Essential

I had to go back into my room and get it. The hat. The room was the computer lab at the elementary school at which I work. For the past few days it had been the center of activity as our staff rushed about preparing as many Chromebooks as we could find to distribute to our students. The students who were sent home weeks ago with no real sense about what might come next. They were sent home way back in the middle of March with all the copies we could manage in the two hours of notice we were given that schools in our district were closing. Since then, we have been connecting via email and texts and Zoom meetings and Google hangouts and the occasional phone call that keeps us in touch with this education business.
The hat was sitting on the stool where I habitually leave it once I come back in from the playground, or at the end of the day once all the kids have been picked up and I don't have to wait outside with them anymore. Over the past week, there haven't been that many kids to supervise. There have been a lot more parents to talk to, to advise, to remind, to explain things to. Here's a bag of art supplies. Do art with your kids. We can't do that right now. Here's another big wad of books and paper to help your kids practice to write and add and subtract and multiply and so forth. We can't do that right now. Here's a Chromebook for you to connect to Al Gore's Internet so that your child's teacher can make a virtual connection every now and then. We can't do that like we used to right now.
And as I scurried about the school trying to locate scraps of paper or power cords or phone numbers for two free months of wi-fi connection, I wore that hat. The one that used to be blue but has faded to almost gray. The once white block letters over the bill have aged and become filthy enough to make it hard to discern them: FDNY. Fire Department of New York. My mother sent me that hat as a Christmas present after September 11, 2001. It helped keep the memory of those brave first responders alive in my head when I wore it. All those years ago. Now it brought me comfort to think of all those brave first responders who are on the front lines of a different catastrophe.
When at last we had closed the front gates after two days of handing over sanitized envelopes of schoolwork and devices to enable distance learning, it was time to shut the school down for what could be months. Trash was emptied. Appliances were unplugged. The computer lab was shut down. Everything was turned off.
But before I left, I went back in my room and picked up that hat. I wanted to take it home with me. I wanted to remind myself of this tiny bit of heroism, and all the others out there doing their part. Those little bits of essential.