To the healthcare workers healing, to the cleaners cleaning, to the teachers e-teaching, to the feeders feeding, to the deliverers delivering, to the entertainers phone-filming, to the drag queens lip synching, to the police and prisoners, bureaucrats and scriveners, techies and tricksters, firefighters and fixers, mobster-saints, flingers of paints, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, movers and shakers and renegade Quakers, to those out of work who have not gone berserk (and those who might have gone a little berserk), to the kids and their people, and everyone who makes our beloved NYC thrum, thank you. Our flame still burns bright, as evidenced in this wonderful picture by Silas Raines.
Check out Liberty's fabulous shoes! I will enjoy bragging about Silas when he hits the big time, but for now I revel in the magic of his lines. May this picture bring you some joy, too.
Here's a profile of the artist.
Name: Silas Raines
Age: 9 1/2
Extreme Kid Since: 2013
Something you like about quarantine: no answer.
Something you don’t like about this quarantine: I’m tired of staying home, I miss my teachers and friends.
Any advice to kids (or adults) in these days of Covid?: Play with your toys, eat good food, get outside and have fun.
Please submit your pandemic art to Broken & Woken. We may be able to publish it or turn it into a fundraising tee shirt for Extreme Kids & Crew!
My friend Jenny is a doctor at the Brooklyn hospital which serves Sunset Park, a neighborhood dear to my heart as I used to live there. I remember dodging kids playing street hockey and shopping at Winley’s Emporium, Chinese muzak and Dolly Parton songs blaring as shoppers selected from bins of carrots, bitter melon, lotus root and plantain. That was a while ago, but the neighborhood remains diverse even as real estate prices have caused displacement throughout the borough. According to the most recent census, about half of Sunset Park’s residents were born outside of the United States—primarily in China, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
The wealth of languages spoken in the neighborhood is a joy, but also, from my friend’s point of view, a challenge. If you are a doctor who speaks English and Hindi, how do you talk with a Spanish- or Mandarin-speaking patient? Even when doctors and patients share a common language, other barriers pop up—fissures and misunderstandings related to differences in race, religion, education, gender, age, ability. Fascinated by the role that communication plays in medicine, Jenny has spent years developing an intensive training that helps medical residents better connect with their patients. Extreme Kids & Crew has been involved in the disability component of the program; this spring, some of our parents were planning on visiting her hospital to share stories. Needless to say, that plan fell through. But communication is still on my friend’s mind.
How best to console a person while wearing a hazmat suit? Think of the patients, separated from their families and not even able to see the faces of the doctors and nurses attending to them. Hospital workers have taken to pinning pictures of themselves to their protective gear so patients can get a visual of the human behind the mask. But the families can’t see anyone: they're stuck on the outside, unable to visit. In cases where death seems inevitable, doctors have been able to call in the next-of-kin to arrange for last good-byes. But death doesn’t always act in a predictable manner, and loved ones can’t always be reached. There is a great deal of uncertainty and anguish, both inside and outside of the hospital.
Enter the humble telephone call. Ideally, the primary care physician would be the one to get in touch with families to provide them with updates. But it is not always possible for people running from ventilator to ventilator to look up telephone numbers, leave messages, wait for returned calls, or coordinate with translators. So my friend has gotten together a group of radiologists, neurologists and other specialists, trained them (“You ask the family what they understand of the situation first, then you tell them what you know.”), and given them the information they need to impart. Sometimes, the news they deliver is good. Sometimes, it’s not. But as difficult as the process can be, even with clunky translation and broken connections, even when the news is bad, the doctors say they appreciate the work. The known, after all, is invariably better than the unknown. And regardless of the news, family members almost always thank them for calling. “They are so grateful,” Jenny said. We both teared up: this heartache and kindness at the same time, this understanding that in spite of the regulations and precautions tearing us apart, we are all caught up in the same thing.
The Covid pandemic is often compared to a war. In the numbers of dead and the way we cannot honor the dead as we would like, there are similarities, but war is a trait of humans--and those other extremely organized and populous creatures, ants. Covid is not a multi-tiered society looking to claim our land, resources, allegiance. Covid are motes of fat and protein looking for places to replicate. If they could possess something like preference, they would undoubtably prefer not to kill us; after all, they can’t replicate on a corpse.
I find this reassuring. For once, we are not killing each other. Instead, we are working together. The “we” to which I refer is enormous. As of April 6, 184 out of the UN’s 193 member countries had either issued recommendations to restrict internal movement or enacted some level of national lockdown. I know, I know: There are people flouting the recommendations or making cynical use of them. There are political leaders whose actions seem inhumane at best. But still, in my life, I have never seen people acting in such strange and bewildering harmony. Billions of people are staying home to protect the most vulnerable among us, billions are putting their lives on the line to keep us fed, medicated, clothed, clean and healthy. The news cycle is dwelling on disability related issues practically 24/7.
There is much to be celebrated--from the exhausting, loving work happening at Jenny’s hospital, to the neighborhood volunteers delivering food and supplies to the elderly, to the city wide clamor of thanks that erupts from the streets each night at 7 pm, to the wonderfully spirited art and ad hoc performances that pop up on my computer screen, made by people from all over the world, bent on reaching out, even during quarantine, and offering encouragement.
I love the videos of Iranian doctors and nurses dancing for their patients. But as I’m stuck at home, what gets my own feet working are the clips of people getting down in their kitchens. There’s the tango from a tiny Parisian flat and those South African ladies in their finery, working those hips as they mix that batter. But you don't need to dress up. You don't need impeccable rhythm. You just need to move, any way you can, and let that joy percolate. Here we are, still here!
I’ll sign off with a few Extreme Kids families, dancing from their homes to yours. Why not join them?
Wondering what other Extreme families are doing during this Time of Covid? A lot of us are making art. Here’s a piece I particularly love by Paulina Dunn. The words, from Richard Siken, draw on the old phrase “Fiddling while Rome burns,” an aspersion cast on Emperor Nero, said to have hung out in his version of Mar-a-lago, playing the violin while his city went up in flames. But really, what could he have done? At least he wasn’t telling people there was no fire, or to put out the flames with the eye of a newt. I, for one, would prefer the fiddle to a certain president’s talking or tweeting.
I love the way Paulina’s collage links our present situation to other times and places, the plagues and disasters lived through before, the marvelous and comical desire to be holy as the world we know goes up in smoke. My vision of holy drew from Little Women: the mother and daughters sitting around the fire, knitting socks for Union soldiers. I could do that with my girls! We could sit around the computer, watching old movies as we tore up tee shirts and turned them into a big box of face masks for the workers at Felix’s school. What happened in reality was that I realized I don’t know how to sew. It took me two hours to make a single mask, and it’s not the sort of thing I would feel good about giving to someone else, though it suffices when I leave our little bunker for supplies.
My daughters have dubbed this the Boring Apocalypse because those of us not sick or not directly helping the sick do a lot of sitting around. We wait. We have Zoom seders and eat too many cookies. We repent. We realize how lucky we are: all these cookies, all these relatives and friends who are OK. Yet living alongside this non-eventfulness is a raging concern. We write condolence emails, condolence texts, condolence posts. We practice our own versions of magic by urging light, prayers, thoughts, vibes to wend from us to those we love. It’s not boring, at least not to me. The feelings of separation and connection are too powerful.
This Sunday will be the first Easter I won’t be hovering by Felix, ready to grab a dyed egg before he chomps right through the shell. His absence is a hollowness in my heart, and yet I do not bear it alone. In Rome, in Bejing, in Maplewood, New Jersey, others feel this same ache. And probably also this same wonder at the creativity of our children, the new ways we find of helping each other, the clearness of the skies, and the thoughts that spring up in the quietness.
I clean, I cough, I ponder seedlings and prevailing winds. We are up in New Hampshire, to be near Felix, but due to Covid 19 we cannot visit him. We can only wait, and growl at our internet connection, which comes via satellite and wavers when the clouds go by. Time expands. My heart contracts. A middle aged adult resident at Felix’s school has died. But Felix is healthy, far removed, in good spirits.
You can’t hear sirens here. You hear the wind blowing through the branches, chickadees, our dog barking at his own invisible threats. I attack the storeroom behind the garage, in the hopes of resuscitating a work bench back there. I sweep up years’ worth of mouse pellets that might carry the hantavirus, a silty layer of dust that might trigger my asthma. I swab inky black blobs that might be black mold. None of it bothers me. That’s the thing about wartime thinking. Get a shiny new repository of fear and the old ones fade into has-beens. I wonder if molds, motes and viruses hold microscopic conventions. If they ponder best practices for tamping down the human population. If they consider Covid 19 their reigning champion.
I told Felix it was heroic of us, remaining in our respective houses, meeting only over the phone. We are being Daoist superheroes, fighting the disease by doing nothing. “Ha ha ha!” he roared. He has been in a marvelous mood recently, laughing up a storm. Maybe it amuses him. We, who usually hurry everywhere, stepping into his slower, stationary world, making a big deal of what for him is quite ordinary. Maybe he is a vanguard, lighting the way for stillness, uncertainty, isolation. I don’t know. I just know that I’m grateful he’s happy.
His sisters, not so much. They are bored out of their minds. A friend is working on a community art project in Washington D.C.The idea is to draw pictures, display them in your windows, tag your address on a treasure map.That way neighbors walking their dogs or trying to get a breath of fresh air in a responsible, socially distant way can go hunting for art.
“Maybe the girls would like to do something like that,” she suggested.
“We don’t have people walking by,” I said. “We’re in the woods.”
“You’ve got foxes. Make art for the foxes.”
After the girls’ daily bout with Google Classroom, I suggested we collect material from the forest, make figures, arrange them in the hollows of trees. They listened politely. They didn’t say no. They are in middle school. That’s about as good as it gets. We tromped along the path, the dog bounding ahead, Miranda lagging behind.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I considered a stick ledged with fungi. She tripped in a puddle.
“Are you OK?”
She looked like she was about to cry. “Please, please do not make me do pine cone art.”
And so it goes. No art for the foxes. But she did paint this:
Good luck everyone. Next week, a dispatch on your art. Hang in there!
