Category Archives: Resistance

Still Cute, Just Bigger

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A couple months ago I was on my walk, and I saw a real estate sign in front of a house that was getting an addition. It said, “Still Cute, Just Bigger.” It made me think of the kittens. They are undeniably bigger. Willow, who was just two pounds when we got them in late May now weighs almost ten pounds, and Walter, who weighed two and a half pounds, now tips the scales at twelve and a half pounds. And I can say with complete objectivity that they are still cute.

Games

But they are no longer kittens. They turned one on Monday (if the date the shelter gave us was accurate and not an estimate). Because they do not need any more toys, for their birthday I decided to give them the experience each one wants most.

For Walter, that’s to go outside. He is always trying (and often succeeding at) running out the door when anyone opens it, but we are trying to keep him an inside cat for his own health and so he doesn’t catch birds. When I’m doing yardwork, I often glance back at the house and see him watching me wistfully from the window and he will sit by the door and meow, hoping we will let him out. We had a similar situation when Xander was young, and we eventually gave in and let him come and go as he pleased. (He was never much interested in hunting anyway. Matthew, who was more of a homebody, was the mouser in that pair.)

I took Walter with me when I went out to hang laundry on the line Monday morning and then when I was done, I sat on the back steps with toast and a cup of tea and kept an eye on him. He went all over our big back yard, watched birds in the sky and chased a bug in the grass. He crawled under the kids’ old wagon, sniffed the daffodils, and explored the weedy area at the very back of the yard. I had to go join him then because it turns out his black-on-brown stripes are good camouflage in March-brown vegetation, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t try to slip under the fence and escape the yard. He was outside for twenty-five minutes with me and then in the afternoon, Noah took him out again.

Willow doesn’t care to go outside, but what she loves most is the elusive red dot of the laser pointer. She loves it so much we don’t let her play with it very often because if we do it too often, she becomes obsessed and doesn’t want to play with anything else. North has also speculated that spending so much time chasing something she can’t catch cannot be good for her mental health. But I got out the laser pointer that morning and then again in the afternoon for about five minutes each time. If she plays with it longer than that she will wear herself out and she starts to pant with exhaustion. Walter likes the red dot, too, (though he seems equally happy with other playthings, like the worm-on-a-string or the mouse-on-a-string), so he joined in with her. They both like to dash after the dot if it’s on the floor, but Willow also likes to leap up in pursuit of it, if it’s on the wall. She particularly likes it in corners of rooms and will stand there sometimes, hoping for it to appear. She did that a few times the day after their birthday, but not for as long as I’d feared she would.

Names

When we named the kittens, I gave them middle names after Matthew and Xander—Walter Matthias and Willow Alexandra, but as they grew, I started to think I’d gotten it backwards. Of course, no cat is exactly like any other, but Walter’s sweet, friendly nature paired with his intense desire to go outside reminds me of Xander and Willow’s more high-strung temperament and her deep suspicion of any strangers who come in the house (though she is very affectionate with us) is more reminiscent of Matthew. So, this is my official announcement—they are now Walter Alexander and Willow Matilda.

These are deeply upsetting times, but whether these two are chasing images on the television screen or upsetting the paper recycling bin and scattering its contents all the way down the hall or curling up to sleep in our laps, they brighten every single day. I am looking forward to many more years with them.

Shame

I sometimes think one of the nicest things about being a cat might be not knowing anything about the political state of our country. But we know, so we keep going to protests. Beth went to a general purpose one on the lawn on the Capitol about a week ago and all three of us went to protest at Tesla dealership in Rockville last Saturday morning. It’s a weekly event if you’re local and want to go. (If you’re not local, there may be something similar near you. They are happening all over.)

Three hundred and seventy-two people were there toward the end, when one of the organizers did a head count. Because everyone was standing on the sidewalk berm on both sides of Rockville Pike, we must have been easy to count. We stood facing the six-lane street with our signs—my favorite was “OMG GOP WTF”—rang cowbells and occasionally chanted. “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go” was the only one that ever caught on. Response from drivers was very encouraging. There were near constant honks of support from cars, and delivery trucks, and even a Metro bus. People waved and stuck their raised fists out their car windows and yelled in agreement. In the not quite an hour we were there, I only saw one thumbs down, and Beth saw one person give us the finger. (Some of the people yelling their support were even driving Teslas.) It was quite heartening and as a bonus, one of the protesters was handing out homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Afterward we had lunch at Busboys and Poets, which was a nice treat. Like cats, people need those too.

Protests and Dentists

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I recently sent my sister an email with the subject line “my life is all protests and dentists.” It’s true. A little over a month ago, I wrote here that there were fewer protests to attend than in the first Trump administration. This is no longer true. It took a little while to ramp up, but now there are many more than last time. I can’t go to all that I’d like to and hold down even my part-time, flexible job. In the email above, I was giving Sara a heads-up about which days I’d be unavailable to work because I’d be trying to save democracy or my teeth. After the root canal in late February, I lost a crown, and between those two issues, I’ve had five visits to a dentist or endodontist this year so far. I haven’t kept track of Beth’s dentist visits this year, but she’s on her own dental journey, which is eventually going to lead to a bridge. She has an appointment for that next week.

Dentist Visits #3-4

I had the root canal on President’s Day, after two consultations (one with my regular dentist and one with the endodontist who performed the procedure). That same day Beth went to one of the Not My President rallies that took place all over the country. Maybe some of you, did, too. I know my West coast family members were at the one in Sacramento.

Because the endodontist drilled through a crown to do the root canal, I needed to go to my regular dentist to get a permanent filling in the crown four days later. The most notable thing about the actual procedure was that because all the nerves had been removed from that tooth, she didn’t use any anesthesia when she drilled into it to remove the temporary filling. And it was fine. Just as she assured me, I didn’t feel anything. But it was kind of terrifying anyway, to let someone drill into your tooth with no painkiller. So, I’m telling you this in case you ever need to do it. It’s fine, really.

J6 Rally

Here’s something that’s not fine. My dentist is on Capitol Hill, and you may remember the last time I went, the day after the inauguration (for dentist visit #1), the neighborhood was swarming with people in MAGA gear. This time, as I walked by the Supreme Court, I could see a group of people on the Capitol lawn. They were chanting something, but it was across the street, and they were too far away for me to hear them. They didn’t seem to have any signs either. I didn’t have time to stop to investigate, but I decided I would on the way back if they were still there in case it was a protest I’d like to join. But once I returned, they were gone. I didn’t find out until two days later that it was the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, celebrating the pardons of the J6 insurrectionists. It made me feel a little sick I’d been so close to them.

Post Office and Health and Human Services Rallies

The last Monday in February, Beth and I went to a rally in support of the post office with a few of her colleagues. It seems incredible we need to protest for the post office, but that’s where we are. This protest was held in a little park just across from the Capitol, in front of the Robert A. Taft Memorial. In case you’re wondering—who was Robert A. Taft?—I didn’t know either. Turns out, he was the Majority Leader of the Senate in the fifties and before that, as a Senator, was part of coalition that blocked a lot of New Deal legislation, so maybe not the most inspiring place for a labor-related action. It’s a pretty little park, though. Anyway, it was mostly people from various postal unions there, and the President of Beth’s union spoke. The sound system was terrible, so I didn’t hear most of the speeches, but President Cummings projected well, so I could hear him speak about the importance of the post office continuing to exist and remaining unionized.

The next day, Beth went to a rally for Health and Human Services. In the words of a family friend who attended and posted pictures to Facebook, this one featured “Scientists, researchers, educators and union leaders speaking out against illegal cuts to life-saving research and healthcare.”

Trans Passport Webinar

Two days later, Beth and I watched a webinar run by Lambda Legal about passports for trans people. To make a long story short, we missed our window of opportunity to get North’s passport renewed with an X gender marker last summer. That is not possible now, even though current passports with the X marker are still valid (for now). There’s an ACLU lawsuit in progress which could restore the X marker option. So, it seems like the best thing is to wait and see how it shakes out since North doesn’t have any imminent international travel. They are hoping to study abroad at some point in college, though—possibly in Italy, possibly in Ireland—so it will be relevant sometime in the next few years.

Trans Unity Rally and March

The first Saturday in March, Beth, Noah, and I all went to a rally in support of trans people. We weren’t sure what to expect, as it was kind of hastily put together, but there was a decent turnout (big enough so we never saw two lesbian moms with a trans kid we know who were there). And the sound system worked, so we could hear the speeches. It was a long event, five hours, and we didn’t think we needed to be there that long, so we arrived what we thought would be a couple hours into it, but I heard from someone in line for the porta-potty that it had started an hour late because of problems with…the sound system. Resistance problems…

Even though they had to compress their schedule, the speeches were longer than they generally are at this kind of event, but most of them were heartfelt, moving, and to the point. There were many rainbow and trans flags. Someone was carrying the Virginia state flag, I guess to represent their home state, and I also saw the Ukrainian flag (it was the day after that shameful meeting with Zelensky at the White House). There were a lot of hand-lettered signs. I re-used my “Defend Trans Futures” sign from the trans youth rally and Beth had made one that read “Defend Trans Rights.” I liked “Freedom Has No Gender” and “Fight Like a Mother for Trans Rights,” held presumably by the mother of a trans person. Someone was dressed like the Statue of Liberty, complete with a torch she kept having to re-light because the wind kept blowing it out. A lot of people were in rainbow or pastel blue-and-pink garb and several people had hair dyed in the colors of the trans flag. I must report, sadly, that the two trans rallies we’ve attended have also been the only two without any Democratic elected officials at them.

Eventually, we marched down Constitution Avenue to a field within (distant) view of the roof of the White House. I liked marching because it was good to be in movement after standing so long and we encountered a lot more pedestrians, some of whom looked curious, and some of whom cheered us on. I didn’t see any negative reactions. I think there might have been more speeches, but we were tired and hungry, so we left and went to Union Station for a late lunch of crepes and ice cream.

Trans Parents and Allies Zoom Meeting

The next Monday there was a Zoom meeting for parents and allies of trans people in the DC area. The group was small, just over a dozen people, mostly mothers of trans teens and young adults. Several had been at the rally and march. It wasn’t clear what the focus of the group will be—it was more of a introductions and brainstorming session, but we’ll see what comes of it. There’s another meeting in a couple weeks.

NLRB Rally/Dentist Visit #5

On Wednesday, Beth went to a rally outside a courthouse in support of Gynne Wilcox, a senior member of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired and was suing for her job back. She won. You can see Beth several times in this local news footage of the rally. She’s in a red hoodie standing in the second row back.

That same day, I went to the dentist to have my crown re-attached. I was worried beforehand that they would not be able to get it back on because the gum around it had gotten swollen in the five days since it popped off. (I lost the crown to some pecan toffee brownies Noah made. My mom asked me if it was worth it and I said, maybe, if it was about to come off anyway. They were really good brownies.)

It was a pleasantly uneventful visit, other than getting soaking wet from my mid-thighs down on my walk from the Metro and back due to driving rain—my umbrella and rain jacket could do only so much. But more importantly, the dentist got the crown back on with no problem and I did not encounter anyone in MAGA gear or any identifiable Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Even so, walking through the streets of Capitol Hill doesn’t feel the same. I look at all the federal buildings I used to think of as a pretty backdrop and think about what’s going on inside. I see all the professionally dressed people coming in and out of them and wonder what they’re up to, whether they are tearing down the government or desperately trying to shore it up.

Standup for Science/NIH Rally

Because I write about nutrition and health for a living, Stand Up for Science rally was very tempting. I regularly use sources from the CDC, EPA, NIH, and other government websites. Some of you may also remember that from the spring of 2019 until the winter of 2021, I had a side gig working for a small organization that subcontracted to write reports and made infographics for the EPA. I was working on documents about water quality in the Great Lakes.

On Tuesday I learned that the group lost its contract with the EPA, after twelve years. Mike, my former boss (and North’s former basketball coach), was given just hours notice to turn over all his and his employees’ work in progress. The EPA was his main client, his wife is a public middle school teacher, and they have a kid at DePaul. The human cost—both to the public losing the benefit of accurate and accessible information about the environment, and to the skilled and dedicated people doing the work—is enormous and infuriating.

However, despite all this, Stand Up for Science was four hours long, on a workday, and being held at the Lincoln Memorial, which is not very close to a Metro stop. So, with some regret, we decided to go to the NIH rally the following day instead as our way to stand up for science. NIH is important to me because, aside from the lifesaving research it funds, it publishes PubMed, a research database without which my work would be much more difficult. I worry about studies being censored from the site.

So, I stayed home Friday, worked, looked at my friends’ Facebook pictures of probably thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial, and wrote get-out-the-vote postcards for Josh Weil. That night Beth, Noah, and I went out for pizza and then to see a local ska band play at the community center because life can’t be all protests and dentists. We need a little fun.

Saturday morning Beth and I drove to the Metro Stop right before Medical Center (because there’s no parking there) and then took the Metro to NIH. This stop lets you out just steps from one of NIH’s many buildings. Because there was a narrow space between the Metro escalator and the building and because there were hundreds of people there, we were really packed in there, with some people standing to the sides of the Metro exit or sitting on top of the bike lockers. My favorite sign was one I didn’t photograph, “Girls Just Want Funding for Scientific Research,” held by an elementary school-aged girl. I wondered if she had an unusual familiarity with 80s pop music or her parents helped word the sign. She’d adorned it with anthropomorphic hearts. My sign said “Science Saves Lives. Save Science,” while Beth’s said, “Fund Healthcare, Not Billionaires.” I found the one with a Pete Buttigieg quote: “You Are Not Powerless And He is Not Unstoppable” bolstering.

The sound system wasn’t great. I didn’t hear much that our county or state-level representatives said, but the union leader was more audible. “Unions know how to yell,” Beth told me. Another person who knows how to project is our Congressional representative Jamie Raskin, and as usual when he shows up at this kind of thing—he said it was his eleventh rally of this administration—people lose their minds and chant his name. Our Senator Chris Van Hollen was there, too, and we heard from people who work at NIH and the wife of someone who participated in a clinical trial there. It lasted about an hour and a half, which is a good length for this sort of thing. We left the rally for a long series of errands and then a late lunch at MOM’s Organic Market.

I’m thinking of sitting out protests this week at least until next weekend because my sister and her family are going on a two-week trip to China to see the area where Lily-Mei was born, and I think it could be useful for me to be available at short notice to finish up projects before they leave.

I am going to give the last word to my friend Megan, whose husband works at the Department of Justice. She posted this on Facebook on Thursday:

Hi friends! Just checking in from Our Nation’s Capital, where every day a friend or neighbor of mine is watching their life’s work being destroyed, breaking down in sobs, being taunted and belittled at work to the point of needing sick leave, just being indiscriminately fired altogether, or feeling the stress and strain of trying to stay afloat amidst the chaos and void. It’s REALLY REALLY bad, and if you personally have not felt the ripple effects yet, well, it’s coming for you. Maybe you’ll even remember this post on the day you find yourself saying “Oh no… I didn’t realize THIS would happen…” (when your Social Security or tax refund check doesn’t arrive? When you visit a national park and find overflowing toilets and trash bins? When you are stunned to see how much your groceries cost?) I am asking you to please call your congressional representatives and tell them to grow a damn backbone. https://5calls.org is a good tool. Government reform is one thing. This is vandalism.

 

The Three Rs: Four Rallies, A Road Trip, and a Little Romance

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The first half of February was crazy busy. In different combinations, the three of us went to four protests, all of us took a road trip to Oberlin to see North perform in a play, and we celebrated Valentine’s Day. Settle in, this is a long one.

Rallies 1 and 2: Treasury and Department of Labor

The first Tuesday in February, Beth, Noah, and I all went to a protest outside the Treasury Department. That was when Musk and his youthful minions were rummaging around your personal financial information at that department. It was a much bigger rally than the one outside the White House the week before. I’m no good at estimating crowd sizes, but it filled the street and sidewalks for a long block in front of the Treasury Building and we were packed in tightly. I later learned a lot of people I know were there, but I didn’t see them at the time.

A lot of members of Congress spoke, but I couldn’t always hear the introductions. You could tell when Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Elizabeth Warren were about to speak, though, because people chanted their names enthusiastically. I thought the best line was about the government being run by a “billionaire boy band,” but I’m not sure who said it, possibly Senator Chris Van Hollen, which was interesting because I don’t think of him as a wit.

There were a lot of American flags in the crowd. This has been true at nearly every protest so far. I like the idea of not ceding symbols of patriotism to the right. We could see workers inside the building, watching us from various windows. A woman near me gave them the finger emphatically and repeatedly, and I wished she hadn’t because there are still career civil servants who haven’t been fired yet working there and who knows what they were thinking? In fact, at one point, a woman in the window waved at the crowd.

The next day Beth went to another protest at the Department of Labor. I couldn’t make that one, as I had a work deadline, or I thought I couldn’t. The FAQs I was writing for a supplement company didn’t take as long as I thought they would, but by the time I knew that it was too late.

Where it Stands: A federal judge has blocked DOGE access at Treasury and then extended the block, but another judge allowed access at Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Road Trip: Friday

Two days later, on the first Friday in February, Beth, Noah, and I drove to Oberlin for a quick weekend trip. The play North had been rehearsing all Winter Term was being performed that weekend—five shows from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. We had tickets for the Saturday evening performance. And because North would be also performing at a matinee that afternoon, they encouraged us to go see another play, one they’d auditioned for and could not attend because it had the exact same performance schedule as theirs. So, the plan was to drive up Friday, see the two plays Saturday, visit with North during the little slices of time they had between performances, and to drive back on Sunday.

It took us nine hours to drive to Oberlin, with frequent stops, including one for lunch at a very nice vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Bedford, Pennsylvania, which we hope to visit again. Early in the drive we listened to music, jazz I think, and talked about the sad state of our country, just long enough to get it out of our systems before we switched over to vacation mode. We listened to podcasts for the rest of the drive, alternating between Let’s Make A Sci Fi, which is about three writers collaborating on a science fiction television series pilot, and two different podcasts about Severance, which the three of us are watching together. These were good, diverting choices, if you have a road trip coming up and they sound up your alley.

There weren’t a lot of Trump signs in Western Maryland, even though that part of the state did go for him, or in Ohio, which also did, but Western Pennsylvania was awash in them, both billboards and yard signs. (Last week I ran into my friend Becky, who was about to take a trip to her hometown in North Carolina, and she and I talked about how it’s in some ways a relief to drive away from the D.C. area where the horrors are taking place and in some ways it’s not, because, depending on your route, you may see ample evidence that people voted for those horrors, whereas in D.C. and its suburbs, few people did.)

We arrived in Oberlin about six-thirty, which was after North’s call time, so we didn’t see them that night. We got pizza from Lorenzo’s, the only restaurant in Oberlin from Beth’s and my era that’s still open, and we ate in our rental house and watched Severance. It was the fourth episode, the very dramatic one that takes place at the company’s outdoor retreat.

Road Trip: Saturday

We met North for breakfast at the Feve, which is famous for its pancakes. I’d eaten an egg and some vegetarian sausage at the house, so I took a risk on a chocolate-strawberry pancake. It was huge and my blood sugar went a bit higher than I would have liked, but we were on vacation.

At the table, we presented North with two tote bags, full of gifts—dried mango, white chocolate-strawberry truffles (an early Valentine’s present), and Valentines from all of us and the cats—plus several boxes of tea we were donating to Keep after a cabinet re-organization Noah recently undertook. I think they were most excited about the mango. They ate nearly the whole bag over the course of the day. We also had two slices of anniversary cake we’d frozen for them, but we didn’t give them those until later.

We stopped at the mail room to get some medications that had arrived and then took them back to the house to hang out until their call-time. They ate leftover cheesy garlic bread and some apple. After we dropped them off at the student union, where the play was being performed, Beth and I went to find a bouquet for them. There was a gift shop downtown that sold flowers, and we got them six purple roses.

We had leftover pizza for lunch, and we read (me and Noah) and worked (Beth), and I took a walk down a bike path in the neighborhood where Beth had walked before breakfast and recommended. There were woods, a park, and houses’ back yards on either side, and it was a pleasant place to walk.

Later that afternoon we went to see Wolf Play, which won a prize (confusingly called an Obie) for off-Broadway performances in 2023. It’s about a lesbian couple who informally adopt a six-year-old Korean boy whose first set of adoptive parents relinquish him and then there’s a custody battle when the first adoptive couple splits, and the father decides he wants the boy back. The boy believes he is a wolf (or maybe just pretends to be) and is played by an adult actor who is manipulating a child-sized puppet and who speaks both his thoughts and his words. It was very well done.

We re-united with North after their performance. Beth picked them up and they got a noodle bowl at the student union, which they ate at the house, along with more mango. After we dropped them off at the student union, we got takeout Middle Eastern food for dinner and ate it before going to see North’s play.

Deficiency was student written and this was its debut. It’s about three brothers (two in high school and one in college) who are at their alcoholic father’s house for spring break. Unbeknownst to each other, all the brothers are all taking testosterone for different reasons and there is confusion and conflict when a package containing some arrives from their mother’s house. North was playing the middle brother, a trans boy, and their performance was comic, serious, and tender in turn. It was wonderful to see them on stage and in a more substantial role than they’ve had for a long time.

Road Trip: Sunday

There was snow and an ice storm overnight and Sunday morning freezing rain was falling and it was extremely slippery outside. We had breakfast, packed up the house, and then I went for a rather treacherous and much shorter walk down the same path where I’d walked the day before. We picked North up at Keep and dropped off the cake. The Christmas tree was still up in the lounge. I was charmed by paper snowflakes in the windows surrounding a “Free Palestine” sign, I think because it made me think about what it’s like to be in college, close enough to your childhood to make paper snowflakes, but old enough to be politically engaged.

We went to Slow Train, which is North’s favorite place to get coffee in Oberlin, to get coffee, hot chocolate, and pastries (I got a spinach-cheese croissant). We lingered because it was hard to leave after such a short and fragmented visit, but eventually we said our goodbyes and dropped North off at Keep just in time for a lunch cooking shift before their last show, and hit the road.

The trip back was a little faster partly because we had lunch at a Noodles & Company, with a stop at The Milkshake Factory, instead of a sit-down restaurant. We listened to the same podcasts as on the way out, and got home around dinner time, so we picked up Indian to take home.

Rallies 3 and 4: Capitol and D.C. Attorney General’s Office

Two days after we got back, there was a rally in front of the Capitol, organized by the American Federation of Government Employees, which was holding its annual conference in D.C., so the focus of this one was to support federal employees. I met Beth at her office and walked down to the Capitol with about a dozen of her co-workers. As at Treasury, there were a lot of speeches by members of Congress (including both our senators) and a lot of American flags. I was given a small one, which I put in the buttonhole of my coat, along with a button that said, “Public Workers Work for Me!”

Where it Stands: Mass layoffs are in progress.

That week I was writing a one-thousand-word article on arnica, due Thursday afternoon, so I thought the AFGE rally would be my only outing into the city, but on Thursday morning around 9:20, Beth texted me to say there was a rally in support of trans youth at noon. Sara had already told me that if I really needed more time, I could send the article to her Friday morning and just I couldn’t skip that one, so I decided to go.

The rally was to urge the D.C. Attorney General to direct hospitals in the city not to deny gender-affirming care to trans youth. States attorneys general and hospitals across the country that provide this kind of care have had different interpretations of the executive order and different responses. In short, it’s not clear if it’s binding or even legal.

Disappointingly, Children’s National Medical Center, where North has received care, decided to stop prescribing puberty blockers and hormones (they never did surgeries on minors) but to continue with psychological and psychiatric care. Since appointments with a psychiatrist are the only kind of gender-related care North currently receives there, they are not directly affected, but it hits close to home anyway. (For a while, they were taking birth control to suppress their period, partly for dysphoria reasons, but there were other medical reasons, so it’s unclear if they still had the prescription if it would have been cut off, but it’s possible it would have been if the words “gender” or “dysphoria” were anywhere in the paperwork.)

I met Beth at her office, and we walked to the A.G.’s office. This was a smaller protest, because it’s a niche issue, compared to some of the others, but it was quite spirited. There were speakers (the mother of a trans girl, someone from an organization that works with trans youth, a doctor from George Washington Hospital who provides trans health care and who threw some shade at Children’s, etc.). Between speeches, we marched in a picket-style oval in front of the building and chanted. “A.G. Schwalb, do your job!” was the most common one. A reporter from the Washington Post talked to Beth and me, but I didn’t get the impression she was going to quote us because we don’t have a kid who is currently being denied care. Anyway, she didn’t take our names.

The rally got started late and Beth had to leave about a half hour after it did, but I stuck around for another forty minutes or so. Someone else who had to leave gave me her hand-painted “Protect Trans Futures” sign, which I decided to keep, as I may need it again. As always, a lot of people had homemade signs. I thought “Trans Kids Deserve to Be Trans Adults” was the most moving. I also liked the one that said, “Trans Rights. Trans Joy. All Day. Every Day” with what looked like blue and pink conversation hearts in the background. I thought that was a nice, seasonal touch.

Where It Stands: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the order restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth. And then another one did the same thing.

It’s important to note, there are losses in this round-up, but there are also wins. If you are going to protests or calling your representatives or giving money to organizations fighting for our democracy, please keep it up. It can feel overwhelming and hopeless at times, but I am trying hard to believe that it’s not.

Romance

Life does go on, outside politics. Our Valentine’s Day was low-key, but we did celebrate. Noah made a chocolate banana bread, with vertical slices of banana baked into the top. The banana strips were pleasingly sweet and chewy. Meanwhile, I fashioned our regular Friday night pizza into a rough heart shape, and we exchanged small gifts, all food.  Beth got me a very thoughtful little bag of diabetes-friendly treats—some single-serve nut butters (walnut and pecan), an unsweetened raspberry-cashew dark chocolate bar, and some tiny paleo pies (lemon and key lime with coconut-nut crusts). Noah got dark chocolate caramel hearts, and Beth got dark chocolate hearts and dark chocolate-covered orange peel sticks.

I picked up that last item at a fancy chocolate store in Union Station on the way home from the AFSGE rally. Even as we are focused on justice, we can’t forget to take time for our little joys along the way.

Enough to Start

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Where did we leave off? It was nine days before the inauguration, and I was wondering if there was any chance that my marriage could be legally undone during the next four years. Well, about a week ago, the Idaho state House petitioned the Supreme Court to reconsider Obergefell v. Hodges, so that’s on the table now. This doesn’t seem to be where the administration’s immediate attention lies, however. It’s more interested in firing as many federal employees as possible, giving Elon Musk access to your personal financial information, persecuting trans people and immigrants, and starting trade wars. (Sorry, Canadian friends!). This isn’t to say it won’t get around to it eventually. After all, it’s only been two weeks.

Meanwhile, as of several days ago, you can’t get a passport with an X (non-binary) gender marker anymore. This directly affects North because they need to renew their passport. It may be complicated to get a passport at all now because their Maryland state identification and their reissued birth certificate both have an X marker, and according to what North’s heard, it might be necessary to change one or both back to F to proceed with the passport. We are all upset about this.

Despite the gravity of the political situation, I have not been as active in protesting as I was this time eight years ago. By early February 2017, I’d been to about a half dozen protests. This year I’ve been to one (more about that later). There have been fewer to attend, but I didn’t go to the ACLU’s People’s March two days before the inauguration, didn’t even think seriously about going, even though I donate to the ACLU. It’s hard not to feel discouraged and like your actions don’t matter.

Sometimes I feel guilty about this. But sometimes I think I’m just pacing myself. We protested all through the first Trump administration, but never at the rate that we did between November 2016 and February 2017. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I know that. Being more selective doesn’t have to mean we’re giving up.

Inauguration/MLK Weekend

Speaking of slogs, the weekend of the inauguration already feels like a very long time ago, but I feel the need to mention how we spent it, in case I wonder later. This nicest thing about it was that Beth and I spent time together each of the three days. Saturday, we had a mini date and got coffee, hot chocolate, and chocolate chip cookies at Koma. Sunday, we hung around the house together while Noah was at his weekly game event, talking a lot, and Monday we went to see the Dylan biopic. I’d hoped to time it so that we were in the theater during the exact moment of transfer of power, but there was no convenient showing for that. Still, it was surprising how successfully I managed to block what was happening from my thoughts. (Mind you, this was temporary. It’s never far from my mind now.)

That was also MLK weekend, as I’m sure you remember. We’d been thinking of doing a service project, but more than one local creek cleanup (our default MLK day project) was cancelled because of cold and icy conditions. (January was unusually cold this year. It took until the very end of the month for the snow that fell the first week to mostly melt.) On Monday, when it became clear we weren’t doing the creek clean-up, I looked into a multi-organization service event at the Silver Spring Civic Center where we gave blood one year but discovered it had already happened the two days previous. Next, I went to the website of a food bank where we’d volunteered many years ago, but it was closed for the holiday, and I don’t think you can’t show up without registering ahead of time anyway. So, we did not volunteer that day. I still consider the weekend well spent and a kind of self-care.

(Does baking count as self-care? In addition to our anniversary cake, in the past few weeks I’ve made almond flour-banana walnut muffins and a poppyseed loaf. Plus, Noah and I collaborated on rye muffins and he’s planning to make a chocolate sour cream Bundt cake today.)

The Day After

I had a dentist appointment the day after the inauguration. It wasn’t a routine visit; I was having pain in one of my molars. My dentist’s office is on Capitol Hill, and I hadn’t fully considered what it would be like to be down there on that particular Tuesday morning.

The first thing I noticed on exiting the Metro at Union Station was that the flags were back at half-mast for President Carter after Trump’s tantrum led them to be raised the day before. The second thing I noticed was fencing and barriers everywhere. It turned my normally straightforward route to the dentist into a frustrating series of detours and retracing of steps. The third thing I noticed was the presence of swarms of people in MAGA and commemorative inauguration gear. Of course, it made sense out-of-towners would stick around for a few days and do some sightseeing. But the first few times I saw them, I felt a visceral recoiling, like someone had kicked me in the gut. It was as if they were signaling with their stupid hats, scarves, and sweatshirts that they did not mean my family, and especially my youngest child, well. That’s not a good feeling.

Anyway, turns out I need a root canal.

Demonstration

Last Tuesday, Beth and I went to the White House to protest the freeze on federal grants. The protest was very last minute—the call went out only a few hours before five p.m. when the freeze was scheduled to take effect. We left the house around 4:15, drove to the Metro, and we were at the meeting stop, about a block from the White House, in front of the Eisenhower Building just before five. It was a small but spirited group, probably about fifty people when we got there, but it grew to about a hundred over the course of an hour or so. I am in this photo on the PBS website. I’m in the red hoodie. You can’t read it, but I was holding a sign about clean air someone from an environmental group gave me.

Other people had hand-lettered signs reading: “The Felon is Stealing Our Science Grants,” “Release Federal Funds. Keep America Safe and Healthy,” “Unfreeze the Federal Funds Now,” and a good general purpose one: “Stand Up. Fight Back.” At least a dozen people had American flags. There were two speakers who talked about the impact of the federal freeze on the environment, health and science, education, poverty, and more issues than I can remember because that’s the point. Federal grants are far-reaching. They affect nearly everything.

We moved about a half block closer the White House, as close as you can get with the barriers. The same two speakers spoke again. One told us not to be discouraged by the modest size of the crowd because it was impressive for a hasty effort and he said, “This is enough to start.”

There was a lot of chanting. Beth said that was why she wanted to go—she thought it might be cathartic. There was my old favorite, the call and response “Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.” (It has a nice rhythm.) But apparently now at these kinds of events we now also yell, “No kings!” and “Rule of law!” This is the current baseline. There were also a few rounds of “F—- Trump!” I said later I would have preferred a more policy-based chant, but Beth said she found it satisfying.

While most of the Secret Service agents who were standing by the barriers looked stoic, I noticed a couple were smiling. I could not tell if they were genuine smiles of support or smirks. I suppose it could have been either (or one of each). They are government employees, too, after all.

When it was over, we took Metro home. The Red Line was single-tracking and we had to wait so long for a train that I had time to read one of Allison’s very comprehensive Year in Review book review posts (4-star horror) on the train platform. When we got home, Noah had made the kidney bean, cheese, apple, and tomato casserole I’d been planning to make. It was good to come home to hot food.

We found out later that night that a federal judge had blocked the freeze. After a second one did the same thing, the White House rescinded the order. They may try it again later, with a less scattershot approach, but for now we will take the win.

The next day and rest of the week, we were back at work. I’ve been working on a long-term project about household toxins and I was starting to write the chapter on water pollution. I used a lot of government sources for this—the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey. It occurred to me to wonder if these sources will still be available online when I finish, at the rate information is already disappearing from government websites. Like gay marriage, environmental reports don’t seem to be a first-priority target, but it’s going to be a long four years. We need to be prepared for anything.

And Tuesday afternoon, Beth and I will be back in D.C., protesting outside the Treasury building.

Before Breakfast: A Long Hop

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As he came down the hill, Grenfell was chuckling to himself: “Anyhow, when that first amphibious frog-toad found his water-hole dried up behind him, and jumped out to hop along till he could find another—well, he started on a long hop.”

From “Before Breakfast,” by Willa Cather

The Day After

I cried three times before breakfast the day after the election. I had not stayed up to watch the results come in. Because it was projected to be down to the wire and the last time around it was several days before we knew who was going to be President, I really didn’t expect it to be settled that night, and I didn’t see the point of losing sleep. I did watch some MSNBC coverage with Noah, for about an hour and fifteen minutes and went to bed only a little later than usual. No swing states had been called and none of the states that had been called were surprising. Still, I was a little nervous about the granular analysis of results that focused on how Harris wasn’t getting the margins expected in the counties she was winning, and how she was losing by more than expected in the counties she lost. Based on the rate at which he was putting Halloween candy away, I think Noah was nervous, too. Even so, I didn’t have too much trouble getting to sleep.

In the morning, I looked at Facebook before getting out of bed and I learned from a friend’s post what had happened. At first, I did not believe it. I thought maybe the election had not been called and maybe it was looking bad, but perhaps my friend was being hasty. I guess that was the denial part of the five stages of grief, but it only lasted a few seconds until I saw another post and another.  I skipped right over bargaining. (How would that even work? With whom would I bargain?) I have felt anger. Mostly, though, in the past twelve days, I have been stuck in depression, with very little acceptance.

Beth, who got up before me, came back into the bedroom, got into bed and gave me a hug and that was when I burst into tears for the first time. The second time was when Noah emerged from his room, and I pulled him into an embrace in the hallway outside the bathroom. The third time was when North answered the text I sent shortly after getting the news. They had not stayed up either and my texts and Beth’s, read on waking, were how they found out.

The day after the election was Noah’s last day at work. From Monday through Wednesday he was working on a montage of clips from election ads his company made for female candidates that would be used to promote the firm to future clients. So, he wasn’t home when we had a video call with North that morning to touch base and share our sadness.

But North also had some good news. The day before they’d learned they had a part, one of the leads, in a student-written play. It means they will be in Oberlin over Winter Term instead of home as they had planned, because they have four weeks of daily rehearsals, starting in early January, and then the play will be performed in early February. Beth and I plan to road trip up there to see it. This was very heartening news as North was never satisfied with the roles they had in high school plays. I am so glad for them that I don’t even mind that they won’t be home for as long as we thought.

Even though before the election I had advised North not to isolate themselves and skip meals or class if things went poorly, I did not take my own advice, at least in one instance. I skipped book club on Wednesday night. In the thirteen years I have been attending this book club, I have never done that unless I had a schedule conflict, or I’d decided ahead of time I was not interested in the book. This was the third of four meetings on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. I’d been to the first two, but I just couldn’t imagine talking about nineteenth-century Russian literature that night or leaving the house.

Instead, Noah, Beth, and I started a new series, Ghosts UK, which I highly recommend if you are looking for something light, funny, and distracting. It has made me laugh more reliably than anything else the past couple weeks. It doesn’t feel like exaggeration to call it a lifeline, which is a little ironic, considering it is about dead people.

The Week After

I muddled through the next few days, doing the things I was supposed to do (work, cooking, housework), operating on autopilot. On Saturday Noah and I made homemade whole-wheat pumpkin ravioli. He’d been wanting to do it for several weeks, and we never seemed to have time. If I’m being honest, I was not initially enthusiastic about the project, because we’ve done at least twice before, and I know it’s a lot of work and I just wanted to phone things in at this point. But he wanted to, and imagining what it might be like to want something someone else could give me, I wanted to do it for him. And it turned out to be kind of therapeutic, to make something difficult and to do it successfully. There are tricky parts rolling out the dough in the machine and not breaking it, and I found myself focused on that and not the potential downfall of democracy for a little while. That was a relief.

Two days later, Beth and I went to Great Falls, on the Maryland side of the park. It was Veteran’s Day so we both had the day off. We went on the theory that getting outside never hurts and sometimes helps. We walked for two hours to various overlooks, along the canal towpath, and on a trail in the woods.

Watching the rushing waters proved mesmerizing and temporarily calming, as did being in movement that long. At one of the overlooks, we watched kayakers paddle in a calm bend of the river and then venture briefly into the white water, going back and forth, occasionally overturning and then righting themselves. It didn’t seem like these forays were meant to go anywhere as they always returned to the same pool. I asked Beth what she thought they were doing, and she said they were practicing paddling in rough waters. My mind tried to make a metaphor about how that’s what we will need to do, rest in the calm waters, dart out into the turbulence, get knocked over and get back up. I told my mind to shut up. I wasn’t ready for motivational speeches, even from myself.

At one point along the trail, we saw a pay phone and as we got closer, I saw it was not operational. Most of the receiver was missing and wires protruded from it. That’s the metaphor, a sulky part of my brain tried to say, but I shushed it, too.

After a picnic lunch eaten on a fallen log, Beth suggested going out for ice cream, so we did. I got chocolate chip, because you don’t see plain chocolate chip very often anymore and it seemed retro in a comforting way. There was a neon sign in the shop that said, “Ice cream solves everything,” which Beth didn’t even notice until I pointed it out. I said I did not believe it. She said it may not, but it “gives you the fortitude” to go about solving things.

We got home and found Noah making a pear crumble. When the kitchen was free, I made eggplant parmesan. Comfort foods were on the menu all week. Beth made a cream of vegetable soup that tasted just like the inside of a pot pie. I made the eggplant for Beth because she loves it, mushroom stroganoff on mashed cauliflower for myself (it would have been on egg noodles if not for diabetes) and a vegetable-tofu stir-fry on soba for Noah (soba is a relatively safe pasta for me).

The Second Week After

Two days later, on the second Wednesday after the election, I woke and realized I had not been jolted from sleep in a panic between four and five in the morning for the first time in a week. I was aware I’d had bad dreams, but I could not remember what they were about, and it seemed like a hopeful sign to me that my brain had switched to a more symbolic form of processing, instead of sheer terror. My mind settled into the familiar early morning routine of remembering the early Trump months, or really the whole god-dammed presidency, and wondering how we could possibly do this again and probably worse this time. And then my mind said, rather firmly, we just will. And I had a flash of acceptance. It lasted about five minutes, but still…

Thursday morning, I remembered my bad dreams, which could be interpreted as another form of progress. There was one in which I was hiding in a kitchen cabinet with a bunch of mothers and children (we somehow all fit) while someone threatening, maybe soldiers, rummaged through the house looking for us. In another, I was shepherding several small children along a street that I used to walk along to get to and from my kids’ preschool and two of them ran away and I ran after them and caught them but then I realized I’d left a boy no older than two alone in the middle of the street a block away. I don’t think I need to analyze these dreams for you.

The second dream woke me up earlier than usual and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so before breakfast I completed my first set of post-election postcards. It was for a Congressional race in California that was too close to call. The postcards were directed to people whose ballots were spoiled and had not been counted, urging them to get in touch with election officials.

This might have been an inspiring end to this post, with me getting back in the saddle, but right after I finished, I looked at the newspaper on the dining room table, which I had not yet read, and discovered that after two races were settled the House had been called for the Republicans. Every branch of government—President, Senate, House, and Supreme Court—would now be in the hands of people with ill intent for at least two years and quite possibly longer.

The House race I’d been writing for did not seem so important now. I reached for the Wite-Out and covered up the optional line in the script about the whole nation waiting to see who would control the House on all fifteen cards. Then I went back to the paper and read further. Learning one of the two races that tipped the House was in California, I got a sinking feeling. I googled the postcard candidate and sure enough, it was his race. I wondered if I should even mail these postcards. I was running low on stamps, and I could probably peel them off. But I’d committed to send them and if my vote had not been counted, I think I’d want to know so I could correct it for the historical record, plus you never know when there could be a recount, so I went ahead and mailed them.

And over the weekend, I finished my book club book with the intention of going to the final meeting on Wednesday, and I completed a new set of postcards for a state Supreme Court runoff in Mississippi. I will hop to the next water hole, paddle into whitewater, try to find a phone that works, or whatever metaphor you prefer. I hope you can, too. Maybe there will be some ice cream along the way to fortify us.

For Our Lives: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 74

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It was potentially quite a busy weekend. North had a lot on their social calendar and there was a March for Our Lives rally in response to the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde on Saturday afternoon and it was Pride all weekend. In DC, there was a parade on Saturday and the street festival was Sunday, plus our little town was having its first-ever Pride festival on Sunday.

Beth, Noah, and I were all going to the rally and Beth, North, and I were all considering going to some Pride activity, but at the beginning of the weekend we hadn’t decided which one(s).

Friday: Prelude

North’s friend Ranvita came over for our weekly pizza-and-movie night. Over pizza and mozzarella knots, North and Ranvita talked about the dialogue they needed to perform for their theater class the next week and whether or not they were going try to get off book. (Apparently, there was an option not to, but you couldn’t get an A on the assignment if you chose not to memorize the lines.)

Beth was working late, so it was just Noah, the two high schoolers, and me. We didn’t want Beth to miss one of the movies we’d communally selected to watch together as a family so we needed to pick a new one. We have a complex nomination-and-veto system for choosing movies and having to pick a new one that four people could agree on made me reflect on the genius of having an orderly system because picking a movie four people can agree on is hard. Well, it was really just three people because I think Ranvita was a little overwhelmed by us and she kept quiet. It was mostly North putting ideas out there and me rejecting them because they were unrated and it was too hard to know what objectionable content they might contain or Noah rejecting them because their Rotten Tomatoes score was too low.

Finally, we settled on one of Noah’s choices, Perfect Blue, an amine thriller that was rated 16+ on Common Sense Media. By this point, we’d spent so much time trying to decide on a movie that I didn’t look carefully at the details of the reviews and if I had, we might not have watched it with North’s friend who’s a year younger than they are and whose parents I don’t know at all. I liked it—it was very twisty and played with reality, fiction, dreams and hallucinations in an interesting, artsy way—but it was also quite violent and sexually explicit and some of the violence was sexual. But I do tend to be stricter about media than most of North’s friends’ parents, so I hope it didn’t scar her. She did keep saying, “That was not what I expected” afterward as we all tried to figure out the plot together.

After the movie was over and Beth had gotten home, but before Ranvita left, I saw Xander in the kitchen, dragging one of his back legs behind him. It seemed like he couldn’t move it at all. I alerted Beth and she pointed out that something like this had happened to him last summer and it only lasted about a half hour (the vet couldn’t explain it), so we waited and sure enough he made a full recovery. It’s worrying, though. As Beth said, having an elderly pet “is not for the faint of heart.” Someday it won’t be a false alarm, but that day was not this weekend.

Saturday: Protest

Beth, Noah, and I left for the rally late Saturday morning. I’d gone through the hand-painted signs we’ve kept from previous marches and rallies and found some gun control ones we could re-use. I hesitated over the more all-purpose “America Is Better Than This,” sign I made for some early Trump administration protest (I think it was immigration and the Muslim ban). I’d actually made it thinking I would re-use it, but I never did. The sad truth is while I got to fifty years old believing that, at fifty-five, I don’t anymore. Too many of my fellow Americans, including members of my extended family on both sides, watched the cruelty and corruption of the Trump years and didn’t flinch. But I do still believe in the power of protest and the ballot, so that’s why I still go to rallies and write get-out-the-vote postcards.

Beth wore an orange top and I thought about it, but even though I have two, they are both short-sleeved and the day was drizzly and unseasonably cool, so I went with a long-sleeved shirt that says Love is Love is Love on the front. It occurred to me that someone seeing it might think I was heading to Pride. We saw people obviously going to one event or the other on the Metro. In fact, in the Takoma Metro parking lot, we saw a woman I thought was probably going from the rally straight to Pride because her outfit was mostly orange, but she had a rainbow flag draped over her shoulders like a cape.

We arrived at the rally around 12:15. There was a timer at the bottom of the Jumbotron screen indicating the speeches had been going on for ten minutes or so. We missed X González but we heard plenty of speeches. We heard two sons of an eighty-six-year-old woman who died in the supermarket in Buffalo, and we heard the mayor of DC, and two young people, one who introduced and praised the mayor for her efforts on gun control and one who criticized those same efforts.

The most powerful speech, of those we saw anyway, was David Hogg, of Marjorie Stoneman Douglass. He’s an electrifying speaker. What I appreciated most about his speech was his focus on the many state-level gun control victories there have been since the Parkland shooting, including some in Florida. It’s so easy to think nothing has changed and despair, but there has been incremental progress. It made me think I really should get back to my postcard writing, which I’ve let lapse a bit. When he finished I was thinking of visiting the line of Porta-potties because I didn’t think it was going to get any better than that, but Representative Cori Bush was next with a gripping account of being a survivor of gun violence in the context of domestic violence, so I was glad I stayed for that.

During her speech, the timer stopped at 78 minutes and after she’d finished, it was announced that was how long it took for police to stop the gunman at Robb Elementary. It was an effective demonstration of how long that must have felt to the terrified children, teachers, and staff inside the building.

There was a moment of silence, but suddenly in the middle of it, people started running away from the stage. We hadn’t seen or heard what sparked it, but we ran, too, until someone from the stage implored people to stop running and said there was no threat. I didn’t find out what had happened until later, but apparently, a counter protester (I hadn’t even seen there was a counter protest—we must have been too far away) had jumped over the barrier, yelled, “I am the gun!” and threw something into the crowd. He was detained by park police and the speeches continued after that, but I saw several people crying immediately afterward and I noticed they were all kids or teens. It made me think how a lot of kids my kids’ age are traumatized by the ever-present specter of gun violence, as we hear about school shooting after school shooting. (I guess the equivalent for 80s teens was nuclear war. I was pretty much convinced there was going to be one when I was in high school, but the obvious difference is we never did have one.) It actually made me glad North did not attend the rally because two summers ago witnessing a car crash into our fence as they stood just feet away was one several factors that may have triggered their functional neurological disorder and left them partly paralyzed for months.

We didn’t stay much longer after that, because Beth needed to get back home and drive North to their friend Marisa’s birthday party. We took pictures by a field of bouquets of white and orange flowers, each of which presumably stood for some number of lives lost to gun violence. Part of the way to the Metro station, Noah and I peeled off because he wanted to stop for lunch. I’d eaten before we left, but I accompanied him to Corner Bakery and got an iced latte and a cookie—I ate half of it and saved the rest for later—and he got a sandwich, chips, and a muffin. The restaurant was filled with people in March for Our Lives t-shirts and others in rainbow gear.

If North hadn’t had a birthday party to attend it might have been nice to go from the rally to the Pride parade and meet up with them there. Pride was cancelled the past two years because of covid, but the two years before that we went to the festival and I thought the parade would have been a nice change of pace.

Noah and I came home and made a soba noodle-vegetable salad with peanut sauce for dinner together. North came home in time to watch half of O Brother Where Art Thou, after they plucked the index card with its title from the pile of approved films.

Sunday: Pride

Sunday morning, we were still undecided about Pride. Thunderstorms were predicted and Takoma Pride was postponed for two weeks hence. North was all for going to the DC festival, which had not cancelled, but Beth and I were unenthused about the idea of going to Pride in a downpour and she had work she needed to do, so she and I stayed home and North went alone to meet up with their friend Sol there. North has the same Love Is Love Is Love shirt I do (they were Christmas gifts from my mother years ago) and they actually did wear theirs to Pride.

As it turned out, it never stormed and they were able to stay a few hours. Apparently the kids had trouble finding it, initially going to the right address in the wrong quadrant of the city, but they managed on their own without calling for adult backup. North was using their wheelchair that day, as was Sol, which makes that feat more impressive. They said they had fun. They didn’t bring home too many tchotchkes, but they did pick up a tube of lip balm that looks like a tampon (which they are quite taken with it) and a new button.

I’m glad they went and I hope to go to Takoma’s smaller Pride celebration in two weeks. It’s another way of witnessing and standing up for our lives.

Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

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After the first forty days of our new pandemic lives, and then again after eighty, I wrote posts marking off each traditional forty-day period for a quarantine with lists of forty things. I skipped one hundred twenty days because that was the week after North stopped walking and was hospitalized and it wasn’t a good day for me to write or for Beth to post. (It’s true—I am so tech-challenged I don’t post my own blog.)

I missed the one hundred sixtieth day, too, but it was only yesterday, so I’m plowing ahead with forty things about the past week:

  1. On Monday, North and I made an unbirthday cake because it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. I did this five years ago on a whim and North still talks about it so I thought it might be cheering to do it again. The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting.
  2. There wasn’t room for the leftovers in the fridge, so I left the partially eaten cake in the oven and forgot it was there while I was preheating it the next day to roast eggplant, but I remembered pretty early in the preheating process and the frosting just got a little runny.
  3. However, the next day when I was preheating the oven again for roast cauliflower, I left it in longer. The crumbs on the empty part of the pan burned, but the cake didn’t, and the frosting actually acquired a pleasant toasted marshmallow taste, so all was not lost. I do think it’s a good demonstration of how preoccupied I am these days. Fortunately we finished the cake on the third night, or who knows what would have happened to it?
  4. Tuesday we got notice that Ithaca College is going completely online for the fall semester. This wasn’t a complete surprise, given what’s going on at other colleges and universities that have opened for in-person classes and had to shut down. I’m not critical of the school’s decision, but I am sad for Noah.
  5. He’d been tracking Maryland’s numbers, which have been trending in the right direction to get off New York State quarantine list, so I think he was hoping to be allowed back on campus. We all have mixed feelings, of course, but it seems no matter what, he isn’t going to have a normal college experience, at least not in the first two years.
  6. On Wednesday North had their longest seizure ever. It lasted more than an hour and a half and sent us to the emergency room.
  7. For several days before this, they’d been having one to three of what we now think of as the medium-length seizures a day, the ones that last around five minutes. (Since then they’ve increased and yesterday they had six.)
  8. When I got home from my morning walk a little before eleven, Beth was sitting with North, whom she’d found seizing. When it had been going on for at least ten minutes (North later told us it was closer to twenty or thirty) we called 911, for the second time in a week and a half.
  9. When the paramedics got there, one of them remembered North. This isn’t something any mother wants.
  10. This time we didn’t get a choice of hospital—we went to the closest one. Given that the last time we called 911, the paramedics weren’t even sure we should go to the hospital, this made it seem more serious.
  11. As we did last time, I rode in the ambulance, but in the front this time, not because I asked to, but because there were a lot of medical personnel in back with North. Meanwhile Beth followed us to the hospital in the car and waited outside. North got two anti-convulsant shots in the ambulance.
  12. When we arrived, there were so many people crowded around North in the tiny exam room that there wasn’t room for me and I had to stand in the hall answering intake questions for people with clipboards.
  13. Eventually, people cleared out. When I got in the room, North had an IV with a different kind of anti-seizure medicine, and eventually they started to recover, though they’d intermittently slip back into smaller seizures. It was sort of like a series of aftershocks. It was 12:20 by the time they stopped all together.
  14. Beth brought North’s stuffed monkey Muffin from home and had a nurse bring it to them. He was conscientious about wearing a mask.
  15. North got their second covid test of the summer and it was negative.
  16. We were there until three o’clock and several times various people told us we would probably be transferred to Children’s. As bad as the experience was, Beth, North, and I were all thinking that maybe it could be the impetus for more timely scans. We already had an EEG scheduled for the first week of September, but we were all hoping for answers sooner.
  17. ER visits have a kind of rhythm to them, in my experience, and once it seemed we were in the wait-alone-a-long-time part, it was hours past lunch time, so I decided—with North’s encouragement—to go see if I could find us some food.
  18. It took me a while and a number of redirects from passersby but eventually I found the coffee shop where I bought yogurt, grapes, Cheetos, and an iced latte. The cafeteria was in sight of the coffee shop but I was in hurry to get back because North was alone so I thought we could get by with what I bought.
  19. I got lost again getting back to the ER and had to exit the building because some doors are blocked off now to stop people from circulating as freely through the building as they did pre-covid. I ran into Beth, sitting outside the main entrance, so I gave her an update. (Of course, we’d been texting the whole time.)
  20. Beth had North’s phone she’d brought from home and she let me know that Zoë, who was supposed to come over that afternoon and had knocked on the door only to have no one answer, had been calling. Beth filled Zoë in.
  21. When I got back to North’s room, they had a balloon and a teddy bear and some hard candies, which had been delivered by a social worker. The balloon looked like a cookie and said, “One Tough Cookie.” Apparently the first words the social worker spoke on entering the room was, “I hear you’re one tough cookie.”
  22. This whole interaction reminded me of the volunteers with the heart-shaped balloons in The Hostile Hospital (Series of Unfortunate Events, book eight), but Beth said, even if they had no way of knowing it the balloon’s message is true of most patients, in North’s case, it is.
  23. Shortly after this the doctor came back and told us North was being discharged, not to Children’s but home. We were surprised, and frankly disappointed not be able to get more answers that day. He also advised us not to come back to the ER, but to ride the seizures out at home, no matter how long they are. He seemed to be of the opinion that it wasn’t any of the medication North received that stopped the seizure but that it had burned out on its own and he said medicating a non-epileptic seizure could do more harm than good.
  24. All the medical professionals we’ve seen suspect North’s seizures are non-epileptic, which seems to cause a lot of them to lose interest. Beth really had to advocate to get the EEG we do have scheduled. When telling us North wasn’t being transferred to Children’s, the doctor actually said “It would be a waste of a transport.”
  25. The next day Beth went to work trying to get an EEG before September. Both our pediatrician’s office and North’s psychiatrist have been working their contacts to find us a bed at either Children’s or Georgetown. We’ll take whatever we can get first. Among other reasons, we need an official diagnosis before the school system will even begin to talk to us about accommodations and it’s clear North is going to need some.
  26. In the meantime, we made some changes at home. We stopped leaving North alone except to go to the bathroom and they’ve been sleeping in Beth’s and my bed with Beth while I sleep in their bed. They are not crazy about the lack of privacy. (And today we relented a little, leaving them in alone in a safe position in our bed for a half hour or so. They did have a seizure during that time, but they didn’t fall off the bed so I guess the experiment was a success.)
  27. So, life goes on. Thursday it was North’s turn to pick the weekly after dinner family activity so we had a faux campfire, with microwave s’mores, votive candles on the patio table, what stargazing was possible on a cloudy night, and a chorus of crickets and cicadas.
  28. Friday in physical therapy North walked 185 feet with a walker, surprising the physical therapist.
  29. After North got back from PT, my friend Megan and her daughter Talia came over for a socially distanced backyard visit.
  30. We all met twelve years ago when North and Talia were in preschool together. Megan is one of my best friends and North and Talia stayed in touch throughout elementary school because they were on the same rec league basketball team—the Pandas, as long-time readers will remember. After attending different elementary and middle schools, they will be at the same high school, and North thought it would be nice to get re-acquainted.
  31. It was nice. I positioned chairs in the backyard in pairs far away enough from each other so that the adults and the teens could have separate, private conversations. This was only my second get-together with a friend since March and it was good to talk in person to an adult other than Beth. It turns out I had a lot to say. I think I monopolized the conversation, but I’m guessing Megan will forgive me.
  32. As for the kids, North said it wasn’t awkward, even though they haven’t seen each other in a few years. Also, we prepared Talia for what North’s seizures are like, but they didn’t have any more than a few seconds long during the visit.
  33. While Megan and Talia were over, we got a phone call from our pediatrician letting us know they were getting closer to scheduling an EEG, and they thought they could get one early next week. Fingers crossed.
  34. Saturday morning, Beth, North and I had a telemedicine appointment with North’s therapist and at the end he offered to write his own letter to the school, in support of accommodations: we want North to be allowed to have their camera off so they’re not seizing online, extra time on assignments if they seize during one, and no penalties for not participating orally if they’ve just seized and can’t speak.
  35. That afternoon we went for an outing at Downs Park in Anne Arundel County. We got Chinese takeout and ate it at a picnic table in the park, then we went for a walk. North alternated between using the walker and the wheelchair. I’d say they walked about half the time, which was encouraging to see.
  36. The park had nice views of the Bay, some wooded trails, an aviary with a red-tailed hawk, a Great Horned owl, and turkey vulture, all injured. The vulture was being rehabilitated to be released, but the other two were permanent residents. (The owl only had one eye so probably didn’t have the depth perception to hunt, Noah guessed.)
  37. While we were there we found a moss-covered stone bench with a plaque saying it was a wishing bench, so of course, we felt compelled to sit on it and make wishes.
  38. I won’t tell you what I wished for because everyone knows if you tell a wish it doesn’t come true. But if I’d had a second wish, it would have been less personal and more political. I bet you can guess what it is.
  39. And speaking of politics, we haven’t been to as many protests as I thought we would this summer, for reasons that are probably obvious, but I’m sorry we weren’t able to make one in support of the post office this weekend. Did you ever think we’d need to protest for the post office? But that’s where we are. For now I’ll have to content myself with writing postcards to voters. I mailed my six hundredth one today, in another batch encouraging Democratic voters in Florida to enroll to vote by mail.
  40. Keep doing whatever you’re doing to help our country weather this dangerous passage and if you have any wishes to spare, send a few our way.

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

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On Friday morning around eight, North found our cat Matthew lying on the living room floor near the front door, half-paralyzed and crying in distress. We were all quite surprised because the day before he’d seemed perfectly normal, but now he had no control over his back legs. The first thing that came to mind was that he had type 1 diabetes and this was exactly how it first presented when he was about a year old. We’d just switched him and his brother Xander from high-protein kitten food to regular cat food and one day his legs just gave out and he collapsed onto the kitchen floor. After some short-term insulin, we got him on food for cats with diabetes and he never needed any more insulin or diabetes medicine. At the time, the vet told us as he got older, the special food might not do the trick anymore and then he’d need to go on insulin. That was sixteen years ago, so I thought that the time had finally come for more aggressive treatment.

We carried him to our bed, which is his favorite place, and brought him some water, which he drank, and for the next few hours, we took turns sitting with him alone or in various combinations. He seemed to calm down and stopped crying so much, but every now and then he’d try, unsuccessfully, to stand. Mostly he just lay quietly, breathing more quickly than usual, occasionally napping a little.

Beth was trying to reach the vet’s office but they never picked up the phone so she drove over there to see if there was anything posted on the door about holiday weekend hours. As it turned out, they were closed for the whole day, so she called an animal hospital in the city. It was the same hospital where our first cat, Emily, received treatment at the end of her life and died, eighteen years ago.

After asking a few questions, the staff person at the animal hospital asked us to bring Matthew in. We’d have to leave him in his carrier at the door and they’d take him inside and talk to us by phone as we waited outside. Even though we knew no one was going inside, North and I came along with Beth and Matthew, just in case we knew the answers to any questions, and for moral support. There weren’t many questions, though, and pretty soon after we left him, they told us to go home and said they’d call us.

Late that morning, the vet called with the bad news. It wasn’t his diabetes. It was heart disease, very advanced. They did an ultrasound and found fluid around his heart and lungs. The immediate problem was a blood clot that was preventing him from moving his legs, but his overall prognosis was poor.

We decided to go through with the euthanasia that day. This time all four of us went to the animal hospital. They are putting animals down in the parking garage because of COVID. This sounds really horrible, but they did their best to make a private space. There was a folding screen making a little room out of a corner. It was near a vent blowing cool air, so it wasn’t oppressively hot, and there was a wooden bench with a cushion on it and side tables with boxes of tissues and water.

Only one person was allowed to be there during the procedure, but we were all allowed to visit with him beforehand. The vet brought our loudly meowing cat behind the screen and stepped out, saying we could take as long as we liked and to call her when we were ready. We sat on the bench and petted him and talked to him and kissed the top of his head. He was wrapped up in a white fleece blanket and part of one of his front legs had been shaved, just above the paw, and the port for the drugs was already attached. My heart sank a little further when I saw that.

When we’d said our goodbyes, everyone but me left, and Beth called for the vet to come back from inside the building. I held Matthew while the vet administered the two drugs, the first to render him unconscious and the second one to stop his heart. They took effect more quickly than I thought they would. The vet listened to his chest with a stethoscope and said, “He’s gone.” She told me it had been the compassionate decision. Or at least that’s what I think she said. Between her face shield and her mask and the fact that we were in a garage, it was hard to hear. I just nodded and she asked if I wanted to stay with him for a while and I did. When I finally lay him down on the bench, I found Beth outside and asked her to call someone to come pick him up and I went back to wait with him again because I couldn’t bear to leave his body alone.

It’s three days later and we’re all sad and kind of shocked. One day we thought he was reasonably healthy for a seventeen-year-old cat—his most serious problem seemed to be a tendency toward constipation and some weight loss we thought was due to his digestive issues—and the next day a vet was telling us he was fatally ill.

We spent a quiet fourth of July. The Takoma Park parade and fireworks were cancelled months ago, so our observation of the holiday consisted of watching Hamilton and having a backyard picnic.  And because it was the most patriotic thing I could think to do, I wrote a small batch of postcards, encouraging Florida voters to enroll in the state’s vote by mail program. (I’ve written over a hundred postcards for this campaign alone.)

The next day, Beth, Noah, and I went to another park. We’ve continued to do this every weekend since mid-May and we have yet to repeat a park. The weekend previous we’d been to a charming little creek off the Middle Patuxent, where we could hear what I think was a good-sized bullfrog croaking underneath a mass of submerged tree roots and we could see dozens of these beautiful black-winged, turquoise-bodied dragonflies.

This week we went to South River Farm Park, which as you might guess from the name is on the South River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We waded in the salty river and in a little pond (until some kayakers warned us out of it, telling us there were snapping turtles and snakes in there). We saw a Great Blue Heron in the pond, and picked some of the plentiful raspberries we found growing along the trail.

I was sorry North had elected not to come because I think they would have liked it but we weren’t sure whether or not the park had beach access when we set out and they didn’t want to come without knowing for sure. (And actually, this park wasn’t even the one we thought we’d visit. Our first and second choice were filled to capacity and closed.) I was timing how long it took to walk from the parking lot to the water and noting the firmness and slope of the path for future reference. Speaking of North’s condition, after the MRI last week, we learned that they have a herniated disk. It may sound like an odd reaction, but Beth and I were both really happy to learn this because it means there’s a concrete reason for their pain and it should guide the physical therapist’s plan. They already have some at-home exercises to do and they’ll have their first full-length PT session on Thursday.

After we left the park we stopped at a nursery, where I got two dwarf sunflowers and a thyme plant, then we went to a farm stand and got some excellent peaches, peach jam, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. We each ate a sweet, juicy peach in the parking lot before picking up some Chinese takeout for lunch and following it up with frozen custard and Italian ice at Rita’s. It was a nice outing and kind of therapeutic to spend so much time outside.

We brought home some extra fortune cookies and gave one of them to North. It said their luck was about to change.

“That could be good or bad,” I observed, but given that they’ve been on crutches since February, our country’s been in the grip of a pandemic since March, and a cat they loved dearly just died, we decided to read it as a good sign.

RIP, Matthew Simon
Circa February 14, 2003-July 3, 2020

He was a beautiful cat and more than a little neurotic, he loved to play with lanyards, which I think he pretended were snakes, and he was a good mouser, even in old age. We will miss him very much.

A Protest and a Park: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 12

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Well, I ended my last post saying I imagined the summer would hold more protests and drone-flying excursions and that seems to be how it’s going. Last Friday we went to a slightly bigger Black Lives Matter protest in Silver Spring and then Sunday we drove out to the Chesapeake Bay to swim and fly the drone.

Earlier that week North had an in-person appointment at the pain clinic, as a follow-up from the telemedicine appointment. The doctor ordered an MRI, to check for any issues with their spine as a precaution before they start another round of physical and possibly aqua therapy. It was the aqua therapy that really seemed to turn things around last time, so we’re hoping the pool at the rehabilitation hospital has re-opened or will soon. Anyway, the MRI and their physical therapy intake appointment are both next Monday.

Black Lives Matter

We didn’t have much information about the protest before we went. I’d seen a notice on Facebook a while back and I’d picked it because I thought at a kneeling protest it might be easy to keep your distance from people. You could select a spot and stay there and everyone else would stay in their spots. I also like the idea of a reflective, silent tribute. But then a day before the protest I couldn’t find any information about an action going on at the time, place, and date I remembered (5 p.m. Juneteenth, Silver Spring Civic Building plaza). There was one there at 3 p.m. on that day and one at 5 p.m. the next day. Living where we do, you really don’t have to look too hard to find a protest. But I wasn’t sure if I’d misremembered the time or the date or if the kneeling protest had been cancelled because neither description I found said anything about that. Beth and I decided on the Friday afternoon one because it seemed like it would be less crowded than the Saturday afternoon one. We invited the kids and Noah said yes, while North declined, possibly because we were pretty short on details and they wanted to know what they were getting themselves into.

When we arrived it was raining gently. There was a crowd, but the plaza wasn’t packed and virtually everyone was wearing a mask. The crowd was mostly teens and adults, but some people had brought younger kids. We tried to keep to the edges, which meant when the speeches started, about 3:20, we couldn’t hear much. The march organizers were young, probably high school age, and there were a half dozen of them standing in a line where the skating rink is in the winter, near a big Black Lives Matter banner, handing the microphone back and forth. There’s really nothing like young activists to make you feel hopeful for the future, even when you can’t actually hear what they’re saying.

Eventually people starting moving and it became clear there was going to be a march. For about twenty minutes we filed through the streets of downtown Silver Spring, chanting the usual chants. Noah commented that he’s always thought “No justice, no peace!” is an odd thing to chant at a peaceful march. It was harder to keep our distance here, but at least we were passing people and they were passing us, so we weren’t in close contact with the same people for long.

When we returned to the plaza it was announced everyone should sit or kneel for nine minutes, the length of time the police officer who murdered George Floyd knelt on his neck. So we had shown up at the right protest, more or less by accident. It was what I wanted but I also had a little trepidation. I’m fifty-three years old, heavyset, and I injured my left knee badly several years ago and it has never been right since then. But just in the past few months it’s been bothering me noticeably less. I have no idea why. I suggested to Beth we move back to the benches because wood isn’t quite as hard as brick. I got up on the bench and tried kneeling. It wasn’t what you’d call comfortable, and it got worse with time, but it was doable. It was conducive to reflection as well.

When the nine minutes was over, the protesters began drifting out of the plaza. We went to Cold Stone, thinking it might be crowded but we were the only ones there. (Maybe the other rain-soaked protesters wanted some less chilly snack.) We took our ice cream back to the parking garage and ate it in the car.

Bay

Two days later, all four of us took a day trip to the Chesapeake Bay. It was North’s first time on a drone-flying expedition, but this one held the promise of swimming, Taco Bell, and Dairy Queen, and this combination proved enticing. The park was just past the Bay Bridge. With no traffic, this would be about an hour from our house. It was a summer weekend, though, so we weren’t expecting no traffic. And as it turned out, there was an accident on the bridge so it was actually two hours before we got to the park.

It was a short hike through marshland and woods to get to the beach. The ground was soft and it was hard going for North in places, but we got to the water. The beach was narrow but long, so people were able to stretch out along it pretty well. We were there around two hours and I didn’t see a single person wearing a mask, though Beth said she saw a few. North and I were in the water most of the time we were there and Beth and Noah joined us at the beginning. Then the two of them got out of the water and he took some footage with the drone on the beach then they took a walk toward the bridge. They found a little creek running into the Bay and he shot some footage. Here’s a compilation he made.

When they came back, I’d just gotten out of the water and we watched North. They’re always in their element in the water and it was good to see them so happy and active.

“We have to get them to the beach this summer,” I commented to Beth.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and we hadn’t had lunch yet, so we left the bay and got drive-through Taco Bell and Dairy Queen and ate it at the tables outside the Dairy Queen, which we had to ourselves. (We reminisced about Noah’s twelfth birthday and how we had cake and ice cream at those very tables while en route to Rehoboth for the weekend and how hard it was to keep the candles lit so he could blow them out.)

Looking Ahead…

Noah finally got time slot to pick up his things from his dorm room, where his camera and most of his summer clothes have been awaiting his return since early March. It’s a few weeks from now. We’re going to make a long weekend out of it, staying a couple days in Ithaca to splash in some of the abundant waterfalls and eat take-out from some of the many excellent restaurants in that foodie town.

It will be the first time we’ve been on an overnight family trip since we went to Berkeley Springs in February, but we’ll be hitting the road again less than a week later because after going back and forth for months about whether to go to Rehoboth this summer, we finally decided we would, but not as the big extended family gathering it usually is. We’re thinking of it as moving our bubble to the beach—a mere block from the beach as it turns out. We decided to prioritize proximity to the ocean, so North can spend as much time in the water as they like. We’re not sure what else we’ll do and what we won’t while we’re there. We’ll have to assess how crowded our other usual haunts are and what conditions in Delaware are like in mid-July. But North said if they could go to the beach and get takeout from Grandpa Mac’s and Grotto that would be enough for them, so I think we can swing that.

School’s Out: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 11

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School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces…

Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not come back at all

From “School’s Out,” by Alice Cooper

Thursday: Last Day of School

North was promoted from middle school, virtually, on Friday evening, so I guess it’s summer break now. It may be hard to tell the difference, as North’s schoolwork had been pretty minimal since it went online, but it’s a milestone nonetheless. They finished their last assignment, a short essay on the role of slavery in the Civil War, on Thursday so they could relax and celebrate all day Friday, or “North Day,” as Beth dubbed it.

We also had a telemedicine appointment Thursday at the pain clinic, with the doctor who helped set up North’s physical and aqua therapy for their last bout of chronic pain, the one that lasted from February of seventh grade to November of eighth grade. Because North mentioned some intermittent  muscle weakness and that’s a new symptom, the doctor wants to see them in person, so we made an appointment for Monday. (I can’t go because only one parent is allowed to accompany kids to the National Children’s Medical Center right now, and since Beth drives, she’s the obvious choice. I’ve been avoiding both public transportation and ride-sharing services since March, which has really curtailed my transportation options.) As much as we all wish we weren’t in this situation, it’s a good thing to be on a path to a treatment plan.

Thursday is North’s cooking night and it was also their turn to choose our weekly family activity evening, so they made cucumber-tofu sushi and then organized a scavenger hunt. Because it’s Pride month, we were searching for little colored pieces of paper in arc shapes. (They printed a rainbow and then cut it into bands and then cut each band into several short strips.) They hid them around the house and yard while Beth was sequestered in our room on a work call and Noah and I went for a short walk so we wouldn’t see them hiding the papers. When we got back, they directed the hunt from the living room couch, where they issued occasional clues. The hunt was supposed to end when someone found strips with all six colors, but time ran out and as I had five at the end, I was declared the winner.

Friday: North Day

On Friday, Beth took the day off and wore her “Let Summer Begin” t-shirt. At lunchtime we got takeout from an Italian deli and Starbucks and we all had a picnic at Wheaton Regional Park. We also let North choose the venue for takeout pizza that night (they chose Roscoe’s) and Beth made a cake—chocolate with a raspberry filling between the layers and white chocolate frosting. We stuck the numeral nine candle in it because they are now a ninth grader. When we lit the candle, I put on Elizabeth Cotten’s “Graduation March,” but because it wasn’t the more familiar “Pomp and Circumstance,” and because there was cake, the kids decided we needed to sing “Happy Promotion” to the tune of “Happy Birthday” so we did that.

When we presented North with a promotion card and gift—an iPad, with a keyboard and pencil— they were really surprised because they weren’t expecting anything. I have to admit, I felt some retrospective guilt about the fact that we didn’t get Noah anything for eighth grade promotion—and he worked so hard in middle school!—but it’s kind of late for that now. And he did get a class party on a riverboat and an in-person promotion ceremony, while North’s class trip to Six Flags was cancelled, so maybe this evens things out.

The prerecorded promotion video was supposed to be available at 6:30, but there were technical difficulties and it was 8:30 before we were able to view it. After we’d been waiting a while we started to watch The Way, Way Back, which Beth or North found in a list of coming-of-age films. (They were both looking for one because North thought it was an appropriate genre for the evening.) When we finally got the message that the promotion videos had gone live, we paused the movie to finish the next night.

The virtual promotion was a lot like an in-person promotion. There was music from the school orchestra, speeches from the principal, faculty, and students, and awards for various virtues (Caring, Thinker, etc.)  Then the names of the roughly four hundred eighth graders scrolled down the screen. Finally, there was a slideshow of photos students and parents submitted. I sent in photos of North at Outdoor Ed in the fall of sixth grade, and in chorus concerts, plays, and coffeehouses. The teacher who organized it (North’s Spanish teacher) picked four of them and Zoë sent in a few pictures of North, too, so they were well represented. I hadn’t told North I sent in pictures, so that was a surprise, too, and they seemed pleased. I think North Day was a success.

First Weekend of Summer Break

The only thing on the agenda North didn’t get a chance to do on Friday was get their head shaved, which we’d promised them they could do once the school year was over. They’ve been wanting to do it for months, but first I was making them wait until after my sister’s wedding in July and then when the wedding was postponed until next summer I proposed after promotion as a good time for it, so they could mark the end of middle school. This was back in May and they wanted to do it right away and grumbled a bit, but Beth advised them to “take the win,” and they must have seen the wisdom in that because they stopped complaining. But by the time we’d watched the promotion on Friday night, it was dark out and all quarantine hair cutting has been taking place in the back yard, so they had to wait another day, but on Saturday morning Beth shaved their head, as promised.

Today North and Zoë got together to wade in the creek and they painted their faces to mark the fact that today was supposed to be D.C. Pride, before it was cancelled. I’m glad North is able to socialize in person with Zoë now and that it’s motivating them to move a bit more, since they have to meet outside.

Summer and Fall

North will be free for a while. Starting in July, they’re going to take an online summer school class in computer science to get their tech requirement out of the way and to give them a little something to do, as other than a two-week, half-day socially distanced drama camp, also in July, they don’t have many plans. It’s unclear if  they will be going back to school in person in August. We got a message from the school district just today informing us that no decision has been made and if we’ve heard anything one way or the other, it’s just a rumor.

As for Noah, we got his academic calendar a few weeks ago. Because his college is starting in early October and ending not much later than usual, it’s compressed—with no fall break and shortened Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks. Students are encouraged not to go home during either the Thanksgiving or spring breaks, but that’s not mandatory. Of course, this is all assuming these plans go as currently scheduled. The School of Health is openly lobbying for a different plan for fall semester—a hybrid one in which the students start online classes in August, switch to in-person classes for October and November and then finish up at home in December. This disturbs Noah because he’s applying for summer jobs and internships and he’d like to know the exact length of his break.

Parks and Protest

Speaking of Noah, Beth and I continue to go on weekend outings with him to fly his drone. (It was probably on one of these rambles that Beth got bitten by a tick. She was diagnosed with Lyme Disease on Monday. It was her second go-around with it, so she was able to recognize the symptoms and get on medication quickly.) A week ago we went to Quiet Waters Park in Anne Arundel County, which is on the South River. The name is something of a misnomer, because there are a lot of powerboats in the river and there’s a dedicated dog beach, which is a great idea for dogs and their people, but it’s not exactly quiet.  We did find a nice open field in front of a stage and a little botanical garden, though, and these were good places for flying. Then yesterday we went to Rockburn Branch Park, in Howard County, which was notable for the fact almost no one was wearing a mask, so we gave everyone a wide berth. There are some historic houses and barns in the park and Noah flew around and over them, then we walked along some trails, and by the numerous sports facilities (baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts, and a mountain biking skills course).

We also went to a youth-organized, socially distanced march in Takoma Park a week and a day ago. I’ve been skittish about protesting, because of COVID, but this seemed like a good starter march because the crowds would not be as big as downtown and it was going to be mostly kids and their families so I thought there would be a focus on safety. The route was pretty short and close to home, so we thought North could manage at least part of it and it would be pretty easy to get them home when they were done. I also like to support youth activism in these days when we need it more than ever.

There was a good turnout (including several families we know), nearly everyone was masked (with the exception of the guy standing on the corner yelling about how Jesus was the solution) and for the most part, folks kept their distance. “Black Lives Matter” was the most popular sign, but we also saw “Stop Killing Black People,” “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Say Their Names.” I saw the younger sister of one of North’s friends carrying one that said, “My Friends’ Lives Matter.” We carried the sign North made that says “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Do,” taking turns with it.

North walked several blocks and then wanted to sit on the curb, so I stayed with them while Beth and Noah went on. After they decided they were done and not just resting, I went to try to catch up with Beth and Noah with the plan we’d all meet back where North was waiting for us. It took a while to find each other, as the march went off-route at the end, and I went with it while Noah and Beth stayed at the official end point. But eventually we reunited. I went to the farmers’ market to get strawberries and Beth drove the kids home. The march went well enough that we feel ready to tackle another protest next weekend in Silver Spring. This one is a kneeling protest, so I’m hoping people will stake out their spots and stay put, minimizing close contact, but we’ll see.

I imagine there will be more protests this summer and more drone-flying expeditions and I hope, more physical activity for North.