Looking for Silver Linings

“Look for the silver linings,” Facebook urges me during the weeks of the pandemic.  The silver lining is the bright side, introduced to us by blind poet, John Milton, in his long poem, Comus.  Why is it that I feel churlish when I am asked to consider the good that comes of tough situations?  Corona Virus makes me churlish. 

Silver linings remind me how fast a piece of silver tarnishes.  I have several lovely candelabras inherited from my grandmother, heavy and full of crevices.  When I get around to polishing them, it is gratifying but messy job. I rub the polish cream on with a rag and the grime lifts, transferred to the cloth and to my fingers.  Eventually, the silver gleams, but my fingers feel chalky for hours.  It is a labor of love--one I do not undertake often and then feel guilty about having neglected for so long.

Neglected.  That is how my empty school feels when I wandered the halls earlier this week. Without children to animate the rooms, the school I lead feels dusty, sorrowful, like one of those pieces of silver left too long unpolished. Our school has delivered a distance learning curriculum for more than two months.  My faculty and staff are tired.  We know there will not be much of a break this summer because we need to plan for next fall, and the weeks of June, July and August will fly too fast for us to get everything done.  Our parents will have higher expectations.  So, I try to summon optimism and determination as I lead, but at home, where no one can see me, I feel grumpy, inadequate, dull.  I cannot fix Covid-19.  That much I know.  My empathy for those mourning end of year celebrations is great; I feel sad, too.  We have tried to celebrate our grieving Seniors, tried to comfort their mournful parents.  We have planned a virtual commencement and a drive-through pick up for diplomas and a box of treasures, but there’s a hollowness to all of it, a sense that we are dutifully trying to make lemonade from a batch of lemons without much sugar to sweeten the drink. Of course, these days, even lemonade stands are forbidden, and how could we drink lemonade through masks, anyway?

I started a gratitude journal in the middle of March just as the Governor of Ohio asked us to self-quarantine.  I remarked on having the time to notice, much more acutely than usual, spring’s procession: buds appearing from one day to the next on branches outside my window, the moon, the sunrise, daffodils in their infinite variety, feathery leaves and the elegant pink strands of weeping cherries.  I appreciated our pets more—the cats’ antics, the faithful and unstinting affection of our three rescue dogs.  I continue to recite Shakespeare to our amazing long-lived Shark, our carnival goldfish, who was promoted to a bigger tank a few weeks ago, but has now begun to break out in black spots.  I have Googled cures all week, forestalling, I hope, his demise with Epsom salts and ammonia water tank tests. 

About two weeks into Shelter in Place, one of my two Manhattan-based daughters decided she and her beau and their large dog might fare better in Ohio than on the Upper West Side.  They packed up all they could imagine they would need and drove to an empty house we are lucky enough to have on our school’s second campus.  For the first two weeks, we dropped food at their back door, waved, and occasionally took walks in masks, more than ten feet apart.  And, when the fourteen-day period ended, we began to socialize more—first, the pleasure of hugging one of my girls and then dinner at our house, backgammon at their house, ping pong at ours.  Suddenly, our family enlarged again.

I have always missed the day to day presence of my grown-up daughters, always missed the heavy swing of the younger one’s long thick hair and the curious big blue eyes of her big sister.  And now, we had Cordelia, Cole and Artemis, the dog.  Miranda, the older one, and her beloved Sara, facetime us often, so we sometimes eat meals together. We have gone from three lonely family members—our son is the only one still at home—to a crew of seven!   Cole is an excellent chef, refusing offers of help and leaving few dishes to clean.  Cordelia used me as her model for a Zoom yoga last week for mothers of a certain age.  I love having her be my teacher, and I love talking about distance learning and what to make for dinner with Miranda, who is a second-grade teacher. We can talk about school for hours.  Sara promises she will soon help me update my website.  We are so lucky.  All of us are healthy; we are managing. 

We do not see Cordelia and Cole every day.  Most nights, my fifteen-year-old son and I make dinner—ingredients ordered online by Miranda in NYC and delivered to our back gate by masked people.  My son is increasingly interested in cooking, a more willing sous-chef than he ever was.  In fact, I appreciate what a good conversationalist he is and how lucky I am that he still enjoys spending time with me.  Over chopping onions or reading recipes, we have discussed the Avengers. My son is an expert.  Early in quarantine, we began, at his behest, to watch the entire Avengers oeuvre in chronological order according to Marvel Universe.  We sat together in our family room watching a movie—sometimes with Cole and Cordelia, sometimes just the three of us and not every night depending on his homework or my Head of School duties.  I’d do needlepoint, hiding my eyes during the scary parts. My dreams are filled with my students and various Avengers fighting Covid 19.  Black Widow and Falcon scoop up tiny girls in plaid jumpers and whisk them to safety; Captain America informs the Seniors that graduation is back on. Iron Man tells me that it is safe to return to school, but I return and find hideous purple Thanos! Some of my dreams are splendid and others terrifying.  My son and I have talked about the fact that few in the Marvel world are purely good or purely bad.  Absolutes matter less when the circumstances are ambiguous.  That is an idea I am trying to hold in these uncertain times.  We have to be able to live with uncertainty, to manage ambiguity. There are no tidy resolutions.  My job is to lead without having a sense of exactly where we are headed and to project a confidence I may not always feel.  I have to believe that shiny silver glows underneath all that covers it.

Covid-19 is terrifying; I wonder if we will ever have school again as I know it.  But there are also opportunities to re-shape American education that nothing but a pandemic could have catalyzed.  And, at home, there is my family—my calm and funny husband, my son who will get his license soon, my daughter, the Yogini, her musical and culinarily-skilled boyfriend, and my NY daughter and her fiancée, who, though far away, are with us because of technology.  I can see and talk with them.  They have postponed their August wedding—a hard call, but the right one.  At least I won’t have to order my mother-of-the-bride dress from Amazon, which was my fear before they postponed until next August.  Perhaps, a year from now, we will all be together, with masks or without.  I’m planning to wear a silver dress.