Day #83 Writing Through COVID-19: Black Lives Matter (and much smaller matters)

I'm on the fourth chapter of "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi. It is spinning me around and setting me down hard. I still have so much to learn.

While maintaining my COVID quarantine, my closest views of the Black Lives Matter protests come from both protesters and the police:

1) My oldest daughter and her family are active in the Des Moines anti-racist movement. Their work on social equity initiatives and politics readied them for their daily marching in Des Moines alongside the Black community. My son-in-law celebrated his birthday Saturday by inviting his friends to march with him.

2) Remember my sister and her husband Randy in Eastern Iowa who is recovering from COVID-19? Their son is a police officer in Iowa City. His job is to keep protesters off the Interstate where they and others could be killed, while also trying to keep armed anti-protesters from escalating violence.

My head and heart have been filled with images and emotions related to George Floyd's unspeakable death and the uprising of response this week. Suddenly, after nearly three months, COVID is no longer the only story on my mind.

I have been using this "Writing Through COVID-19" blog to record my own tiny window into this national crisis. George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter protests are, indeed, a stinging layer of our nation's pain, June 2020. 

So two days ago I began a blog post about the challenges of scrutinizing my own privilege, rethinking the attitudes I was raised with, and recommitting to my anti-racist responsibilities as a teacher in a nearly all-white rural school district. It is difficult to write. More difficult still is to condense it into a single blog post. So let me return to this as I distill and make sense of my experiences and ignorance.
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On my morning run, I stopped to take a picture of how green everything is. The corn is a foot tall already. This is a reminder that time is passing; seasons have not paused--even if I have.

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Palmer cut her grandpa's hair Friday, and I was there to snap a photo. I love everything about this: the vegetable dish towel used as a cape, Palmer's phone tucked into her running tights, my dad's hand-carved favorite cane propped between his knees, four pens in his shirt pocket, the smile on his face.
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Today, Sunday, Palmer made a run to town to pick up the Des Moines Sunday Register, bottled water, and ice, as our ice machine has been on the blink.

When she delivered the groceries, Palmer set them inside the back door and shouted "Here is your ice!"

At the time, I was napping on the sofa. Dan was doing bookwork. I heard him rustle to tend the ice, and I dozed back to sleep.

Suddenly I heard the doorbell. Roused, I answered it to find my mother, dressed in long sleeves and long pants on this 93-degree day, toting a plastic container (actually, it was the file box I'd given my dad to help him organize his mail).  "I'm here for the ice," she said.

"What ice?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I heard someone say 'Your ice is here.' I think our freezer is broken."

Half asleep, I told her that her freezer was fine; the ice was for Dan.
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Ten minutes later my mom rang the doorbell again. This time she held out a $20 bill. "For the ice," she said.

"Mom," I explained, "You didn't ask for ice. You didn't get any ice. You heard Palmer say 'Here's your ice,' but she was saying that to us, not to you."

And then (finally) my empathy overtook my lethargy. I wasn't going to finish my nap. Instead, I walked outside with my mom. I explained again--lightly, happily--that her freezer probably needed to be defrosted, but it was still working. No ice needed! I then spent about an hour with her, reading poems and letters, looking at photos: the gentle glide from angst to calm.
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The dog peed on the carpet, but that's a story for later.
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After supper, I went downstairs with my mom's meds and two Klondike bars. I saw that a large sofa had been pulled from the wall, no job for enfeebled nonagenarians.

"What's this?" I asked, then absorbed the scene as my dad explained. He and my mother had moved the sofa to unplug the refrigerator. They'd moved its minimal contents to their table, then (somehow?) filled the ice tray with warm water, and positioned (cattywampus) their dishpan to catch the defrosting freezer.

This was, indeed, a Berryhill Red-Green operation.
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Will I ever learn to stop? I should have taken a few breaths and realized their cockamamie strategy for defrosting their dorm-sized refrigerator's freezer was fine. Just fine.

Instead, I bulldozed MY defrosting method: dragging the fridge outside where it could melt without needing dishpans and towels. Of course, in executing my plan, I caused a lot of water to slosh onto the carpet. The same carpet the dog peed on...but that's a story for another time.

Enough.
Be well.
Write.

Allison