You Take a Covid Test Then Take a Picture
of your covid test then take two subways to work. You turn your time card, take your mask off to drink tea. You take attendance and teach The Poet X. You teach The Joy Luck Club. You cross your fingers for each student dancing in the hall. You learn new names. You memorize new pronouns. You wonder if your cancer will return. You taught some of these kids on Zoom. You saw their faces then. They sat in folding chairs in front of bunk beds. Now they’re wearing masks. Your eyes look at their eyes. Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable. You grade four papers, then another four, press two for Cantonese translation, update your Google slides. You stand outside in chilly columns as they sweep your school for bombs, holding only folders to your chest. All clear. You walk the six flights back to class. You give your students extra points if they don’t check their cell phones when they finish workshopping their drafts. You walk between the groups and say “Good job just spacing out!” and mean it. They laugh. Nobody knows which lockdown drills are real. You take two subways home and pick your own kids up from after school - your living, vibrant kids. Your son sits on the floor to play with beads. Your daughter hates being alone. Your wife is on the F train now and has a cough. Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable. You do not know if it will ever be better or worse than this.
Nina is Wonderful!
I prop my phone against the ketchup so we can all see Nana’s face, her short hair white in Key West sun, my two kids at the table, the baby buckled in, the big kid reaching jammy hands out towards my screen. Between their shrieking, Nana tells me her friend Janet used to say “Nina is wonderful!” each time her toddler daughter Nina spilled juice, sassed back, or sat her dressed-up self down in the bath, new party shoes and all. I think of this sometimes when Mia grits her teeth and mumbles “Never” when I ask her to put on her socks. Mia, four years old in a track suit jumping couch to couch while Leo licks crayons beside her. Nina is wonderful, now thirty-plus in Denver doing something with philanthropy, and Mia is wonderful, and Leo, too, though he won’t wear his coat. And surely my wife and I are wonderful as we haul two full car seats and a stroller through the airport several times a year, caravanning up the terminal towards the loving arms of grandparents, and what could be more wonderful than that? Oh Mother Goddess, oh Nana and Abuela, oh lifelong friends like Janet, oh women who’ve schlepped any children anywhere, please help me to survive these years of ear drops and sippy cups, this age of so much wonder.
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