DISPATCH AS A DISPLACED WORKER
(Carbondale, IL, Fall 2020)
I’m taking a break from researching PhD programs when I receive an email from my brother. “Dad’s asymptomatic,” he says, “don’t tell Mom.” His email, written in his characteristic clinical and removed tone, reads like a litany of events and symptoms pertaining to my elderly father’s ongoing health complications. Last update was prior to the pandemic. Dad had been moved from his public assistance apartment to a care facility in Ft. Dodge, Iowa. “Dad’s on a rant again” my brother wrote then, “something about the system.” I encouraged him not to take Dad’s brusqueness to heart, that everyone knows how inadequate our healthcare system is, and as a former Vocational Rehabilitation counselor burned out and displaced by his own disability, Dad may have a point.
The last time I saw my father was years ago, before I moved south for my MFA. He was using a cane then but still living independently. The last time I travelled to northwest Iowa was one year ago Thanksgiving, for my mother’s heart surgery. Due to my teaching load at the university, I made a speedy trip, didn’t stop to see Dad. And a trip back has been delayed due to Governor Reynold’s reluctance to issue a face mask mandate. I’ve read in the Iowa Public Radio Daily Digest about the infections in the prisons, meat packing plants, and long-term care facilities.
I think of my health, a lung obstruction diagnosed a decade ago, tested via the Ames Laboratory Former Worker Program every three years since, the last time 2018 in Iowa City. It’s not lung cancer as the original letter suggested, and they don’t think its Berylliosis, but the diagnosis renders me one of the immuno-compromised. Since the pandemic hit, I’ve made decisions about where to shop or travel or live based upon this lung obstruction. In part, I’m eligible for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance because of it.
It occurs to me that I’ve never told my brother any of this. It occurs to me that if I tell him now my family with whom I have little contact will likely think this is just another excuse for me not to engage, me being “dramatic” again. That’s how they regard my back injuries.
I do a quick risk-benefit analysis like Dr. Jen Ashton on Good Morning America advises. What’s the risk if I go north and see my father? What’s the risk if I don’t? What’s the benefit if I go up and see him? Or if I don’t? How to protect my health and the health of my elderly parents? How to be a good public health citizen?
I thank my brother as always for passing along the news and for shouldering the responsibility as the oldest sibling. I tell him about my lung obstruction, my plans not to travel north for now, agree there is no benefit to tell Mom, ask him to keep me posted. I don’t expect any reaction.
My brother and his family of healthcare professionals, a status quo middle class American family, tend to believe in the system. I applaud their efforts, and all Frontline workers, for putting their lives on the line during this crisis. Our country can’t work without them. But when my brother complains, “You’re becoming more like Dad,” in one sense I think he means I am becoming more of an outsider.
I’ve been an outsider my entire career. Early in graduate school I studied with a Marxist Taoist about land reform and social movements and Tiananmen Square. He said he liked my ethics. I worked with him excavating worker stories about the trauma of closing Rocky Flats, the former nuclear plutonium plant. I had high ideals that I could illuminate their stories of silence and contamination. After obtaining special clearance, I walked on site of this classified (un)holy ground near Boulder, Colorado, collecting names of workers posted on doors and cubicles. I suited up in PPE and toured one of the most contaminated rooms, The Infinity Room, in the world. I was in way over my head but I pushed through the pushback and got those interviews. Stories of Asbestosis and Berylliosis and all the Osis and all kinds of exposures. The Cold War workers took risk for their country like the Essential and Frontline workers are taking for the country in lockdown.
My research at the Ames Laboratory Department of Energy was sidelined by 9/11 and the Amerithrax scare when the government froze funding. And though I worked independently on the project, I trained at a different research institute and defended a different thesis. My dreams of a research job were cut short by the Great Recession into which I graduated and couldn’t find a research job anywhere. I pivoted, eked out a living as a teaching artist, wrote grants, met with small groups of immigrants and of the mentally ill, on the road to independent living centers and shut ins. On the road of social justice. To collect the unofficial stories for the record.
And when those resources dried up, when my cheese was moved yet again, when the Iowa Arts Council was defunded, I took a job as a part-time legal assistant and as a seasonal tax pro, teaching financial literacy to swarms of people who might otherwise get taken advantage of by the State. I listened to their stories of loss, their aspirations for the American Dream. And when it became clear I couldn’t make a living as a tax pro, I moved out of state, reinvented myself as an MFA student, teaching college composition to undergrads in charming Lake Charles, LA, where I enjoyed carriage rides along the Bord du Lac in between teaching. I told my students, “I’m going to teach you to care, like the speech professor in the film Larry Crowne.” How their faces would beam as they read about MLK or Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression.
But after one semester, including a self-quarantine due to the 1000-Year Flood, I left Lake Charles, and my unsustainable stipend of $6000, to teach in the comfort of my Midwest. I landed in Southern Illinois where derechos blow through though winter is not brutal and long like my native Iowa. Despite state corruption and collegiate mismanagement, I continued my mission to teach students to care. When the Las Vegas massacre and the DACA restrictions occurred my first semester, I taught the post-world-war poem by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller titled, “First they came…” for the Socialists, for the Trade Unionists, for the Jews…I did not speak out…and there was no one left to speak for me.
Some of my students consider me a self-made woman, having grown up in a single female headed household with an absentee disabled father, not having parents to lean on. But I graduated into this pandemic with my third master’s degree and no job, no health insurance. Despite my efforts to support myself both in and out of college, and to pivot and reinvent myself when necessary, never have I had a salary, never have I earned a living wage. Always under the poverty line. Always on soft money. I’ve been a hardship case helping those on the margins, studying up on the ruling elites, those ‘upwardly failing’ as a sociologist friend calls it.
I never wanted to live beyond the borders of Iowa, but funding or lack thereof necessitated it. Now I cannot go home to Ames or Iowa City or Storm Lake, all burning with fever and outbreak. I cannot go to the nursing homes or the independent living centers. My father resides in a long-term care facility somewhere in Ft. Dodge suffering with asymptomatic Covid and other afflictions.
What kind of living is this?
A sign by the edge of the hospital says: We thank our doctors nurses emts first responders fire fighters frontline workers. But what is the State doing for the one third of American workers displaced by Covid-19?
I want to work. I am not a parasite.
I’ve spent a lifetime supporting myself and others who are vulnerable. Trying to make crooked places straight. It didn’t matter the medium it only mattered to go to those left out of the spotlight. But I wonder, as my professor used to ask, and as my father challenges, is it more a wonder the system works as well as it does, or a matter of the system not working as well as it should?
REFLECTIONS ON LOCKDOWN PIVOTING
Illinois Executive Order 2020-10, March 21 Thru April 30
Yes, there were warnings. At the bakery, where I bought cranberry orange cookies and bourbon decaf latte, the tables gone and the corner where I worked boxed off. At the Life Center, the pool where I aquacised closed and the lifeguard said the site for unemployment insurance crashed. On campus, a cybersecurity guard asked if I noticed a green light in the empty lecture hall, said he’d been laid off too. The intercom at Walgreens reminded its Illinois law to wear a face mask. And the sign at Turley Park read: Stay healthy stay safe stay home.
Yes, there was stockpiling. My stash included: aspirin//brown sugar//cinnamon pecans//dawn soap//eggs//dried fruit//greenies//hershey’s cocoa//isopropyl wipes//jerky//kahlua//lipton tea//musselman’s apple sauce//nitrile gloves//oinkies//pumpkin baby food for my dog Freya//quaker oats//reliv protein shakes//salsa//thyroid pills//upside down cake mix//verona decaf coffee//white wine//yogurt//zinc.
Yes, there was inconvenience. A canceled gym membership. A loaf of wheat bread at Panera’s drive-thru for six bucks. Hours waiting for Instacart grocery delivery then an upcharge for service plus tip. And many trips through Walgreens drive thru where my thyroid pills were twice rationed to 5/30.
And other things were annoying. Dropping a roll of paper towels subbing for toilet paper into the septic tank. Gloves tossed at the side of the road. Wrapping the gas pump handle with a handiwipe. Customers in line without a face mask. An internet company’s late notice, despite the governor’s orders not to disconnect.
Yes, there were cravings. 17th Street’s BBQ. Cajun food at Broussard’s along the Mississippi in Cape. Hot crossed buns or jellybeans for Easter.
Yes, strange emails. One from the Hampton Jitney, from travelling mid-January, New York City to Miss Laura’s Southampton birthday party. Little did I know that would be my last steak dinner before the country shifted into COVID cuisine.
Yes, there was terminology. Like: covid cuisine//covid curtain//covid jail//covid fluff//covid time//covid brain//corona conundrum//corona kit//pre-pandemic times//quarantine creativity//quarantine fatigue//uncertainty fatigue//SIP (shelter in place).
Yes, isolation. Our canceled gala, no graduation party.
Yes, lost opportunities. A deferred PhD program at Binghamton University.
Yes, quarantine. A student who traveled to Chicago for spring break confined to his dorm floor on the west side of campus.
Yes, death, even in Jackson County. And in Ecuador cardboard boxes used for coffins to keep bodies off the streets.
Still, Americans were enterprising. Out of candles and cupcakes paid bills. Medical personnel volunteered across the country in makeshift field hospitals. All over the world people donated to food banks, made breast pumps into ventilators, fashioned face masks from banana peels. Even Soirees in Brazilian favelas crafted resistance poetry.
And my landlady reduced my rent.
So, I prayed over the house, like Goshen and Passover. Though I never put blood on my door. I read Psalm 91, about pestilence. And listened to Pope Francis issue a special payer, Urbi et Orbi, reserved for Easter or Christmas.
And I remembered how I pivoted before: the 1982 recession when my father lost his job and my mother returned to school; 2008’s Great Recession when I lost my job and started a writing business; the 1000-year flood when I quarantined in a garage apartment in the Lake Charles historic district.
And I reminded myself how I recovered from bronchitis last winter.
And recalled Grandma J’s pantry: canned tomatoes, sweet relish, peaches, pickled beets. And how she would say, “This too shall pass.”
I woke to birds outside my picture window. And Mardi Gras colors springing up at Campus Lake. An old turtle dude sunbathing who looked like he survived many eras.
And took inspiration each night from the New Yorkers who celebrated on their balconies, chanting for the medical workers and their patients.
I thanked a man on the Green Earth trail who raked leaves to clear the path my dog Freya and I walked daily. And read page by page a story-walk fairytale posted for our leisure. And explored: Brush Hill Nature Preserve; Chautauqua Nature Preserve; Fernland Nature Preserve; Oakland Nature Preserve; Pyle’s Nature Preserve. Listened to the wisdom of the woods. Opened to the luck of the toads I found throbbing with life, clinging to a horse tail reed.
And though my pre-existing lung obstruction rendered me sequestered, and I watched the news from afar instead of taking my place on the frontline, I cheered the Essential Workers, stood in line for the vaccine, a good public health citizen. Asked not what good was I in the chaos and calamity, (other than making French toast?) but how could I bring levity.
~Inspired by Fr. Richard Hendrick’s pandemic poem, “Lockdown,” March 13, 2020
Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in sixty plus journals and thirteen anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.
Art: Sine, A Vispo by robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter. Insta: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22
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