1.
A few nights after Hamilton first aired on Disney Plus, I kissed Lin-Manuel Miranda in my dreams.
Right before I bent down for The Kiss, Lin-Manuel looked up at me, smiling with those lively, mischievous brown eyes. He had been strumming on a guitar in a corner of this cavernous restaurant, where crowds of extended families had gathered at long picnic tables. They wore face masks, but otherwise the mood was boisterous, celebratory.
Weirdness aside (and with apologies to my sweet husband), it was easily one of the most luscious, life-affirming moments of the pandemic.
2.
“It’s just better with you here.”
My 5-year-old is seated on the toilet. He affixes me with a soulful, penetrating look as I attempt to break free for a minute to clear the dinner table.
“Alright. I’ll stay.”
I settle myself awkwardly on the rim of the bathtub.
“Mom, did you know there are 65 differences between dragons and dinosaurs?”
Part of me relishes these oddball moments together in the bathroom, the existential questions or wizarding fantasies that often ensue. How can I deny him some comfort and closeness in the middle of a world turned upside down?
And yet, if I can point to a scene that encapsulates the utter surrender of self while caregiving in a pandemic, it might be this one.
3.
The working-class writer and mother of four Tillie Olsen wrote poems in snatches, on lunch breaks and bus rides.
This is not poetry. The Muse, with whom I’ve had a tenuous relationship at best, has certainly abandoned me over the past six months.
But, remembering Olsen, I seized on the notion that writing in fragments might at least get me writing again.
Maybe I could gather some of the scraps—the wisps of ideas that have been nagging at me while jogging or washing dishes or distractedly doing pretend play with Harry Potter LEGOs—and tie them up into a madcap Dadaist bouquet.
4.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
5.
You can find Jeremiah the Innocent Frog on a dumpy, inconspicuous stretch of businesses across from the UT Austin campus, known by locals as “the Drag.” The mural consists of nothing more than a sketch, a doodle really, of a bullfrog with bulging eyes, over which the phrase “hi, how are you” (no question mark) is scrawled in a clumsy hand.
In the early 1990s, the record store Sound Exchange asked local musician and artist Daniel Johnston to recreate his 1980s cover art on the side of their building. The record shop vanished long ago, replaced by a now-shuttered Thai restaurant catering to undergrads.
But the mural endures. It has become a vital artifact of Austin’s slacker iconography.
To the extent that it even registered at all, I’ve always thought of Johnston’s mural as, well, kinda goofy. Irrelevant.
This naïve-art image, though, has been shadowing me lately. Every once in a while, Jeremiah pops into my consciousness, glancing around nervously with those periscope eyes.
Hey, how are you?, he whispers conspiratorially.
6.
At breakfast, Isaac makes this surrealist joke about COVID-19—or “the germs,” as he calls it. It sounds like a litany:
I was born in the time of the germs.
You and Daddy were born in the time of the germs.
Your parents were born in the time of the germs.
Your grandparents were born in the time of the germs.
Your great-grandparents were born in the time of the germs.
I loved his little poem so much that I drew a picture of it.
7.
Villanelles are a poetic form with a highly rigid rhyme scheme—almost maniacally so. The first and third lines of the poem repeat alternatively in the stanzas that follow. Meanwhile, the second line of the first tercet (trio of lines) rhymes with the second line of subsequent stanzas. In the poem’s final four lines, the two opening lines come together again: the dance quickens, the noose tightens.
The villanelle flirts with the absurd, is absurdly overdetermined. In expert hands, villanelles can evoke pathos or loss, but, mostly, they are the Class Clowns of poetic forms. I love it when poets lean into that aspect, writing villanelles about zombies or twerking.
At the same time, their manic rhyme scheme creates a stifling, claustrophobic effect. Maybe that is why I was reminded of them during COVID-19. Or, it could be merely that villanelles happen to contain nineteen lines.
Either way, they seem like fitting avatars for “the time of the germs.”
8.
OK, rational me knows that my dreaming brain was simply recycling the kiss between Hamilton and Maria Reynolds at the start of their affair. Riffling at random through the days’ images.
But metaphor-loving me secretly hopes that Lin-Manuel might have transferred some of his own creative exuberance through that dream-kiss.
Despite the Internet’s insistence that the “COVID-19 Lockdown is Unleashing People’s Creativity,” it’s been a bleak time for my writing life as a working parent.
To be fair, creative energies have been expended these past six months. They’ve just been channeled toward, say, making a weekly podcast series called “The Sciencers” with my kid or repurposing random vegetable scraps into Paula Wolfert’s herb jam.
Mostly, though, they’ve been redirected toward trying to keep it together for my family. For my 5-year-old, who has been unwittingly thrust into this bizarre alternative reality of ‘Zoom kindergarten.’
For my husband, who just lost his dad to cancer.
Of course, it’s possible that the real obstacle to creativity isn’t particular to being a parent at all. The weight of all this ceaseless uncertainty, injustice, and grief is enough to send anyone’s Muse into hiding.
My child’s non-stop creative efforts during the pandemic have thrown my own lack of creative mojo into sharp relief.
9.
I’m still feeling stumped about why the “Hi, how are you” mural has volunteered itself as the unofficial mascot for my mental state.
Then, it hits me: I am missing Austin, even though I still live here.
In some ways, the pandemic has encouraged more of an engagement with deep-time Austin, with the native landscape. At Balcones District Park recently, I found myself in ecstasies over spotting a water snake and two Eastern cottontails. Even my child’s whining at the length of our hike couldn’t spoil that sense of exaltation.
But I’m pining for the social dimension, the lived city, the build environment. Cities are about movement, that dynamic sensation of passing through their spaces—the streets, the libraries, the bars, the coffee shops.
There’s this feeling right now of being rooted, spellbound, chained to the spot. And at the same time, of being nowhere at all.
10.
11.
Ordinary Terrible Things.
That’s the name of this quirky picture-book series I’ve been reading with my kid.
We began, in June, with Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. The young protagonist questions the ambivalent or defensive responses of the white adults in her life to news of police brutality. She reads up on the history and demands better of both herself and the grownups around her.
When my father-in-law died last month, a friend checked out Death is Stupid for us from the library. Here, too, we see a child encouraged to ask for more than the pat answers we give kids—heck, that we give to each other—when someone dies, to instead find a path that acknowledges the rawness and complexity of our grief.
Isaac regards me warily, tentatively, whenever we read books like these together. Books that make my voice crack or tears appear involuntarily. Books that tap into the ever-growing well of sadness, anxiety, and anger that I work so hard to push below the surface.
12.
The sexiest scene in Hamilton is not, IMO, the kiss from “Say No to This” that seduced its way into my dreams. It’s the one with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. (as Burr) singing “Dear Theodosia.” The dad duet.
Here is one powerful essay by a father uneasy for his kids’ future. Here’s another.
13.
You can keep your eyes open, see nothing at all
But it might be the zombies are already near
You think life is s’posed to be lived in this gear?
14.
My mom reminds me that Isaac Newton, my kid’s namesake, invented the calculus during a plague.
I doubt, however, that Newton (who, in fact, never married) had a 5-year-old rudely awaken him at 6 AM to ask: “What is the Southern Hemisphere?”
15.
Daniel Johnston died last year at age 58. He struggled with bipolar disorder, had been in and out of institutions.
Researching this post, I learned that in 2018 Austin declared January 22nd “Hi, How Are You Day”—a mental-health day in his honor.
16.
“Mom, you’re losing your brains.” – Isaac, age 5
17.
My thoughts are in disarray. Grocery lists. Lesson plans. Zoom meetings. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Mike Ramos. Images of my father-in-law doing “happy baby” pose in his living room while his fluffball of a dog danced around him excitedly. Character names from Dragon Rescue Riders: Race to the Edge. Wildfires. Elections. COVID-19 stats. Snatches of the Oompa-Loompa song from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
Who do you blame when your kid is a brat?
Pampered and spoiled like a Siamese cat
Blaming the kids is a lie and a shame
You know exactly who’s to blame…
The MOTHER and the FATHER.
What compels me to let you see me this way? Disoriented, jumpy…like a paranoid cartoon bullfrog. Why not wait it out, shouts my inner critic in embarrassment, until you GET IT TOGETHER?
But maybe the times require a more scattered—and, frankly, shattered—form of personal essay. A self-portrait in the manner of Picasso.
Self-portrait inspired by Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych.
18.
Playing in my head are those epic rap battles of Hamilton, the lyricism pouring out, equal to the urgency of their incendiary moment. I want to achieve a similar sort of escape velocity. I want to break free of the tedium and angst and grown-up burdens of this time to, however briefly, ride a wave of improvisational flow.
Instead, I remain earthbound, tongue-tied. Typing a disjointed emo love letter to the ghost of Daniel Johnston.
For the past few years, the hours I’ve stolen for this blog have grounded me amidst the chaos of raising a young child. These days, writing has never felt so unnatural, so straightjacketed or strained.
19.
Still, it’s good to say hello.
"Hi, How Are You" by mikerastiello is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0