Introduction
The summer of 2020 has been like no other. When, in living memory, was everyday life so thoroughly transformed—disrupted—for so many people in so many ways?
Many of us are simply not doing what we would normally be doing: driving to work, chatting face to face with colleagues, going out to crowded bars or restaurants on Friday to unwind. Those of us who are doing what we would normally be doing—as essential workers—are doing it with masks and hypervigilant anxiety and making our way to work through strangely undercrowded streets.
The twin, intertwined crises of our moment—a political crisis and a public health crisis—are demonstrating one of the axioms of the study of everyday life: that historical transformations, though we talk about them in generalities and abstractions, exert their most profound effects in the concrete, specific world of daily life.
Everyday Life in Middletown asked our volunteers to write very brief essays totaling exactly 100, 200, or 300 words, describing experiences, emotions, thoughts, or observations from life this summer.
We call these essays “Hundreds” after a project conceived by Professors Lauren Berlant of the University of Chicago and Kathleen Stewart of the University of Texas-Austin—two leading voices in the academic study of the ordinary.
Their book, The Hundreds (Duke University Press, 2019), contains 100 essays that examine how emotional states and energies pulse through ordinary life, and how they connect to larger political, social, and historical structures. They describe the essays as “exercises in following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units or units of hundred multiples.”
The external constraint of writing to exact multiples of 100 helps to give form to thoughts and experiences that might otherwise seem formless. Berlant and Stewart describe the experience of such writing: “In writing condensed, we amplified through subtraction, tightened up thought through a detour, leaching words.” Their project is an experiment in making writing reveal something in new ways.
Berlant and Stewart have a complex, specific theoretical project that is hard to define or describe exactly. At EDLM, in the spirit of collaborative creation, we did not give extensive direction to our volunteers: we wanted their experiments to be as open and free as they liked.
In the same spirit, we’ll let the little gems they produced speak largely for themselves, except for this brief precis:
You will see people giving form to the things we’re doing: sitting on our porches, reading about race, grappling with political anguish, vacationing in seemingly-safe outdoor spots, looking to movies and books for analogues to the strangeness we’re living, quarantining with the virus, viewing an estranged natural world, giving witness to the signs of economic and social dysfunction.
–Patrick Collier
One More Thing
Ten days into quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 despite more than following recommended precautions.
Five minutes since having to unfriend some friends and family on Facebook because of their toxic and/or racist posts.
Second time today of talking myself down from the guilt from having potentially exposed family and friends to this horrible virus.
One broken heart from the vitriol supposed people of faith are spewing.
Constant exhaustion from waiting to see what the next awful thing in 2020 will bring.
Praying the country survives until November and hope will be reborn.
Unsure I can handle one more thing. (100)
–Diarist C47
Pushover
In Pushover (1954) the police take an apartment to watch a gangster’s girl across a courtyard. The bad cop falls for her. The good cop relieves his boredom by training his binoculars on the girl next door, a single nurse, friendly, industrious, brunette, smiling. On the other side of the wall the bad girl, blonde, paces and smokes.
We surveil social distancing. A friend on the council gets calls about black men or college students congregating.
Saturday, we try things to set the day apart.
The bike trail, once a rail line, is too crowded. Too many people are out. Near an intersection in a trendy “village” a flutist and a cellist play. It’s lovely, but people are gathered, so I cycle on. Later, across the river, clots of kids and teens, with a few adults, gather outside an ice cream store.
Near home, college girls sit in a row, backs to the street, on a front porch rail. They have just moved in, across the street from another student house.
That night there’s live music, the rhythmic reports of the snare unmistakably live, electronic jazz led by a broad-toned sax. Should I walk over? Would someone call the police? (200)
–Diarist A01
On Being Stopped
Morning reading on my front porch: “Desiring God,” “The Great Divorce,” Facebook threads, Internet advice about wearing a boot for plantar fasciitis.
I prop up my booted leg and notice neighbors taking their morning constitutionals, two by two, elderly couples from the condos behind us. We wave every morning. I’ll be living their lives in 20-or 10-years. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I watch the runners, forcing myself not to be bitter that I’m benched. Even as I critique their forms, I admire them and wish them well. The girl with the swinging ponytail is cute. Ah, youth.
I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window with my leg propped up like this.
In the afternoon, I return to the porch with a bowl of watermelon. Fewer pedestrians, but the traffic at the four-way is crazy. It’s interesting to observe the drivers’ assumptions and behaviors as they approach the intersection. Apparently, the authority of a stop sign is contingent on the presence of a person who can enforce that authority. The many interpretations of stopping are creative and brazen.
I resent my boot. They resent the stop signs. It’s human nature. We don’t like to be stopped. (200)
–Diarist F56
Surroundings
Winds forcefully move the tall trees and dilute the campfires’ smoke, but the familiar and comforting smell remains in the air and I am content, for the moment. We’re surrounded by loud pick-up trucks, beat-up sedans, kids on bikes who whiz by, helmets be damned, but slow down to stare blankly, not sure what to make of us. Heavy metal screams from the speakers of large, shirtless men down the way. Soon the raccoons with shiny eyes will come, unwavering in their search for scraps. There is too much stimuli for my daughter to fall asleep easily, but then again, she never does. I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower about a young Black woman surviving dystopia while bravely nurturing liberation. I have strange dreams.
The wind made for choppy canoeing. Few people were on the lake and we were relieved to be alone. I obsessively think about what brought us here, to this place, at this time, with people who seem different from and yet similar to us. I consciously lean into the similarities, the parents and children swimming in the lake together as we try to avoid the slimy seaweed, the shared experience of sleeping in the woods, melting marshmallows over the fire, telling stories.
Saturday night brings a rapid build-up of bright lights, diesel trucks, revving motorcycles, and music. Finally, there is quiet. Then, a truckload of men arrives to tell painfully loud stories of “that bitch” to raucous laughter. I wonder about “that bitch,” if her life is all that different from Parable of the Sower.
We wake to tanagers, wood thrushes, coocoos, robins, and the smells and sounds of families making breakfast. Did they, like my family, manage to sleep through the misogynist stories? Why did we do nothing? Fear. This has happened before. (300)
–Diarist I69
Summer Reading
On the front porch during our morning coffee break, we share our books. His is An Imperfect God, the story of Washington and his slaves. Washington is the only slave-owning Founding Father who freed his slaves (after Martha’s death, of course), his attitudes transformed by his experience as commander of White and Black soldiers. Washington wrote in strong and specific language, as he could not trust his collateral relatives, who would be shocked. His will specified education for the children so they could “support themselves as free people.”
I share from The Warmth of Other Suns, the deeply researched history of America’s leaderless Great Migration, starting in early 20th century, lasting 70 years. Blacks moved from the South into the North, Midwest, and West, fleeing the poverty, despair, and racism of Jim Crow. The author follows the trail of three fascinating individuals who did what countless desperate humans have done over the centuries. “They left.”
We don’t remember how or when these books came into our home, but they have been patiently waiting for us, at the appropriate moment, after the march from Ball State to City Hall, when, in a buzz of pandemic decluttering, we discover their bookshelf hideaway. (200)
–Diarist G61
My Grandsons
One is dark, talkative, intelligent, and angry. The other is fair, laid-back, smiles sweetly, and sleeps. The four-year-old is my precious, sad, step-grandson. But there is no “step” in grandson. His daddy drinks too much, falls and hurts himself, and doesn’t attend his birthday parties. This darling boy, half Indian and half white, is a treasure discarded and now hoarded.
He asks to see my Obama shrine. Collectibles of my favorite President adorn my home office. Statuettes of embedded etched glass, a gold Presidential Seal, and a necktie my husband can’t wear since I got it sucked into the vacuum cleaner. My grandson knows these are important to Noni.
My sweet new baby grandson is quiet. He adores his older brother. This baby is the spitting image of my son. I see photos of me holding him, and I look twice to see if I’m old or young to tell the difference.
These are my boys. They share their mother’s beautiful eyes. I give them silly gifts they love, like the calculator I gave the older one. He says it is “to do his taxes.” Already a man. He loves my son. My son loves him. Finders keepers. (200)
–Diarist H66
The Little White House with the Blue Shutters
One sign announced, “Estate Sale” and the other “More Inside.” The little white house with the blue shutters was not immune to the Year Without Mercy.
For twenty-five years, I regularly passed the tidy, rather unremarkable little house. Without fail, I could rely on the front door being open. I’m not sure when I first noticed it, but it became religion to check that it was open each and every time I passed. It was a game to try to catch it closed, one that I never won—nor wanted to win. My mind created various stories of why that door was always open—always at the foundation of them was hope–its denizens were anticipating something, someone’s return. Rain or shine, or snow, regardless of the time of day I passed, that door was always open.
A week later, the signs were gone, the door shut. Through a curtain-less window, forsaken knick-knacks from the sale stared back at me with equal disbelief. And now today, even they have vanished, the windows vacant. My mind drifts forward–visions of the little house declining as empty houses do.
The door has closed on the little white house with the blue shutters. (200)
–Diarist A28
Morning Appointment
Some velvet morning when I’m straight. The low, soft, clunk of piano pedals lifting hesitant notes. Small silence gaps suggest. The birds did not descend to the grass today; aloft instead, hidden in the scrawny trees. Covered by no cover. Utility trucks racing. “Did you bring your teeth?” she asked. Parked next to a garbage dumpster. Another just ahead. A hawk far aloft, the second one of the morning. Binoculars lift, a momentary catch only. Does it see me, waiting? A gap in a daughter’s smile. Pastel marks in my sketchbook, fragile pigment placeholder, gap filler. Smudged velvet time departs. (100)
–Diarist B37
A Thing I Didn’t Say
Walking during the pandemic, I see an African-American family playing basketball on a court in “Forest Hills,” a small, old, upscale neighborhood. I have wondered about that court—a small rectangle open on two sides, with one backboard and hoop, pinned in a corner, against the brick wall of a mansion. I’ve never seen anyone use it and have assumed it’s private.
The players are two burly, middle-aged guys and three children, one a skilled, wiry 14-year-old girl with bright-yellow kneepads over her sweats, another a 9- or 10-year old boy with close-cropped hair, small but a good dribbler. The girl dribbles to the perimeter and lets the ball bounce unattended a couple times; one man yells at the boy for missing the chance to steal.
I’m walking slowly to see but not get caught gawking. I think of joking: “Wow, live sports!” and getting laughs, having a moment of mutual recognition, a quick spark, warm but dry, underwritten by our (not rare but statistically unlikely, and provisional) shared liberty of this neighborhood, where I could never afford to live. But they are pleasurably absorbed, so without forming this in words, I perceive my desire as self-serving, and walk on. (200)
–Diarist A01
Up and Down
It’s not hard. Two thousand or so feet, 1.7 miles. Rocks, roots, woods, a typical New England climb. Early enough that heat hasn’t risen but I sweat. Daughters, grown and fit, lead the way. I strive to keep up. Can’t help but remember carrying them up on similar treks, stopping often for rests and snacks. Now I suggest a water break. Views arrive, a reward amid the alpine scrub, and a welcome pause. Reach the peak in an hour. Bare rock. Windy, with a few others around. Bright sun, panoramic views, a few snapshots, and some water. Head back down.
Different route down, shorter, steeper, crowded with climbers. Soon we realize we did this backwards. Carefully, we pick our way down slick granite, using hands and feet. One daughter stumbles, pitches forward. I catch her arm, spin her, but can’t hang on as she stumbles into brush. She cries out, bleeding and bruised, but nothing serious. Comfort her but push her to continue. We slow down. Other daughter, frustrated, speeds up and disappears. New memories arise of managing emotions, personalities. Parenting, even now. Trailhead appears. I change shoes and my soaking shirt. Traumas mostly forgotten. New memories blended with old. (200)
–Diarist A02