My recollection...
Looking back to March, Five Years ago. For my students and I the Eighth Week of the Spring Semester of 2020 (ending March 6, a Friday), was scheduled to lead us into a week-long break. Over the 7 days that followed Covid-19 drastically changed the way the world was arranged. Presaging it all, on that same Friday - way out west - the University of Washington announced that it was going online with classes “for at least the next few weeks.” We watched and waited but little suspected that we were on the cusp of something for which we had no schooling whatsoever. Information was garbled and overload slowly but steadily set in.
The trump Whitehouse offered mostly obfuscation and “ass-covering-doublespeak.” The nation was leaderless and many of our other institutions seemed caught off-guard. At my school, an email on March 11 directed us to extend our Spring Break an extra week and return to class online by way of Zoom or Google Meet technology on March 23. The projection was that we should prepare to teach that way until April 6. As we all know, we did not return to campus in early April but rather finished out the semester online and stayed in distance-learning mode through the Summer and Fall of 2020, and the Spring and following Summer of 2021. I did not return to a brick and mortar classroom until the Fall of 2021 — and at that time with all of us masked and most vaccinated. Myriad good reasons meant that others would take longer to go “face-to-face.”
Amidst all that hurly-burly and having not planned for a planetary event I was attending the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies gathering in Austin, Texas — Wednesday, March 4th through Sunday the 8th. I arrived in Austin early on Tuesday to keep a commitment with a local high school college prep program called ‘Austin Achieve.’ I noticed a few masked passengers in the airport upon landing in Texas. Nothing was different at all at the high school.
On Friday, March 6, the second day of that conference the city of Austin canceled the music festival known as South By Southwest. That was the same day that the U. of Washington moved online. The next day, Saturday, I gave my paper at an afternoon panel. Heading out by plane the next morning there were considerably more masks along with a palpable, and growing, sense of trepidation.
In the background a cruise ship had been stranded — off the coast of California and refused docking due to virus suspicions - ultimately crew members tested positive. In the meantime I had caught an interview online with Dr. Michael Osterholm. He convincingly cautioned that what we were seeing — now called the Corona Virus or Covid-19 — was deadly, on the rise, and would change the world. Sickness and death in New York City and Italy were making the news. My family and I were scheduled to fly into Newark on Wednesday, March 11 for a few days in The City. We canceled our plans. That very day The World Health Organization noted 118,000 cases in 114 countries and declared a Pandemic. On Thursday college basketball was cancelled just as March Madness was set to start.
The world seemed to be crawling with deadly invisible killing germs. No one knew if it was in the air or on the things we touched. Masks were urged but they were nowhere to be found. Recipes for hand sanitizing liquids, to supplement the now bought-up supply circulated. Panic buying and hoarding brought shortages. There was no toilet paper. We would learn so very much over the months to come. A new kind of education was aborning. Thoughtful folk were scrambling for information. We did not ‘come together.’ Things changed. Normal evaporated. A new normal began to shape. And still is.
I realize now that with the crashing inward of the world in the Third Month of Two Thousand Twenty of the Common Era that I started writing - and perhaps even thinking - in a way that I never had. Reaching back, for good or ill, and grabbing semblances of past ‘normals.’ And realizing that such a state is, in fact, ever-shifting, never still, and both deeply personal and widely shared all at once. I wasn’t just reaching back either but also reaching out for the lost human contact of the past - of playgrounds and ball courts and barrooms and buses. I learned too - as have so many of us - that “You can’t go home again” because home did not sit waiting while you were away. Indeed…
“…the dark ancestral
cave, the womb from
which mankind emerged
into the light, forever
pulls one back-but…
You can’t go home again…
You can’t go..back home
to the Escapes of Time
and Memory. You can’t
go home again.” ~ Thomas
Wolfe
Oh yes, and while we are piling on the adages - Home is ever with my family, ever Where The Heart Is. Ever Before Me. Ever Before Us.