Diary Day
December 9, 2021
I am sick for the first time since 2019. Twenty-one months of mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing kept me virus-free for the longest period of my life and now my body is quite out of practice with being sick. I am inordinately privileged to be able to say this, and I still hate being sick. One should assume that a country like ours would have readily available Covid tests after 21 months of the blasted virus but the soonest appointment for Covid testing that I could find is days away. No longer is a cold a cold; cold symptoms are Covid symptoms and reason to worry, shut down, socially isolate. Today, I want most to watch movies and drink tea, read a good fiction book or my increasing pile of New Yorkers and Sunday New York Times when the spirit moves me. Instead, I agreed to meet with a student who is failing my class at 8:15 a.m. I think she’s on the right track now. I cannot say the same for all of them.
My life is consumed by teaching, parenting, and community work. My daughter lectures me about how little time I spend with her. She has even accused me of caring more about my job than her. To be fair, she would probably say this no matter how much time I spent with her. I care about her so much, but I care about my job and community work, too. Like countless other women, it’s a precarious balancing act. To counter this, I made pedicure appointments for us this evening. I spent too much money for what we got but my daughter had fun and felt appreciated. We stopped at Noodles & Company on the way home and then watched another episode of Anne with an E, a spectacular contemporary rendition of the book Anne of Green Gables. Its social commentary, and even celebration of, the lives of women and those who did not fit the heterosexual playbook is great and it’s a refreshing change from the kid shows she still prefers to watch (I’m not complaining – I’m glad she’s not watching poorly written teenybopper shows, yet, but many of her shows, like Boss Baby (?!) don’t draw me in like Anne does). It leaves me thinking about gender and feminism, evaluating my own life and the women and men I come across in my everyday life.
While hanging up Christmas lights on my front porch early yesterday evening, I heard a strange sound. At first, I thought it was my daughter yelling for me from the backyard. As the sound got louder, I stepped off my ladder and looked around. A woman was nearing our house from the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. She was sobbing, loudly. Mouth open, hands down, tears streaming, and loud. I called to her, “Are you okay?” [Obviously not!] She calmed instantly, cleared her voice, and said, “I’m fine,” and then walked on as she had before, sobbing loudly. Instantly I regretted my question. I should have asked, “Would you like to come talk about what’s bothering you?” I thought about chasing her down, insisting she come talk. But I didn’t. It was too easy not to. It reminded me of another encounter with a random woman a few years earlier. I was at Minnetrista with my daughter, in the early evening just before sunset. We were on bikes, laughing and joking around. A middle-aged blond-haired woman approached us. She was dressed casually, neither overly professional nor unprofessional, but uncomfortable. She asked me for directions. She said she had been walking for a long time and could not find the address. I pulled out my smart phone and showed her where we were and where she needed to go. Her shoulders slouched and she looked utterly defeated. I had no money on me. My car was nearly as far away as she needed to go. I will never forget the look on her face. She looked at me and my daughter as if to say, “How nice it would be to be bike riding on this evening without a care in the world.” The look was not mean spirited, judgmental, or self-pitying. It was exhaustion and a recognition that our lives were different. It occurs to me just now that I could have called her an Uber. I think about this woman. I wonder why she was going where she was going. And I wonder where she had been. My sense is that she was having more than a bad day.