to gain guardianship of my father and his estate; once Susan left Wisconsin we didn't hear from her until my father's death in 2014. Still the emissary of us kids, now adults, I was tasked with calling Susan and telling her about the plans for the memorial. We chatted for a bit. I'm not entirely sure about what, but I asked her about the dogs, what happened to them. I wondered about this for years. She said Tuck disappeared like Nell did. But Andy and Sterling got old and died, like real dogs, my old friends. Ron Padgett, "Bluebird":

You can’t expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from the picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he’s much older
now, can’t carry those
bottles ‘neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don’t think I’m
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.

Mineral Point (Part 8)

One thing my dad and I would do during that Spring was play tennis. Research on how to slow down dementia was pretty limited about twenty years ago but they had found that exercise helped, and so I bought a couple of rackets and some balls to hit around the courts down at Soldiers Park. This activity echoed things we'd do when we were all kids and dad would take us there in the summer evenings, after work. We'd play doubles, myself, brother, sister, and him and maybe then go have ice cream afterwards. It was fun then, and fun again, the most normal, non-dementia hindered activity that we could do together. As opposed to other activities that required us to interact with folks. Going to Pizza Hut and having my dad tell the waitress that he had dementia. Or Wal-Mart, again, my dad first asking a stranger where he was from and then telling him that he had dementia. He'd tell them, and then announce, proudly I suppose, that most folks couldn't tell that he had dementia. They'd respond to it the way one could respond to that kind of comment, with polite bewilderment. 

Or the time on the airplane in May that year, the last time he ever left Wisconsin when I accompanied him for a coordinated visit to see my sister in DC, staying in the old Georgetown house of the judge she was house sitting for. My brother had came down from New York to join us, the four of us together. Before getting on the plane in Madison my dad and I had bought a bag a cheese curds from Hooks, a famous cheese maker in Wisconsin. Or maybe Susan had given it to us for the plane ride. I don't remember. What I remember are two things: the way fresh cheese curds squeak when you bite them. Dad leaned over to the man sitting in the aisle seat and offered them a cheese curd and told them about the squeakiness of fresh cheese curds. That it only lasts for a day or two at the most. That's how you know they're fresh. These are fresh curds. Most folks have never really had fresh curds. And then he told them that he had dementia, that nobody would ever know if from the way that he behaved, and that he was on his way with his son to visit his daughter and his other son in DC. The man had a cheese curd and then talked with my dad for a while. Wished him good luck as he exited the plan. 

When we were kids dad paid an old man named Mr. Eckstein to give us tennis lessons. I think I only ever went to one of them, maybe two. Mr. Eckstein was quite old. He lived alone in the motel like little houses behind the Quicktrip. I didn't know much about him but he was pretty good at tennis. He played with a wooden racket and though he couldn't really move around the court, he'd just stand in the middle and hit the ball back no matter where we hit it from. He used to be a pro of some kind. He'd teach us how to grip the racket, how to swing with a straight elbow. Occasionally a string of drool would slip down from his cheeks and he'd slowly wipe his wrinkled hand across his bottom lip to catch it. At some point later, maybe about seven or so years, he fell and broke his hip and got put into an old folks home. One day my dad took me there to visit him. This was a thing my dad did, always talking about how important it was to visit people when they were alone or sick, how important it was to see your family, even if you didn't feel like going. We sat in Mr. Eckstein's room with the television on. I had nothing to say to him. At some point my dad wandered out and it was just him and I. We watched television. I might have been fourteen years old. My dad and I left and not too long after Mr. Eckstein died.  

I always wondered what my dad's relationship was with folks like Mr. Eckstein, how it came about that he gave us tennis lessons. Or rather, given my brother and sister tennis lessons. I wasn't really into tennis and I didn't have much of a relationship with Mr. Eckstein, not that I said this to my dad. Or my dad's relationship with an old lady named Florence that we'd go out to dinner with in Dodgeville on Mondays. I don't know who she was or why we spent so much time with her. She wasn't someone who watched after us kids and wasn't someone we were related to. She had a blue Chevy Nova hatchback that sat in her driveway and a police scanner what I'd ask to turn on if we had to sit in her quiet living room while her and my dad chatted about things I couldn't follow. She'd always laugh at something my dad said and say, "Ohhh, Bob" and a thick Wisconsin accent. I wonder what my dad was doing. Why we were there. Who these people were to him and if there was some plan as to what kinds of relationships he was trying to help us build. If he was acting as a kind of emissary of anti-loneliness. Always talking, driving around and talking to people. It was important, he'd insist. It's important to say hello. 

Mineral Point (Part 7)

From what I was told, Susan's father also died of Alzheimer's and she spent some years taking care of him before he was shipped off to a care facility. Us kids had a contentious relationship with Susan that eventually ended with Susan selling the farm to a stranger. Of the three of us, I was typically given the job of talking with Susan on our behalf. Plus, my sister, post-law school took a clerkship in DC and my brother had just started teaching school in Brooklyn, thus I felt like I was the only one of us who was free enough, i.e. not tied to anything resembling a real job, to go back to the farm to help out. Though I can't confidently characterize the tension between Susan and in particular, my sister, I believe Susan resented that even after my father's diagnosis us kids had been of relatively little help; the whole, Mother Hen thing, that if one does not cut the wheat or grind the flour, one is not entitled to eat the bread. The bread in this case being having a say in what happens to my dad. That, and her previous experience with her own dad. That one can only bear so much, to watch the people you love deteriorate, to forget your name and their own. That care takers need also to be taken care of and even now I respect what I'd characterize as her decision to not let my father's illness consume the later years of her life. That as an American I grudgingly accept the trope of looking out for number one. 

Susan and my dad married when I was thirteen years-old. The wedding was held at the Jones House, an historic bed and breakfast that tourists would stay in when they came to Mineral Point. Adam and I were tasked with the job of throwing rose petals from the balcony above the bride and groom during the "I do" moment. Susan and my Dad knew each other in high school in Pikeville, Kentucky and started seeing each other following a class reunion, both of them now divorced with three children, Susan's youngest daughter older than my older sister. During the lead up to the wedding Susan would come up from Kentucky to stay on the farm, the house on top the hill. One evening my dad had taken us to Dairy Queen and on the way he mentioned that Susan was coming up yet again from Kentucky for the weekend and to stay the week. Naïve and young, I asked him why she had to come up to Wisconsin since she doesn't seem to like us kids. From my perspective, eleven years-old, Susan didn't act particularly motherly. When she was there my dad was more or less with her, doing things one does when one is in love. Thus, Susan coming up to the farm meant that my dad would be unavailable and occupied. Of course I was too young to understand that my parents were also human beings. My dad responded to my question with anger and no answer, sending me to the car and no ice cream.

That dynamic, of Susan politely demonstrating that she was not our mother and my dad enthrall to the task of keeping her happy, was present at the beginning and continued to the end. My role as I saw it when I was a kid then and even to a degree now, thirty some years later, was to serve as a bridge between warring parties. I took on the same role with my step-dad J at my mom's house when she remarried a few years before my father, that when my brother and sister were being hostile or dismissive that it was my job to do the opposite, to show that that in fact this person was appreciated and welcome. Not that Susan needed that from me, or J, or that I was even in a position to make someone feel welcome, these projections of what someone needs an obvious marker of what I must have been feeling myself, at least that is what an analysis via psychology might come to. Simply though, I tried to be nice even though her role in our family was confusing, that if she wasn't a caretaker to us then who was she? Why was she there? My coming to the farm during Spring of 2001 was an attempt by me to do the right thing, to empathize with the other in hopes of smoothing relations between those with the power to act, which in this case was my sister and Susan. When I left Mineral Point, around four months after I got there, it was because Susan had told me that one of her sons was coming up to stay for a while and that I'd need to leave the Barn to make room. I was not kicked off the farm but politely shown the door. 

Mineral Point (Part 6)

When I moved from Seattle to the farm I moved into the Barn with a duffle bag of clothes and a laptop made in 1995 that my dad had bought my sister when she started college, the best valued laptop of its day, no doubt. Amy accompanied me on my drive back across the country. With Joel I first drove down to California to meet Amy and had a weekend somewhere in Napa valley at a rented house with Amy's friends and our friends. Amy and I then drove down to Oakland and picked up a mattress from her place and delivered it to her parents in Los Angeles. From there we drove to Mineral Point, stopping in Arizona and Colorado, making it a trip. 

When we arrived in Mineral Point the first thing we did was go to dinner at a new brewery in town with my dad and our old family friend Ted and his sons, Matt and my oldest friend Adam. At dinner my dad acted strange. It was the first time I had seen him for about nine months and though I had been talking to him every week it was clear that he was not able to track our conversation. Ted watched me as I learned first hand that my father was not himself and gently stepped in as needed, someone who had experience being around this new version of my father. When we got back to the farm and Amy and I went up to the Barn was suddenly overcome with emotions and I cried while Amy hugged me, perhaps just then realizing what I was doing and realizing that after tomorrow Amy would no longer be there and it would just be me, my dad, and Susan in a somewhat isolated countryside compound. Perhaps I was just tired or perhaps I was disappointed that my dad didn't really acknowledge that I was there at dinner, already lost in another world.

Me being there allowed Susan to relax a bit and not worry too much about my dad getting into trouble. At that point she was still teaching elementary school in a nearby town and needed to go to work during the day. I was tasked with very little by Susan other than to watch after my dad and to see if I could sell my dad's 94 Mazda MPV. Its ten-disc CD player was broken such that it played the same track over and over, "Somewhere over the Rainbow" by the Hawaiian singer Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. There was no way to change the settings other than to turn it off. Every button broken, including the button to eject CDs. You couldn't even switch it to the radio. The only thing one could do was to turn it off. My dad, however, didn't notice that it was repeating or at least didn't seem to mind. When I arrived in the Spring he was still driving, though only really driving around town. This worried Susan and part of selling the car was really to get the vehicle off the property so he couldn't drive, which she wisely predicted would eventually get him into trouble. An account of that time I wrote ten plus years ago,

He used my blue truck to drive down to the mechanic and check on the status of his vehicle. It was early and I kept sleeping until the phone rang, the mechanic asking me to bring the fire chief's truck back. Confused I looked out the window to see my dad pulling up in a tan truck. After returning the tan truck and bringing back my own, I scolded him and barred him from driving my truck ever again. 

My dad loved cars. Not new cars but all cars, always reading about them in Consumer Reports, trying to find the best car with the best value. When we were younger, probably on a Friday after picking us up, we'd drive around farm equipment lots and used car lots near Dodgeville. It was unclear what exactly he was looking for but was always looking. He often traded in one used car for another, suddenly and surprisingly showing up in a vehicle none of us had ever seen before. During my senior year of college one day he was supposed to pick me up. It was late on a Friday and he was late. I was sitting in my dorm room and kept hearing a car alarm outside. Eventually I got up and went into the hall way where one of the jock types who lived down the hall informed me that there was a guy in the parking lot asking for me. I went out to find my dad in a white Nissan Ultima sitting in the driver's seat trying to turn the alarm off. Somehow we turned it off and drove back to Wisconsin. This was a year after he was diagnosed, a year before I went back to Mineral Point. Instances like these were frequent while he was still in the nebulous zone of post diagnosis and pre-institutionalization. He knew he was getting worse but could still almost go about his business. He traded in the Nissan for the MPV and wanted to trade in the MPV for a Toyota Rav4. This never happened. 

Mineral Point (Part 5)

When we came to farm we'd stay in the Barn, which has a misleading name. It looked like a barn but the lower floor was essentially a large garage with concrete floor, room for four cars and a work bench at the back. There was a closet, always locked and with the light on underneath the stairs that lead to the upper level that I think Susan and my dad used to grow pot, but I could never get into that space to know for sure what went on in there. In practical terms the lower floor was a space for the tractor, tools, and shelves of things that might have a use one day. The upper floor was where we would stay, which was a huge open space with bathroom walled off in one corner. It had a full kitchen, a little living room area, and three beds. All of it in the same open space with a vaulted, exposed wood ceiling. 

Late Spring, 2001. The barn in full sunshine, the dark blue Ford Ranger that I drove to Seattle and then back to Wisconsin and then eventually back to Seattle and then Portland and then to the East coast, to Providence for graduate school, where I sold it to my Brother-in-Law's brother and didn't own a vehicle for nearly ten years after that. The light blue truck on the right side of the photo was a manual four-gear GMC that we used as a 'farm truck,' an old beat up machine to drive around the farm without needing to worry about if we hit something or drove into a ditch. Not that that happened. 

About a year before my dad was officially diagnosed with dementia, one weekend, during my sophomore year of college I got a ride back to Madison to visit friends and my mom and on the way back I got dropped off to visit my dad in Mineral Point, about a two hour drive from the small town in Iowa where my college was. It was getting to be late afternoon on Sunday and I needed to get back. My dad had said earlier that he'd drive me back to my campus. When I asked him, reminded him that we needed to get going, he seemed to not entirely remember that he agreed to do this, or maybe he remembered but decided that he didn't want to do the drive, or who knows what he was thinking. In retrospect there are many instances like this, blurry lines between my dad being selfish or reneging on promises and what we'd come to learn was certifiable cognitive decline. That there is a fine line between one's personality and one's mind/body complex, a personality something we are responsible for and the latter, something out of our control, at least according to modern divisions of the material world and our subject position. After acknowledging that I needed to get back, my dad said, well, why don't you take the truck. I said that I didn't know how to drive a stick shift. He said I'd figure it out, gave me a brief lesson, and then I got in the truck and drove, a stressful two hour drive on highway 151 through South-West Wisconsin, across the Mississippi through Dubuque, and down into Iowa.

My point is not so much to paint of picture of me figuring out the stick shift (which I guess wasn't all that hard but was stressful, especially the massive hills that ascend out of Mississippi river valley on the Iowa side, the stop lights on these steep hills and to release of the break while simultaneously engaging the clutch fast enough such that I didn't crash into the cars behind me), but my image of my dad was that of someone who wouldn't just cast someone out to fend on their own. That image is probably not entirely true, even when my dad was in good health, but upon reflection it's hard not to wonder if his odd behavior that afternoon was something of the dementia, something causing him to not 'be himself.' He was not the kind of dad, at least as I knew him, to teach his kids 'tough' lessons, the sink or swim kind of lessons. That wasn't really how he conducted his dad business. He made us work, and I'm grateful for that, but he didn't ever do so in ways where we'd struggle to the point of failure. He'd push us to do things we weren't comfortable doing. And we'd whine about tree planting or whatever farm or building project he enlisted us into, complain about to church or not wanting to go yet again to Farm & Fleet, but there was always a choice it seemed. If something was too much then it was okay not to do it. His behavior that afternoon was odd and distancing. 

My father standing in front of a burn pile of brush and wooden junk. Myself, standing just down the hill from the burn pile, circa 2001. That is not to say that my father was a deep well of compassion at all times. He had a terrible temper at times and raged suddenly if my brother and I weren't listening to him or doing what he asked. This kept us on good behavior for the most part when we were around him. Whether or not our 'good behavior' could have been achieved without a fear of him whacking us on the butt or punishing us with some forced labor task is not something that we could ever know. I can think of three times when his patience ran out, the first when we were young on our way back from a trip to Kentucky to see family. We were close to home, past Chicago, and my brother and I were horsing round in the back of the van. He warned us a couple times and then he pulled over. He went to back of the van where I was laying on top of my brother, doing what I don't know, and he smacked us in the butt. We sat in our seats the rest of the way. Or another time, probably middle school, when my brother and I were out cutting brush with him, he with a chain saw and the two of us tasked with moving the wood bits into piles. It was a bit boring and cold, and we were repeatedly riffing on commercial jingle for a kids game named 'Thin Ice' we had heard on television. The only verse that I can remember us singing, going something like, "If you're sitting in the tub and you need a belly rub / you're on thin ice / you're on thin ice." After about fifteen minutes of our variations and laughing at them to the point that we were neglecting the work, my dad snapped at us, telling us to shut up, that it wasn't funny, to do the work, etc. At that point we were a bit too big to be whapped on the butt but we listened to him and did what he asked. 

The time that I remember most vividly, however, in terms of getting into trouble with my dad was when we were tasked with painting a little shed that he built next to the original farm house, a shed to keep a lawnmower in and other garden tools, something a little closer to the house than the machine shed. We were painting it white with a roller and brush, my brother and I, in the summer, it was hot and sunny. I might have been eight, my brother ten. Bored with the monotony of painting (though ironically, or maybe fittingly, later in my life I would come to like painting and did it as my primary income source for a number of years after college and then after graduate school), bored with the monotony of painting I was goofing around and rolled some paint onto the low hanging roof of the shed which I though was funny at the time, an eight year old sense of humor. My dad had come out to see how we were doing and he saw the paint on the roof and became furious. I remember him saying to me, asking me, "Do you think this is funny? Do you think this is a joke?" I guess those were rhetorical questions but I remember him yelling something about not taking the work seriously which was something that I thought about a lot when I was a kid, how mad he got in that particular instance. The idea that I was not someone to depend on, to rely on for a serious task. Regardless, I think eight years old is too young to paint things, where painting is partly about making a judgment on and an investment in what looks good and I did not care about how that shed looked when I was eight year old. He removed me from the task and I think my brother finished it on his own.