Gardening at Night

I've been a little under the weather.  Not like, ventilator-under the weather, but definitely have some sort of cold.  I started getting a little nervous and decided to get tested again.  I still don't go out, but Alec is working and was exposed by a co-worker.  I also just kind of wanted to know.  I decided to go to one of the free, health department sites because I wasn't sure how many times my health insurance would pay for these tests and even if they did pay, I knew I haven't met my deductible and I don't want to cough up another $180.00 right now.

On Monday, I pulled up to the first health department site and was surprised to see a sign out front that stated that the site was closed because of "lightning".  I drove to another free site and got in line.  Thunder cracked through the air and the testers came out and informed us that they too were closing because of lightning.  I drove home.

Tuesday, I tried again and drove to a different, roving health department testing site.  I was surprised to get in there really fast.  I registered while standing there on an app on my phone and walked over to a tent where a volunteer handed me a bag via a really long set of pinchers.  It had my test inside and my name and date of birth on the outside.  I walked to the next tent and waited for the plastic covered volunteer to finish fumigating a chair, then sat in it as he stood six feet away from me, directing me how to perform the nasal swab myself.  The swab was like a mascara wand on a long stick.  I did the deed and handed him back the bag.
"Do you guys have an idea of how long the results might take?"  I asked cautiously.
"I did my own test a week ago Monday and just got the results back last night." the volunteer answered.
Eight days.
"Thanks." I said repeatedly and left.

The school year officially began on Wednesday.  My district decided not to pay us for five days worth of our salaries this year and instead, replaced four of them with a stipend-paid "learning institute".  The stipend is about one hundred dollars a day less than I usually make and for the fifth day, I get nothing. 

Each day began with a TEAMS call.  Everyone has pretty much learned to mute their microphones and keep the camera off at this point.  We were guided through a series of online modules and instructed to do small activities and upload our work into multiple folders and platforms in order to receive our stipend pay.  In the afternoon, we were told to work independently but to stay on the TEAMS call, muted.  By Thursday, things started getting strange.  The calls were lasting from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, most of it in muted silence.

I laid on my bed with Lola doing modules, hearing people occasionally unmute their microphones.
"Rainier...Rainier...." the meanest teacher in the school suddenly began whispering into his microphone.
"I need help!  I don't know what I'm doing!"  he whispered furiously.
It was weird hearing him in my bedroom.
He was met with radio silence.  Lola rolled over on her other side.
"Oh hey....." Ms. Rainier suddenly purred.
"Sorry....I was eatin'...what'd you need....?" she continued in a sleepy tone, her southern drawl dragging her words out.
At random times someone would inadvertently unmute themselves, causing half the school to also unmute themselves and yell "MUTE YOURSELF!" before the offender said anything embarrassing.
"Anyone wanna hear a song?" another teacher offered one afternoon, breaking hours of silence.
"Sure." I responded in the chat.  I ended up sort of regretting that.
I was getting texts, too.  Laughing, complaining, or requesting to copy my work.
It felt like some giant, metro-Atlanta sleep over.

Thursday night, I received a message from the health department.  My COVID test had been damaged in transport and was inconclusive.  They requested that I come back and be tested again.

Friday, they let us out for a long lunch, but requested that we keep the TEAMS call rolling but our microphones muted.  I let the TEAMS call operate on auto-pilot and drove to another testing center.  I sat in a line of cars in a giant, cracked, sunbaked Porsche parking lot next to the airport, waiting for my turn to get tested again.

I looked up at the the big, commercial planes flying overhead and suddenly had an overwhelming urge to cry.  I got myself together, just in time to shove the mascara wand up my nose again.

*Title, REM 

The Bubble

The COVID circle continues to tighten.  A close friend got it.  Then Alec's work closed down due to a co-worker having a confirmed case.  Alec had worked with the person and had to get tested again.  It was much different than the first time, he was there over three hours in a line of cars that snaked through a neighborhood and was told to wait seven to ten business days for the result.  It's just coming closer and closer.

School decided to begin classes virtually and re-assess the situation in September.  I am relieved but would really like more information.  Is the teacher start date the same?  And in this talk of budget cuts and furloughs....can we discuss my payment for the next fiscal year, which started on Monday?  Again, I am incredibly relieved that they are not going to force us into an unsafe situation on July 27th.  I just wish we could minimize some of this uncertainty, especially when we are talking salary and schedule.  And as for the Housing Authority, that is still up in the air too.  And it's about 500 degrees in Atlanta right now, Georgia is clocking in at over four thousand new cases a day, the redneck governor is trying to silence our mayor and all of our heroes are dying.

Strange products keep going missing.  I'm not talking about the early explicables like toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizer, yeast, flour and Emergen-C, but really odd, inexplicable stuff.  Windex is gone, which I don't get.  It doesn't have all the anti-bacterial stuff of the other sprays, it's just like benign blue chemical.  My niece tried to make seafood and couldn't find Old Bay anywhere.  Fresca is like a black market item at this point.  Radishes are AWOL.  For a bit, cooking spray was some sort of hot commodity.

Two years ago, I began my thirteenth year teaching, crossing my fingers that I could make it through one more year of abusive bosses and weird-ass interdepartmental insanity, before making a change.  I didn't make it and asked out of my contract during the second week of the school year.  They let me out about six weeks and eight hundred dollars later and I embarked on an extensive tour of schools that lasted four months, only to decide on an ESOL job at a Title I school that actually felt right.  I finished the school year and felt revived, finally, about my place in the universe.  Year fourteen brought COVID and March school shutdowns and the shift to virtual teaching.  Year fifteen begins soon, online.  For almost two years, I have had the sensation that I can't imagine what next month might bring, or how different next year might be and I wonder even more now.  I found it kind of exciting at first.  It still is, but with an underlying feeling of not so nice uncertainty.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Tell me what you know about dreamin', dreamin'
You ain't really know about nothin', nothin'
Tell me what you know about the night terrors every night 
5AM cold sweats waking up, to the sky
Tell me what you know about dreams
Tell me what you know about night terrors...nothin'
You don't really care about the trials of tomorrow...
I'm in the pursuit of happiness and I know
Everything that shines ain't always gonna be gold

There are a lot of different ways this could have gone down.  I'm not going to start with December, when the U.S. could have had an ear to the ground and started amassing testing kits, PPE and contact tracing.  Let's just go to March, when the cat was not even seeing the bag in its rear view window.

We could have really gone with this.  Stay in.  Get groceries delivered.  Chill.  For a bit.  Watch Netflix.
When we flattened the curve and were reporting few new cases a week...we could have moved to stage two.
People could go out with masks to the grocery store.  Maybe start getting some of those routine, medical appointments done that we get annually.  We really wouldn't need to go to Target or get our nails done or our hair cut.  We can cook our own food instead of making restaurant workers take risks because we are shitty cooks.  We could maybe not go to that lake in a neighboring state this summer.  That could wait.

And then, maybe we would have had this thing under control enough to think about restarting the school year.  We could start later then we normally do and maybe go farther into the summer, in hopes of a vaccine by January.  We could do some sort of small class sizes, everyone with masks and the desks spread out, with kids coming in in stages so that all of them get some sort of in-person instruction and we could make sure they have the technology to work at home a lot of days, or indefinitely, if we had to shut down again.

There are a lot of things that could have been done.  But, they didn't do it.  People simply couldn't behave themselves.  Everyone did the minimum and shot out of the house the minute that they could.  And now, our numbers are crazy and everyone wants their kids to go right back into those classrooms, even though most of society only added to the problem we are having now, instead of doing the right thing.

Alec got sent back to work a couple of weeks ago.  Since then, the circle of people I know with COVID has narrowed.  Before, it was stories I read in the newspaper.  I didn't disbelieve it, but it wasn't anyone I knew.  Since then, a store in the market where Alec works had to close because of a COVID positive case.  The restaurant where my niece and sister work had to close down two locations, because of COVID positive cases.  My niece's best friend got sent home because someone tested positive in the bar he manages.  A friend from college had to close down two of his restaurants because of positive cases.  And then, a close friend of mine contracted it in late June.   The circle is closing.

School starts in the fall, our in Georgia terms, in a little more than two weeks.  My district has not released a plan, but I anticipate full roll out, without even limitations on mask-wearing.  I could spend a lot of time discussing that, but I'm too tired right now.

It's been really hot.  I jogged through the park anyway, with my mask, trying to run some of this out of me.  I heard the man, the whistling man, in the park.  I saw him on his bike, whistling to the trees, to the air, to the world.  I could hear him for blocks.

*Lyrics, Kid Cudi, Pursuit of Happiness

Miles of Gold

"How long do we need to wait before getting tested?"
"I don't know, let me Google it."
"KLB said if we protested, the responsible thing is to get tested."
"Some of these places want a doctor's referral.  Wait, they are turning me away because they say I have to have symptoms.  I did the online registration."
"These tests are only 70% accurate, they give out false negatives."
"They say days eight after exposure has the lowest rates of false negatives, only 20%."
"Wait, I found a place that does a PCR test, it is supposed to be 99.6% effective and you can be asymptomatic."
"It takes 48-72 hours though to get results, what is the point if we go on day eight, and get results on day eleven?  Might as well just stay inside and wait for symptoms until day fourteen."
"I've been called back in to work and I can't walk into that building with all of those people without being tested.  It just wouldn't be right."

We registered online, which in itself was a ridiculous process full of dead links and crashed pages.  We finally got appointments, after several tries on various days, and then headed to the site hours ahead of our appointments.  A police car blocked the driveway to the drive-up clinic.  We drove around.  We came back.  We got in a car line in the Sherwin Williams next door.  We drove away and left.  We called, after never even getting a confirmation of our registration.  No answer. We checked the websites of the Fulton county health department testing sites, and they said we needed to call and register, but no one answered the phone.  We started driving to a Fulton county health department site that friends had said was easy, but turned around because we wanted the accurate test, even though we had to use our insurance to pay for it.  We returned, and Alec walked up to the police car. 

"He said people are waiting in the Waffle House parking lot."
We drove over, parked the car and waited with a bunch of other people sitting in their cars, with masks on.  No one went inside the Waffle House.
The clock was ticking.  The parking lot at the clinic was empty, but the cop car still blocked the entrance.  Cars were lining up again at the Sherwin Williams.  It was ten minutes ahead of our appointment time, but we still hadn't received any sort of directions from the clinic. 

Then, the police car ripped away from the entrance to the clinic. 

I put the car in reverse as quickly as a 2006 Honda Hybrid can move, looking into the mirrors as all of the other cars in the Waffle House parking lot did the same.  I pulled out onto the superhighway-type road, hoping to cut off the Sherwin Williams people that came after we did when I noticed, in horror, that cars were pouring out from all of the massive parking lots on all sides of the clinic, all headed toward the same entrance.  I NASCAR-ed the shit out of it and got into the clinic parking lot.  As soon as no more cars would fit, the cop reappeared and blocked the entrance, leaving god knows how many competing cars driving around N. Decatur and Lawrenceville Highway, until the entrance would open again. 

Three months into the pandemic, I don't know about you, but I am really tired of winning. 

Take it Away

There is a small little yellow house, on the southwest corner of Grant Park.  Right behind the zoo.  But it's not a house, it is a police precinct.  It's a few minutes walking distance from my home.  I jog past it all the time.  Probably for the last twenty-odd years, even before we bought our home.  They are Zone 3 police.  I remember when I first started living around here the Zone 3 police were in the newspaper all the time for extorting money from drug houses for protection.  Then, though Zone 3 is housed in my community, we are policed by Zone 6.  Zone 3 continues to nearly kill anyone in their path when they tear up the street in front of my house, only to turn their lights off the minute they see food. The police that killed Rayshard Brooks are stationed there.

I'm disgusted that murderers drove down my streets and through my neighborhood, everyday.  That I jogged past them.  And then, when protestors engulfed their precinct they came out like in a way that shocked me.

"The helicopters are really loud tonight...."  Alec and I mentioned to each other, last Saturday, the 13th.  We weren't budging, we were only less than a week from being exposed to large crowds.
I looked at the photos and videos of what had happened mere minutes from my home Sunday morning.  The most terrifying parts were when rows of police stood in full riot gear, calmly, only to charge at our residents on cue, swinging clubs and throwing tear gas.  All because people, residents, decided that those police didn't belong here.

Papí and I walked down there the following night, with our masks.  Dozens and dozens of police cars blocked the road between our house and there's, they just sat there, parked.  At least forty cops in riot gear stood in front of the cars.  We cut through the back streets to the other side of the park.  A tank-like military vehicle was parked at the corner of the park, flanked by at least fifty-more cops in riot gear.  Atlanta avenue glowed with unmarked cars, all the way up to Boulevard.  The Atlanta ATV guys, the ones that tear through traffic en masse came.  I could hear their engines coming closer and then, I saw dozens of them at the top of the hill, looking down at the almost military like force of police.  In formation, they backed up and road away.

The police stared at us.  And stood around, joking with each other.  If anyone got too close, they shined flash lights in their eyes and yelled "Get back!"
They were really comfortable and it infuriated me.  This is my neighborhood.  None of these cops belonged here.  I have more right to this ground and they were the ones that needed to leave.  And they were all here to defend the murderers that they housed in that little yellow house.

I've heard that most of those guys, I don't use the word 'pigs' because pigs are dignified creatures worthy of respect, got a case of the blue flu the last few days.  I'm glad they are gone.  I jogged past the area where the park and it was nearly devoid of their personal vehicles as well as their po-cars.  But I burn again in my stomach when think of what would happen if I, as a public school teacher, sat in the parking lot and refused to to teach.  I don't understand this power, or this relationship with the community.

I can't imagine saying that I won't work unless I get to kill people.  And, that it would be rewarded.

Fourteen Days

"Do we protest, march, just to make ourselves feel better, aggrandize ourselves?"
"Do protests or marches actually make any difference?"
"Do we protest just to say we did something, if anyone asks?"

I've done some activist type things.   More than marching, but yes, I have marched before.  Some of them were wildly boring and uneventful.  I wondered why I was there.  Other things, not marches, I worried I would be jailed, for more than one night.  I've taken action too, wether it was voting, or cooking in a migrant shelter, leaving water in the desert or making a difference in my day to day life with the way I view and react to Black people and other minorities.  Here I am, talking myself up.  But this one freaked me out.  The virus.

"I don't want to get sick."
"These protests are different.  The numbers are making a difference.  They need bodies."
"I hear them.  They're here.  Get your mask, let's go."

And we went.  I was happy about all the pop-up marches, not just marches in downtown Atlanta, but marches in Kennesaw, Stonecrest, Athens, everywhere.  When we heard the chant coming down our street, we went.

We marched with them up the street and around the block.  Then, they gathered in the park and Alec and I split.  For downtown.  We walked to the Capital and when no one was there, we went to Centennial.  It felt like a river that swept us up immediately and we walked.  And walked.  We kept our masks on and held hands the whole time, never letting go.  The street was full.  Traffic was blocked by the stream of people, but the cars that we blocked raised fists in the air, Black fists, cheering and screaming.  We were in midtown and sheets hung from the balconies, declaring that BLACK LIVES MATTER.  A man, a young organizer, yelled instructions through a megaphone, telling us when to go right when on-coming traffic was coming, or when to run to the sidewalk altogether.  All I could see were blocks of people in front of me and blocks of people behind me.  In midtown, he told us to take a knee.

"Ya'll are starting stuff and you can't do that.  She'll call the curfew on us again and you have to stop.  When you hear this beep beep from my megaphone, I have something to say and it's important.  Let's go."
We simultaneously stood.  And marched.
We were headed back south to my part of town.  I heard a car, squealing, and started to run, dragging Alec with me.  Charlottesville was all I could think.  I saw a man, in a sports car, his back wheels squealing and dragging, creating mountains of smoke.  He was Black, and his fist was out the window while he screamed into the air.

We marched back to Centennial, and then Alec and I walked home the extra mile.  We didn't really talk.  We just went home.

I've Got No Words

"Um, we are under curfew now so.....it's almost nine...."  I mentioned hesitantly to the men repairing our toilet.  Yes, the toilet that decided to nearly fall through what ended up being a rotten subfloor, which also had to be rebuilt.  In the middle of a pandemic, when I would prefer to be about twenty feet away from all humanity but cannot live without peeing.
"Do you think they will stop people on the highways?"  one of the repair men responded.  I found myself worrying about his skin, his slightly darker skin and what the police would do to a man of his color driving down the street after curfew while protests against America's treatment of black people filled the streets of our city and spread across every state in the nation.
"I don't know," I answered, "I've never experienced something like this."
It was the first night of curfew, after the protest erupted the Friday night before.

People that aren't from Atlanta don't really know the layout.  No one lives downtown, in the business district where the tall buildings are.  We just don't.  We live in neighborhoods with different names within the city of Atlanta that surround the downtown area where people work or go to school.  My neighborhood is one of the closer ones to downtown, about one mile from the Capital, even closer as the crow flies.  I can see its gold dome when I walk around the neighborhood.

Soon there was the ever present buzz of helicopters.  Sirens screaming and cops speeding down my street on their way downtown.  Ambulance sirens.  Convoys of police trucks all headed in the same direction.  The National Guard driving military vehicles in front of our houses.  And worse, later, when it got darker, loud booms resonated from downtown while we watched the news on TV, impotent, while they tear gassed the protestors and fired rubber bullets at them.  A mile away.

After days of protest in Minneapolis, Atlanta finally got going on Friday, the 29th.  Our mayor appeared on the television, begging protestors to go home and to not destroy things.  I voted for Keisha Lance Bottoms and I believe in her.  I believe in black leadership for the city of Atlanta.  It can be no other way.  She seemed honestly in fear for the protestors and in fear of what people might lose if their stores were destroyed.  Immediately after, T.I. took the microphone with the same message, followed by an impassioned speech by Killer Mike.  I turned my face to the side so that Alec wouldn't see that my eyes were tearing up.  I could only imagine how hard it was for them to implore the protestors to not destroy things when in the back of my mind all I could think was tear it up....tear it up....no one pays attention unless you do....we deserve it....we deserve this place to be burnt to the ground.....Berenice King followed Killer Mike and my emotions swirled with love for my city and the eloquence of our community leaders, combining with immense sadness and anger.  I can't breathe.... his haggard voice filled my ears and I squinted my eyes to avoid the image in my brain of his face, crushed under the knee of a nonchalant cop.

The buzz of the helicopters continued and I continued, sitting in my house, one mile away, watching the news.  Day three, I noticed a different kind of buzz.  By Sunday, I saw things on Facebook and whispers from neighbors that "they" were going to target residential neighborhoods.  WHITE RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS.  I love my house and obviously would prefer it wasn't burned down, but it sounded ridiculous.  THEY were coming for us.  I saw the buzz from Grant Park to Decatur and even worse, people in fear that their Target store might get hit.  Oh, god forbid the Target.  I like Target too, I buy a pair of flip flops there every summer and even a pair of cheap sunglasses but jesus christ, you care more about a Target store than what this really means?  A man died, another man died.  I looked out on my street that night and saw that a number of houses had their lights off, as if you closed your eyes no one could see you, even though you are the one with your eyes closed.

One of my neighbors ran afoul during a COVID construction project in their backyard and ended up on our front porch with masks on.  They brought a bottle of wine, which I uncorked immediately and basically put in juice glasses.  We realized the minute that we drank it that it was exceptional wine, and we later found out it was the most expensive wine we had ever swilled and that they were asking us for something special.  When I realized we were flanked by another high-priced neighbor, I felt like a Beverly Hillbilly.

I watched when the tree men came to cut down the oak.  They had a 100 foot crane.  When they sawed at my oak, which is even taller and older, I winced.  And I stood in my yard and watched.  But then, I stayed.  I saw a rustling way up in the beautiful tree that was coming down on our property line and realized there was a man, way up in it, suspended by only ropes, with a large chainsaw hanging off of his ass.  I was stunned.  I sat there for four hours, watching this guy work in coordination with the crane, cutting the tree down, limb by limb.  I cringed when they took large limbs off from over the top of my house, the crane swinging from side to side, mere feet from my roof and kitchen windows.  I watched and I watched.

Soon, they were down to the trunk.  I watched while they cut off ten feet.  And then another ten feet.  Then, they cut off the rest.  It was large and round.  It took a really long time for the chainsaw to get through the base and then, the claws of the crane lifted it into the air and through the sky over the yard.  It looked like a human body.

I watched it, suspended and swaying in the air and cried like I haven't in a long time.