Covid Isolation (written in The Kitchen Table's Writing Workshop on 5/7/2020)

    Yesterday I planted Robert’s garden in my backyard.  This morning I admired it from my window, and I was treated to the sight of Baltimore Orioles in my weeping cherry tree, first the female which I couldn’t identify because I’d never knowingly seen one before, but suspected what it was, and then the male which confirmed my suspicions.  Wrens are nesting in the birdhouse.  They start their family here every year.  I spot male and female cardinals at the bird feeder, common visitors but no less brilliant .

                When my bones are brittle and weary, and I cannot make the climb up to this vantage point in my loft, I will remember these peaceful, life-affirming starts to these worrisome days in Covid isolation.

                Yesterday I also held a virtual meeting and saw my students for the first time in seven weeks.  I cried.  Funny how I never really wanted to be a teacher.

                (The Orioles sail over the back fence into the tangled woods.) 

After high school, I wanted to go away to college to study journalism.  I knew it wouldn’t be easy to convince my strict Italian father to let me go, but I was slowly softening him to the idea.  I was passionate about becoming an international journalist, excited by the places it would take me, the talents it would tap into.  Teaching became a consolation prize, a delayed plan B, since my older brother who did not go to college convinced my father not to let me go.  “Dad, you don’t know what goes on there,” and he assailed our father’s ears with cautionary tales of his idiot friend’s dorm life, filled with drugs and sex and, the real clincher, wasted tuition money due to failing grades.

My father, in addition to taking that chance away from me, emboldened by his proclamation, raged on about what a dangerous life journalism would be and insisted I drop the pursuit.  It didn’t take much to smack that dream out of my hands, I was already kicked in the gut and on my knees, betrayed by my brother.

Anger festered and spread inside me, turning to bitterness and hushed resentment of them, of them all.  Men, I mean.  Even now I feel it simmer inside me though my father is dead fifteen years and my brother who I plant a commemorative garden for in my yard every May, died four years ago.

The destructive path I drove my life through then fueled by these ill feelings brought me down strange roads and often to dead ends.  You wouldn’t believe the life I’ve lived.  

Eventually, I made one responsible move on behalf of my newborn son.  I went back to college and became a teacher.  That was 27 years ago.  But I held on always to my grudge that this was not my first career choice.   

I wonder what my life might have been now reporting on this worldwide pandemic.  How would I?  I can’t imagine what I’d be firsthand witness to.  I turn away from the painful images on the screen.  Perhaps I would have hardened my heart long ago and been quite a different person than this one whose heart is filled to bursting at the sight of Baltimore Orioles and the faces of twelve-year-olds happy to see me.