Teaching Tuesday nights this quarter means that I get less time with my students than most of my colleagues. Normally they would have a profile draft due on November 11, but the Veterans Day holiday means we have to work around that obstacle. Some students also see the two-day break for Thanksgiving as a weeklong break, thus sacrificing another Tuesday.
This quarter, my calendar was already patchworked by holidays and absences when illness came knocking.
I tested positive for Covid on Saturday, and Kate immediately started lobbying for me to cancel everything, including work meetings, the radio show, the pub quiz, Poetry Night with Brad Buchanan, and my Tuesday evening class.
I agreed to everything but the class. I wanted my students to get their money’s worth out of a writing class with Dr. Andy, even if our November 4th class would be taught via Zoom with frequent breaks and student groupwork so I would have time to recover from the excitable talk about writing and the First Amendment that fills my journalism classes.
Indeed, my students spent much of their class time working collaboratively in Zoom breakout rooms while I sat in a hoodie in the backyard, coughing between comments and trying to project normalcy through the webcam’s narrow frame.
Even sick, I tried to bring my A game. Using chat, shared screens, and breakout rooms reminded me how much I enjoy teaching with Zoom, a tool we all relied on for a couple years starting at the onset of the worldwide pandemic. The nimble teacher can experiment with approaches that don’t translate easily into the physical classroom. I will miss this if I ever retire from teaching: the faces in those little boxes, the revealed moments of discovery when a student makes a connection, the shared laughter when someone’s cat crosses the keyboard.
Afterward, as I sat bundled in the night air, still a bit gleeful from having taught well to receptive students, I reflected on a future in which all my children but one have been leaving home. I thought of a line attributed to Confucius: A healthy person has a hundred wishes; a sick person has only one.
This quarter I assigned my first-year seminar students a “reverse bucket list,” that is, a list of activities or accomplishments that they once wished for themselves (like getting into UC Davis) that they have already accomplished. Such a list fosters gratitude.
Covid reminds me that when the body fails, the mind narrows its ambitions to breath, warmth, and rest. Illness offers the philosopher an opportunity to practice what the Stoics called futurorum malorum præmeditatio (the Latin meaning pre-studying bad future), or negative visualization: imagining the loss of things we take for granted, so that when we recover them, we recognize their worth. The Stoic imagines loss, while the Buddhist accepts it.
Anyway, back to me and my Covid. Early in the fever, I felt like Charlie Gordon at the beginning of Flowers for Algernon: I was aware that my intelligence and focus were slipping, but I was still fascinated by the process. I could sense a dulling, a static or cognitive interference on the line of thought. While such intellectual deadening is regrettable, a Buddhist might remind me that awareness of the change is itself a kind of clarity. To witness decline is still to be awake. Perhaps we sit in wisdom when we sit with the absence of sharpness with compassion.
When I told Kate I didn’t feel as smart as usual, she said she could tell. Then we laughed. November 4 was Kate’s birthday. Even in my masked quarantine, I poetically celebrated her steadiness, her patience, and her humor that keeps our small household running with “Happy Birthday to Kate, the One Who Keeps Us.” See below if you want to judge how foggy and febrile I was when I wrote my latest love poem.
I’ve been living in the spare bedroom these past five days, windows open to the autumn chill, the air cleaner humming 24/7, and now a silent fan circulating the air as if composing its own weather system. The patient and cleansing morning rain against the windowsill was the best sound of the day. I sat with it, noting its rhythm.
Jukie and the dog both want my company, puzzled that I’ve become distant. They don’t understand why I mask up to fetch a glass of water, or why I wave them away from the door. Sometimes I hear them sighing outside the door, loyal as monks outside a cell.
Soon enough, I’ll rejoin the family, the classroom, the world of a hundred wishes. For now, I’ll sit still, looking forward to once again breathing easily, and to notice the small weathers within and around me.
The One Who Keeps Us
You move through the house
like our gentle November weather,
steadying every fragile thing:
the clock with an extra hour of dark,
a glass of water at my elbow,
the cat’s soft inquiry,
the Instagram announcements,
the insistent whirring of our machines.
You attend to them all.
Your attention has sustained us.
When our children’s small bodies ached with fright,
you gathered them back into breathing.
You coaxed words from the unwilling.
When Jukie woke with his song of need,
you were already rising,
your voice the surest medicine.
When Geneva crossed her own thresholds,
you lit the way with your calm belief.
Even now, when the dark world feels blurred
and my body forgets its strength,
you reappear with the gift of your bright eyes
and I remember what health looks like.
Online, in your circles, and here at home,
you move toward whoever needs you,
our caretaker and secret flame,
ever-ready to kindle, spark, or warm.
Love is just something you do.
For thirty-three years,
you’ve turned care into art:
every day painting with your words
a patient, daily masterpiece
of touch and resilience and grace.
Outside in the dark, here in our bed,
the light in the room, our torch, our beacon,
comes from you.
The weather forecast called for rain on the first and second Wednesday in November. Nevertheless, I hope you will show up for tonight’s Pub Quiz. Dan will be the substitute quizmaster. Come early to claim a coveted outdoor table, especially because we will have a bonus large party joining us at Sudwerk just before the pub quiz begins. I invite you to join the regulars and irregulars for a grand competition featuring 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about. Today’s pub quiz is 973 words long, if we include the answers. This week the newsletter was almost twice that long!
Dan the substitute Quizmaster says this: “I’m encouraging food bank donations like crazy given the interruption in SNAP.”
“At UCD Law, I ran the annual food drive my last year and got a bit of advice from Yolo Food Bank that I’ve never forgotten: Peanut butter is like gold. Kids love it. It doesn’t need refrigeration. It’s protein that can be added to all sorts of foods. One container has enough servings to supplement multiple meals.”
“Family allergies aside, moms finding a peanut butter container in their Food Bank box were known to ask if they could get one every time. And where Food Bank workers could, they’d steer the peanut butter containers to moms with kids.”
In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: protocols, founding fathers, fashion, peanut butter, time travel, Albania, skulls, prime ministers, sequels, special effects, birds, fun jobs that start with the letter H, fictional rock innovators, pop stars, bells, sandwiches, silly memes, Pixar films, ties, distribution centers, favorite colors, Davis names, Canadian exports, poisons, languages, people who imitated The Ramones, clutch players, immunology, departed heroes, machines, support systems, security systems, black glasses, beauty, Supreme Court Justices, people with ridiculously unusual last names, ampersands, U.S. states, geography, current events, and Shakespeare.
For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.
Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. We have over 80 Patreon members now, including the new paid subscribers Kiera, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! I should write a question for Kiera. Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens, whose players or substitutes keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of the aforementioned avocado. I appreciate the Mavens’ kind words to me in the newspaper. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, and Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion.
Best,
Dr. Andy
Three questions from last week:
- Great Americans. The only Army General to win the Nobel Peace Prize did so for his plan to aid the recovery of Europe after World War II. Name him.
- Unusual Words. What eight-letter R noun do we use for a person who has returned from the dead?
- Chinese Communism. The Chinese Communist Party was founded near the beginning of what decade?