Back to School in #weirdworld

on our strange and uncanny ability to adapt

Last Wednesday and Thursday, I returned to the school where I teach to “get ready” for in-person teaching that starts tomorrow. Our school site is in a large office building, and when we left in early March of 2020, I took a few books that I was reading with my students, some papers and folders, a favorite pen and my school-issued computer. I left everything else, including a cardigan sweater folded on a shelf, a pair of sneakers, a bunch of books, markers, some tchotchkes, a lipstick and some hand sanitizer. We had been wiping surfaces for a few days, but we otherwise packed up and left thinking we’d be gone for a few weeks at most. It was really weird, then, and that stifled panic of the early days of the pandemic hadn’t yet kicked in. I can barely remember those early days, their overwhelming intensity and confusion and hunkering down. Can you? Certainly, as we packed our stuff up that day at school, we didn’t think that we’d be home, teaching virtually for the next 12 months, that we wouldn’t see our offices, our building, our students or one another for the next year. I didn’t think that I would not just be teaching, actually, but living entirely at home, inside my house, sequestered with Sophie and Carl and my sons, sporadically, for the next year, waiting out the dreadful election with the Beast fucking everything up, hundreds of thousands of people getting sick and dying and you know the rest. So, when I walked into my office early Wednesday morning, just over a year to the day that I’d last been there, and began to unpack the books and folders and computer from my tote bag, I was in a kind of daze. Everything was exactly the same as the day we’d left. I mean, everything. The place was a bit of a time capsule, if I can use a cliche, or maybe even something left intact after a bomb has blown everything up. In my office, books were on the shelves and so was the sweater. The sneakers were on the floor and my lipstick was on the table, right next to the hand sanitizer. A few pencils and colored pens were in the purple plastic cup on top of the desk, next to the stapler and the scotch tape dispenser. I closed my door, sat down in the swivel chair and opened my computer to sign in to a Zoom class with a Creative Writing student from Connecticut. I was in that vacant place you go when you’re waiting for the ding of the Zoom doorbell, and I looked up and focused, suddenly, on the calendar taped up on the back of my closed door — a monthly print-out from a site called Action for Happiness whose aim is to increase happiness with daily affirmations and actions. It read MARCH 2020 and I felt so strange so suddenly so like or unlike anything that I could aptly describe to you here. It was as if no time had passed and all of time had passed and the words what the hell happened to us came to mind and I wanted to snap a photo of myself, shocked, masked, right before the ding and my student appeared on the screen, ready to write.