Navigating s-p-a-c-e-s

Navigating S-p-a-c-e-s

Dear reader, this is an ongoing post for the pandemic, trying to make sense of our behaviors and motivations as a culture. I will add and subtract from it over time.

Fall, 2021, Tallahassee, FL.

This morning after leaving my driveway to meet a friend for coffee, I felt something come over my body while climbing up-hill from our cul-de-sac and passing the familiar water tower marked Tallahassee on the left. It was the muscle memory of my daily departure for school last fall bringing heavy, cautionary feelings mixed with optimism. 

Fall, 2020

On the very first day I left for school, my foot was so unfamiliar with touching the gas pedal that I could feel it waking up, the blood circulating to my toes, the arch of my foot, the heel, saying "where have you been?"

 We'd been in lock-down.

Muscle memory takes a hold of the body more quickly than one's own stream-of-consciousness. So, while excited to see a friend, I was in a push-me-pull you with self:  "will the staff be masked? will it be crowded?" I had just learned about the death of a teacher at the feeder school for where I had been teaching. She was a woman my age. There was no official announcement of her cause of death. Another fraction of self was sunshiny and eager to get out and about. I had spent a good part of the week indoors, cleaning out my closet, getting rid of stuff.

I had used up the entirety of my Covid19 sick leave in the first days of the fall semester, meeting with all 5 of my classes online. Why?  

I had developed a swollen lymph node under my right shoulder blade days before school began, and while I had no other symptoms, I wanted to practice caution in case I was a carrier. A negative test from the CVS pharmacy drive-in relieved me, somewhat. But: what if I hadn't stuck the testing stick up far enough up my nostril? I stuck it up until tears developed in my right eye. 

 After a week of being out, the administration pressured me to return to the classroom, even though I had been given ten days to quarantine. I was torn between pleasing admin and following protocols. We compromised back to ten days. Was I going to lose my job? The confusion about what I should do for myself and my family vs. what I should do for my work and colleagues was all stirred up and circulating. After all, I had put my all into building up to a new full-time contract; on the other hand there were underlying conditions in my family.

I went back to teaching on the 11th day of the semester, and my students were raring to go. It felt so good to return to their embrace. Just like the faculty, the students were experiencing varying levels of comfort.  I was trying to fake it and make it through the days, but I wasn't very good at it. 

In fact, I was hyperventilating four hours at a time, my voice wasn't projecting out through my mask, and I had other visible signs of hypervigilance: shoulders hiked up towards my ears, eyes wide, and body somewhat frozen, as a deer becomes when headlights are glaring, torchlike, upon them. 

In my case, the headlights were students who refused to wear the mask, or who wore it with their nose sticking out. They looked at me with disinterested pride for not abiding with school rules, and I was triggered by their lack of concern for me and all the others.

I dropped down to teaching only two small classes. I still had students who would not wear their mask properly and from whom, ostensibly, I could catch the virus. But I would lose my health insurance if I left this job entirely. More importantly, I would lose a program I had been putting a lot of care and thought into. What a catch-22. Losing health insurance and full-time income to lessen anxiety and reduce a health risk.

The band-with of our admin team could not keep up with the demand for help from teachers trying to get students to comply with masking. The first day I called upon a member of the team to help out with noncompliant students, he was out in quarantine following exposure.

There were days when I would leave the building and walk to my car, rip off my facemask and inhale the fresh air with exuberance. Then I would get into the car, and go over, in my mind, the moments where there may have been an exposure. Since we knew that anyone might carry the virus asymptomatically, it seemed risky to teach to half-masked high schoolers.

In the earliest days of pandemic teaching, we were cleaning everything that we and the students had touched with incredibly toxic spray cleaners. The days went on, it seemed, with the speed of tar being poured onto pavement. And I always felt covered in a film of potential virus when I returned home. Some days I would stop and park my car on my way home, in neighborhoods full of dripping live oak trees, and rest, processing the day, clearing my head for re-entry home. On one of these days, a woman called out to me from her porch: "Can I help you? This is not a parking area. I've seen you here before."

Was I clean enough for re-entry into my own home? I never knew the real truth about this. Especially in the beginning.

Flash-forward to Summer of 2022:

July.

Everyone is exhausted. Over a million people have died here in the United States, and hospital rates are going up again. I've just had a quick facebook chat with a former student who says her doctor friend is bracing for the next wave in her northeastern city. Here in Florida, it is rare to see someone masking in public. At a recent indoor-outdoor party, I had been cautious, until a friend rushed up to me and planted an air kiss next to my cheek while I was in a moment of under-guarded enjoyment. 

But its happening because of a combination of fatigue and a desire to go back to how things were. And that is the next idea I wanted to address because, we

                               can't

                     go

back and we shouldn't with such new and important knowledge to practice, n'est-ce pas?

With the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s a friend returned from Beijing having practiced masking and remaining untouched by the virus, although he was shaken up by it. I remember so well seeing people masking in China then on the news. Occasionally we would see people in the U.S. who were accustomed to masking elsewhere and had chosen to continue on this side of the ocean. 

Having been inclined to follow the patterns of the outbreak from France, NYC, Chicago, and California it has been easy to follow viral spread throughout the course of the pandemic. 

Masking has become so second nature. I find it makes me more aware of the air quality in my own home (and I put one on to clean house now). 

(tbc)