Still Breathing

 "My mom died from Coronavirus." 

Not true at all, but it certainly would be a way for me to get into the minds and hearts of the five to eleven year olds who saunter about my schoolyard in various stages of masklessness. Over the past year, I have been told by medical experts from this demographic that "kids can't get COVID." I have also been told that "once you've had 'rona, you can't get it again."

These little reminders of the science gap continue to fuel my days. I just got my (feels lump on shoulder) fifth booster. Or something like that. I keep getting shots whenever someone recommends them. I got a flu shot too just to be sure and I'm in the market for a shingles shot in spite of the fact that everyone I know who has gotten one insists it is the toughest of the lot. 

But ultimately a whole lot better than getting shingles. 

Which is really the currency here. Wearing a mask is a great big pain, but the alternative is much, much worse. The tiny threads of knowledge that get passed around about the pandemic that continues to wind its way through our country and our planet make us all complacent. That's a dangerous thing to be during a global pandemic. Even if you "can't get" COVID-19, you can carry it around with you until you land near another willing recipient. And in spite of all our best efforts, kids continue to contract the disease. And some of them die from it. 

Because ultimately it's my job to keep school safe. I would feel nothing but sadness if one of our kids got sick. "I told you so" is a pretty indefensible position when you're a teacher. When you're a teacher, you keep telling them. And telling them. And reminding them. And insisting. 

This position is not always supported by a government that seems anxious to be done with all this disease junk. In one of his less thoughtful moments, President Joe told 60 Minutes that the pandemic is over. What further justification does an eight year old need? I'm just the computer teacher. The President says it's over. What do I know?

Which is the only reason I would even flinch in the direction of telling the story of my mother dying from Coronavirus. It would not be true, except for the dying part, but do they really need to know that? Or maybe I could be one notch more responsible and have them go to the Cincinnati Children's Hospital web site to do a little research on their own. 

And hope they don't end up on Joe Rogan's podcast instead. 

Victim Of Circumstance

 I was headed up the hill that rises from underneath the overpass near our house, determined to keep things as normal as possible, given the circumstances. My mother was fading quickly and I flinched with each new email or text. I figured that I could get away with my Saturday morning run, and come back to finish the day by distracting myself with any number of mindless activities. 

That was not to happen. About half a mile from my house, the little bell that rings in my earbuds interrupted Bruce Springsteen singing about Cadillac Ranch. It was a text from my older brother. It wasn't a funny tweet from my son. It was a text from my brother. It wasn't a reminder to check the school Facebook page. It was a text from my brother. The text that told me my mother was gone. 

So I stopped my run and walked back down the hill to my house. Once there, I broke the news and my wife's heart by telling her the news. Then I set about making phone calls to all those I believed would want to be notified of the passing. Hours passed, and I kept remembering that I needed to call this person back, or maybe I had forgotten. In between, I took deep breaths and dealt with the way things felt out of time. 

And at some point, I remembered one of the distractions I had planned for the day: The University of Colorado was playing Cal Berkeley in football. I had lost track of my distractions. I turned on the television just in time to see the Buffaloes go ahead in overtime. I stuck around long enough to watch them defend their goal line, turning away the last chance attempt of the Bears to tie the game back up. Colorado won their first game of the season. At home. 

Suddenly I was struck with a flood of memories. All of them having to do with the season tickets my mother had in that same end zone I had been watching. All the glory. All the pain. All the mediocre seasons. All the times we walked out of that stadium, sometimes deflated, sometimes elated. Mostly we went to hang together, and to share the football experience we call "being a fan."

This season has been a deflated one for the CU Buffaloes. They had not won a game in five tries. They had fired their coach, and used their bye week to try and put things back together. And they had picked this particular moment, hours after one of their biggest fans had gone to that big grandstand in the sky to win their first game. 

In a day that was filled with a lot of tears, this brought a smile to my face. You can tell me it was just a coincidence. 

Mom and I know different. 

Minus One

 The most difficult part of preparing for life without my mother around: reality. 

For as long as I can remember, the way that I have checked my reality is by talking about it with my mom. Good day or bad day, if I wanted to check my roll, I called my mom. This all started way back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in elementary school. Sitting down at the kitchen table after a long day in first grade over a glass of Kool-Aid and a couple of cookies, we talked about my day. 

Eventually, those check-ins became less frequent. Teenagers don't have quite as much to say to their parents, but I found it necessary to stay in touch with mine. All those things that seemed so confounding and torturous in my adolesence were made less painful by having my mother's ear. 

And it wasn't just the ups and downs of being a kid. All three of her sons felt compelled to share all the music, movies and books that we discovered. Pity my mother for having to sit through three separate recaps of the most recent Planet of the Apes movie that we had all attended together. We all felt compelled to share our latest album purchase with her as well. We did come by this honestly, as mom felt it was her job to coach us up when it came to pop culture, showing us all those MGM musicals and all that Beethoven, Brahms and Tschaikovsky. My mother read The War of the Worlds to us. She handed me a copy of Dracula, knowing my predilection for things monstrous. 

Then there was all that writing. Even when I was writing all that dark poetry and obtuse short stories, I knew who my audience was. When I started writing this blog, I was happy to know that my mom was my constant reader. Some days were diamonds. Some days were rocks. When things went sideways in my life, it was a chat with my mother that helped me straighten it out. 

My audience has shrunk ever-so-slightly. But it's huge. The fabric of my reality has been torn apart. Thank you for reading about it. 

Since We're Neighbors, Let's Be Scared

 Once upon a time, I signed up for Next Door. Online. It was a suggestion made to my question about how I might go about ridding my family and myself of a futon frame that had been propped up in our basement since (checks watch) the Eisenhower Administration. This was in response to my fervent wish that I not become one of those who would simply cast his unwanted belongings out into the street, in hopes that the hand-lettered "FREE" sign would be a message to the universe that I needed its help. Or at least that portion of the universe that would a) be in close enough proximity to my home that the trip would be worth it, and b) that "it" in the form of a slightly used futon frame would fill a void in their life. 

I posted the pictures and gave a brief but informative description of the furniture, making clear that there would be no charge for eliminating this albatross from my life. My son and I carried said albatross to the curb, along with the aforementioned hand-lettered sign, just to accentuate the conditions under which one might acquire such a lovely piece. 

So I waited. I watched. I monitored. I had heard that it would only be a matter of minutes. Or hours. Or days before my unwanted refuse became someone else's treasure. 

After a few days without any contact from anyone on Next Door, I began to wonder if perhaps I had made an error in my posting. I checked. Nope, there it was, under a sea of additional free stuff from all around my neighborhood. Apparently there was some competition. Who would be the lucky one to haul off my debris? Eventually, someone did. Under the cover of night. I never received a notice from anyone on Next Door. 

I did start to receive a steady stream of frightened posts from members of my community who were enduring all manner of inconvenience and strife. I was made aware of all the threats to the quiet solitude of urban living. Not the least of which was the theft of catalytic converters. Nary a day went by without some mention of how bedbugs seem to have infested the neighborhood up the hill from me, or how someone keeps ringing the doorbell pretending to be from PG&E. If I read all their cares and woes, I might not ever leave the house. 

To put a futon frame out on the curb for someone to scoop up. With or without the app. 

Crisis Actor

 Alex Jones was ordered by a court to pay the parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims nearly one billion dollars. Nine hundred fifty-six million dollars. In the words of one commenter, "That's a lot of supplements." 

If you haven't been following the case and perhaps believed that Mister Jones might somehow slip free of any penalty at all for his campaign of lies and shame, the judge made sure that Mister Jones would remember it. For years, Alex Jones took to whatever soapbox would support his bulk and insisted that the twenty first graders and six teachers who were murdered ten years ago were made up. They never existed. And even if they existed, they were part of some liberal scheme to rid the country of guns. Families that had already been torn apart by violence were constantly bombarded by the repetition of these conspiracy theories even as they tried to push through their grief. Jackie Barden, whose son Daniel was killed in the shooting, testified about receiving letters from people claiming to have urinated on her son’s grave and threatening to dig up his body. I cannot imagine.

But Alex Jones could. He apparently thought nothing of using the deaths of children to promote his web site and his stream of right wing blather. His reaction to the verdict handed down? He live-streamed the event on his podcast, laughing off the damages. He assured his audience that he wouldn't have to pay off the monstrous debt. "Do these people actually think they're getting any of this money?" All the while in the background, he was promoting the super sale on all the items in his online store, thanking his tiny-brained followers for bottles of Anthroplex. 

Meanwhile, Jones is shoring up his defense by essentially tearing it down. He filed for bankruptcy back in July, and intends to appeal the judgements against him. This might keep him from debtors prison, but he will most likely spend the rest of his miserable life paying lawyers and, yes, the families of Sandy Hook. 

Because it was never really about a billion dollars. It was about sending a message to dolts like Alex Jones who would use their megaphones to cry wolf in a crowded movie theater. It should be apparent to anyone looking in that the only war Alex Jones is engaged in is the one against reality. The only "info" he has to offer is misinformation. He spent years insisting that the victims and families of Sandy Hook were "crisis actors." Now it would seem that term is best applied to Mister Jones himself. 

Keep It Simple

 Staring at the cursor on the upper left corner of the screen, blinking away, I wonder how many times I have thought about sitting down to write This Blog. 

My mother died. After eighty-seven years of living on her own terms, she decided that enough was enough and she left the earth shy one Barbara Caven. 

I feel it currently in waves. In bits and pieces that don't exactly fit together. There is nothing linear about grief. There are these great arching swoops of memory and emotion. Now my mom exists in all times in all places. 

My mom. Everyone's mom. That was the amazing thing about the woman who raised me. Not content to raise her three boys and a dachshund, she took on the neighborhood. She fed the kids we brought home. She pulled their loose teeth. She listened to their stories. She gave them a place to be for a while. 

As the years passed and we all grew up, they kept coming back. For a kind word or a cookie. To share their lives with the lady who had cared. 

I stayed in touch. I don't have any doubts about what I might have left unsaid. I do wish that we could have had one more game of gin rummy, as I believe she was ahead from our last marathon. I will miss so many things, like the way she could fill in the blanks for any question I might have about what was playing on Turner Classic Movies. I will miss our post-game breakdown after every Broncos game. I will miss matter-of-fact wisdom that only a mother could share. 

I will miss my mother. 

I can say that I am relieved that she didn't suffer. But I know that she did. She had an upper lip so stiff that her laundry list of ailments were pushed to the background. She was not one for scenes. She kept chugging along as she could. Until she stopped. It would be ridiculous not to call her passing a tragedy. The void that she leaves cannot be reckoned. All the lives she touched. All the moments she held and shared. Those who knew her best were the better for it, and those who only knew her briefly wished for a little bit more. 

In some ways, now there will be enough of my mom to go around. She is everywhere. All at once. I will spend the rest of my life trying to love her as much as I know she loved us all. Her friends, her family, her sons, her birds, her home. I am so very lucky to have been part of the light of her life for all those years. 

That light will never go out. 

Paid

 The headline read: One Way to Ease the Teacher Shortage: Pay More. I did not fall out of my chair laughing, but the image did occur to me. It seemed like the proper reaction to the suggestion made by the powers that be that the way to attract more employees to a certain vocation would be to compensate them in a way that made them feel rewarded for choosing a profession that has inherent challenges and an image problem. 

A long time ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was managing a warehouse, my wife suggested that I give teaching a try. At that point in my life, it seemed like a lateral move, with the potential for advancement. I had already risen about as high as I was going to at the employee-owned company that had promoted me to management and elected me (twice) to its board of directors. I was paying rent and keeping frozen pizzas in the refrigerator, but when it came to putting much in the bank, it seemed like it might be a tough place from which to consider retiring. So when the Intern Credential train pulled up the station, I hopped on. The Oakland Unified School District had just weathered a strike by its teachers that brought more salary and benefits to them. I could slide right into this teaching gig and still get my teeth cleaned and fluids checked on a regular basis, and these folks had a salary schedule. 

Salary schedule? You mean I could actually plot my path of advancement? I wouldn't have to wait for my co-workers to approve my raise, if I got one? That sounded like the place for me. An opportunity to learn and grow and maybe even put some money away. 

And eventually that was what happened. Not enough to keep us from stretching a few dollars and pinching a few pennies. Our economic reality was such that we kept our heads above water and managed to pay our mortgage and keep those frozen pizzas coming. And going. The kid we were able to raise on the salary I made as a teacher was a gift, of sorts. One that started with the very impressive medical benefits given to me by the book warehouse, and continued with those afforded me by the contract I had with the school district. 

And yet, I have been made aware over and over again throughout the years that the common denominator in almost all discussion of the teaching profession is the way we are compensated: poorly. Sure, there are those wags who will go on and on about how "it must be nice to get paid for those three months you're not working," without ever understanding that the only way I get a check during the summer is if I schedule deferred pay from the other nine months. The vacation homes and the second car are things we joke about. Frozen pizzas are still regularly found in our freezer. 

And teachers aren't getting paid enough. Helping form young minds should pay more than the guy signing up folks for a Visa card and a free T-shirt at the baseball game. But maybe that's a story for another time.