Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 38

Strange Times with Trudy, Day 100: End of an Era

I like round numbers, and the school year is really over now, so Day 100 seems like a good time to say this is the end of my “strange times” videos, though not the end of the global pandemic.

Mostly for my own benefit when looking back later: here’s the whole playlist of my Strange Times videos.

Strange Times, Day 96: Success!

Here’s a look back at a goal I set for myself at the end of April, with some updates and a real-time glance at how my COVID-19 hairstyle is going. That’s not what the video is about, but it’s a free bonus feature.

Strange Times, Day 82

In which I kinda-sorta go back to work, but not really.

Strange Times With Trudy, Day 70

Just another video update on Life in the Time of COVID-19.

The Great Tunnel Fire, and a Return to “Normal”

Today, we are 9 or 10 weeks into pandemic “lockdown” — numbers vary depending on where you live and what your personal situation is like. Where I live, we are on the path to a gradual re-opening that is, predictably, far too gradual for some people and much too fast for others. Amid all this there has been a lot of talk about “returning to normal” and “the new normal” and what all that may look like. Which, by a thought process I won’t bother to try to trace, took me back to the fall semester of 1982, my first year in university, and the tunnel fire that devastated the underground pedestrian/locker network beneath Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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The day of the fire is burned (haha) into my mind, but what I remember even more vividly is what the tunnels were like before the fire (which fortunately resulted only in damage to property, no injuries or loss of life). I had just arrived at MUN as a 16-year-old (that was the age we graduated high school here in those days), fresh from a tiny Seventh-day Adventist school, aware of most of the vices of the world but innocent of them myself. The tunnels, which ran (and still run) in a labyrinthine network beneath most of the main buildings on the south side of campus, were far more than a way to get from class to class without being exposed to Newfoundland weather. They were truly an underworld, one that was amazing and invigorating and a little bit intimidating to someone as easily intimidated as I was in the fall of 1982.

I didn’t drink or smoke or play cards or play electric guitar, but I found it oddly exciting that people did all these things and more in the tunnels, between and sometimes instead of going to class. Sitting on the floor in front of your, or someone else’s, locker was so common that at busy times, especially during lunch, it was often hard to pick your way between the river of moving bodies and the forest of stretched-out legs. Those were the days of smoking indoors, and the air was blue with smoke as well as with laughter, curse words, and often music. Impromptu tunnel parties were common. The tunnels were intended as corridors, but they were also lively, barely-regulated spaces of human contact, truly common areas whose atmosphere I soaked up even while not actually participating in most of it.

It never occurred to me that the tunnels would be any different.

Then, one day towards the end of that semester, a fire broke out in the tunnels. They were swiftly evacuated (in one of my rare acts of defying authority, I turned back to get my backpack and jacket out of my locker when I was ordered to leave the tunnel at once, and was always glad I did). The immediate result was that lot of people’s lockers and books got destroyed, and deadlines for end-of-term assignments got extended, and lots of people claimed their books had been destroyed even if their lockers were in untouched sections of the tunnels, so they could take advantage of extended deadlines. But the long-term impact went much deeper.

The front-page article from the student newspaper above tells the story well. “Following the tunnel fire last semester…” wrote Joan Sullivan (now editor of the Newfoundland Quarterly) “a severe set of rules is being enforced on those who use the tunnels.” The severe rules included no smoking in the tunnels, no keeping flammable materials in lockers, and “no loitering or congregating in the tunnels.” Student security guards would patrol the tunnels, while the main section from the TSC to the Science Building would be closed for repairs during the winter semester, according to student union VP Danny Breen (now Mayor of St. John’s). Student Union president Ed Buckingham (later a provincial MHA) expressed some concerns: he thought the rules were “a rather strong reaction. I don’t know how practical they are.”

The closing paragraph of the MUSE article identifies a key issue: “Where the students who usually ‘congregate’ in the tunnels will go is one problem no-one seems to be looking into.”

The semester during which the tunnels were closed for repair turned out to be my last as an undergraduate at MUN. I left the province to attend university elsewhere, and when I returned later as a visitor — and later still, as a graduate student — the tunnels were unrecognizable. Clean, empty, silent. If you passed through between classes you’d walk along with several people going from class to class, and maybe see a few students chatting while they stood at their lockers getting books and coats out. Certainly no-one was sitting on the floor playing cards, or perched on an amp busting out tunes on an electric guitar. And, of course, no-one was smoking (even though they would continue to be allowed to smoke in the buildings above the tunnels for years to come).

Obviously, a hideously dangerous fire-safety situation had been resolved. And something had been lost — a communal space, a benevolent anarchy, a pattern of behavior no-one had even questioned until a disaster struck.

Life did not go back to normal after the tunnel fire. Classes went on; extracurricular activities continued; the university sailed blithely on aboveground, but one key piece of student life changed forever, overnight.

Not everything goes back to normal.

When I tried these thoughts out on my husband and daughter, they were able to think of other examples — most strikingly, the changes in airport security that we all accepted after 9/11. Of course, our “normal” is changing all the time, both for worse and for better, but most of the time it changes gradually. I grew up in a time when people smoked indoors, didn’t wear seatbelts, didn’t use sunscreen, and had no computers, cellphones, or internet. The world changes constantly, but every so often a cataclysmic event comes along, disrupts our “normal,” and brings overnight changes. Changes we would have thought unimaginable before the event, that we simply accepted as normal afterwards.

So it’s interesting now, living in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, to think about Life Afterwards. Not only after we’ve “flattened the curve” but even after herd immunity, after a widely available vaccine, after most of us never think of dying from COVID-19 anymore than we think about dying from the flu. What will that “after” look like? What parts of normal will have changed altogether? What will we accept as commonplace that we never could have imagined living with up to February 2020? What will be gone forever that we assumed we would always have?

A Reading and a Sneak Peek!

If you’ve ever wanted to watch me on a crappy webcam for nearly an hour, this is the video of a livestream reading and Q&A I did last night, where I read from A Roll of the Bones, answered some reader questions, and gave a sneak peek of the beginning of the sequel!

Strange Activities in Strange Times

Here’s a thing we did that consumed a lot of time at our house last week:

COVID-19: The Ambiguous Image

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I was very young, probably in early elementary school, the first time someone showed me the image above and asked “What do you see?”

I saw two people looking at each other, of course, because what else would you see? Until someone pointed out there was a vase there as well, and after that, I couldn’t un-see the vase.

There are many such ambiguous images, and it’s always interesting to me how our mind grasps on to one picture first, and then, once we’ve seen the second, seems to shift back and forth between the two. Then of course in 2015, the entire internet learned the same phenomenon works not just with shapes but with colours, as we collectively lost our minds over a photo of an obviously white-and-gold dress (spoiler, in case you slept through 2015: the dress was blue and black).

Lately it feels to me like the COVID-19 pandemic, as I’m experiencing it both in real life and on social media, is a bit like The Dress, or Rubin’s Vase, or any other ambiguous image. Either way, of course, it’s an undeniable tragedy, with over 250,000 people confirmed dead worldwide (as I write this on May 5), millions of jobs lost and lives uprooted. There’s no positive spin to this virus. And yet, when I look at it one way, I can only see:

incompetent politicians making bad decisions
angry people showing up with guns and without masks to crowded protests
poverty, hunger, depression, domestic violence all on the rise
people being rude and even violent to essential workers
frightened, desperate people unsure how things will ever get back to “normal”
dumb, arrogant people blatantly disobeying sensible public health orders
judgy, self-righteous people criticizing others for disobeying public health orders
everyone being angry, sad, indignant, outraged, despairing at a problem for which there’s no end in sight.

All of that is true. All of that is really happening. It’s as real as the two faces staring at each other, implacable and opposed and identical.

But if I stare at the picture I’m living in just a little longer, I see the vase, and what it’s holding. I see:

health care workers risking their own lives daily to care for others
minimum-wage frontline workers continuing to serve with warmth and kindness despite the risks they face
teachers finding creative ways to connect with students from home
community groups putting together innovative solutions to reach out to people struggling with hunger, homelessness, mental illness, and domestic violence
governments and public-health experts doing their best to lead through a crisis where the information is constantly changing
doctors becoming unexpected social-media stars just for telling us what we should and shouldn’t do
people reaching out to their neighbours with acts of kindness and generosity
senior citizens learning to use Zoom to connect with friends and family
churches developing new tools for worship so people can continue to feel connected to their community
rainbows, hearts, and messages of hope painted and pinned in people’s windows to keep us all filled with encouragement

I’m not saying the things on the second list are an “upside” or that we just need to “look on the bright side.” There is no “bright side” to a global pandemic that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people.

But there are two ways to look at our human responses to this pandemic, because the human responses run the gamut from the literally sublime to the literally ridiculous. Just like the ambiguous pictures, both extremes of the response are real, and are actually happening all around us. But when all I can see is the negative response, I have to remember to shift my perspective sometimes and see a different picture. Shifting that focus helps me remember that, in the immortal words of one local encouraging sign-painter:

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Graffiti on Duckworth St., St. John’s. Photo credit: Dave Sullivan. Artist: Unknown.

 

 

Strange Times, Day 45: Mistakes Were Made

OK so today was Day 46 of me being home — but I made this video yesterday, Day 45 … about something that happened on Day 44. I set a goal; I reached my goal; I made a really dumb mistake that nearly undid all my work towards that goal.

Strange Times, Day 43: Virtual What Now?