“a superior spectre more near”

I’ve noticed over the last few decades that when the university administration has potentially upending news, the email goes out at 4:58 on a Friday afternoon, giving the recipients time to process over the weekend. And giving the administration a few days to regroup before responding to the deluge of distress.

Yesterday was Thursday, and we heard at 4pm that spring break will be extended a few days to give the faculty time to regroup as they navigate the new landscape of virtual teaching. (If you’re in that boat, my faculty pals are finding this helpful.) The students will not return after the break next week, but the campus will remain open, and the staff will continue to come to work. We will discuss our tasks with our supervisors.

Of course we saw the writing on the wall, so massaging the timing of the announcement wouldn’t have mitigated the reaction. I suspect that offices have been and will continue to be inundated with calls and email from students and parents. Yikes.

I manage our performance venue on campus, and without students, nearly all our concerts and events are cancelled. The jury is still out, but some of our faculty recitals may happen—in an empty house, livestreamed.

(When I mentioned this possibility to my violinist friend, she asked, “In an empty house? Isn’t that just called practicing?” Which begs certain questions about the nature and value of live performance, but those are for another day.)

Ours is a student-run facility, and without the students to work the lights, recording, cameras, stage moves, etc., it’s unclear to me how we will pull that off. Half-assedly, I presume.

And then there’s the harpsichord we moved to the chapel last week for the now-cancelled Bach recital. That operation, moving our delicate old charmer, requires at least four people. The thought of the instrument staying there, abandoned, put me in mind of Station Eleven, where homes are overgrown with foliage and the corpses of the residents lie rotting. An association which might not be as ill-placed or extreme as we’d prefer.

In the early days, before livestreaming and when I had only a few work-study students, they would run out of hours before the last concerts of the year. I worked more concerts than I can count running up and down the stairs between the booth and the stage door, doing All The Things.

I’m too old for that shit now.

I can imagine filling forty hours with work for perhaps one or two weeks—answering email, tidying, adjusting the calendars. But after that….

So last night I refreshed my memory about the legal ramifications of the terms “furlough” and “layoff,” in an effort to understand exactly how fucked I am. Fairly fucked. Along with the dining services employees and so many, many others.

A few weeks ago, at one of our last concerts before the cancellations, we were waiting for the curtain. My students were chatting in the sound booth, and my favorite kiddo—they’re all my favorites—had a midterm assignment to create a vaccine for COVID-19.

“My solution kills the virus!” he told us, gleefully. Then he giggled and added, “Unfortunately, it would also kill the carrier.”

They were ahead of the curve, these science students. No one else in my world at that time was seriously discussing the ramifications of the coming pandemic.

That’s when I remembered the last outbreak scare, the one that didn’t happen ten or so years ago—bird flu? H1N1? SARS? I forget which plague.

But I absolutely remember with crystal clarity a conversation I had with our former director of Human Resources. We were in the grocery store, late at night, and I was on my way home from an event. We were standing in the aisle by the bulk foods. She assured me that they had protocol in place, but at the time, I wasn’t concerned so much about illness as quarantine and the cancellation of events.

Earlier that day I’d heard a Seattle health official interviewed on NPR, and when he’d talked to his wife about the possibility of quarantine and mentioned that they’d have to be prepared to homeschool their young children for up to three weeks, he said, “She looked at me like I had three heads.” We were homeschooling at the time, and that made me chuckle. But only kind of.

(Yesterday, K-12 schools were cancelled for six weeks.)

I loved that director of HR. I’d known her forever—we met previous to my campus life, in another context. And that sunny autumn day when I walked across campus to pick up my oldest son’s tuition remission forms at her office, another day seared in my memory, she understood the enormity of that moment. When I told her my mission, she gasped, “I remember when he was born!” That day had also involved forms, of course.

There in the grocery aisle, I remember her face shifting when she realized my fear—no events, no work, no paycheck. And it took some little while, explaining, before she understood. Watching her face, that is when I realized we lived in different worlds.

Earlier this week, when the Seattle Archdiocese cancelled everything through the end of the month, Mass, choir rehearsals, classes, meetings—that’s when everything shifted from surreal to real. Funny, how the mind processes major disruption. Then it was just a matter of time, waiting for the university’s official announcements.

Yesterday a friend and I made a lighting strike trip to a tiny Seattle yarn shop. She spent hundreds of dollars on supplies so she wouldn’t loser her mind during quarantine. We are both astonished at the run on toilet paper. Coffee seems a more sensible item to hoard.

On the whole, I am ready to lay low. I’m good at it, after nearly two years of health crisis recovery that prevented me from engaging with the world at large. I can handle staying home. I even have an emergency fund, thanks to the refinance of my house after last year’s plumbing disaster. I’ll be able to pay the mortgage for a while. And eat.

Of course I’m not thrilled about the probability of being stuck home alone. For many of us living alone, this is one of the more daunting aspects of extreme disruption and the collapse of normalcy. Even with Amazon Prime to meet my entertainment and provisions needs, one need not be a chamber to be haunted.

And I’m concerned about my older friends and family, about my friends with young children at home. Concerned, generally.

Now that the university has finally made the call, the reality is quietly settling in. I will so miss my students, the very best part of my job. My favorites.