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[dtsetc]

Trash what doesn’t fit in the cardboard box.

At the high school’s front desk, where I was told I would find materials to pack up my classroom and desk, I found nothing but scrap paper. I crossed the courtyard and “borrowed” four Home Depot packing boxes (each labeled ”SMALL”)  from the middle school’s stash. I boosted a never-before-opened roll of packing tape, for good measure. The desks in my classroom are clearly untouched-since-March, lined still in their three-feet-apart 7x4 grid. On a table, a pile of every poster and piece of student work that had been on the walls. The bookshelves were pushed facing one another, well away from the walls. Every last window was slammed shut and the fan spun at its highest setting. I’d originally thought one or two large boxes would suffice, but in the end six small ones barely did. Before walking home, I took a long look at the tape roll and decided against using it. I decide, having tucked the flaps into themselves (à la Escher’s Penrose Stairway), neither the boxes nor I would feel closure.

[dtsetc]

Tangled plot unwinds beneath canopy.

A sprinkler seizes the morning and makes its own rainbow. A man comes out his front door dressed for vacation to adjust it. I’m on one of the few one-way streets laid out like a right-angle around when I get the news: a Somerville City Council meeting will be soliciting public comment about the budget in a matter of hours. Four thousand neighbors, my friend emails, have already signed the petition to de-fund the police. I’ve had a sign calling for such scotch-taped to my front window all month. I join the call an hour late, at seven, and stay until it ends, at twelve. I choose to fall back, to listen with might, to open a new tab every time someone else in the chat links to something relevant. By the final count, something like 5 expressed some degree of trepidation and 140 unambiguously issued the central demand that the organizers had drafted. De-fund the $18 million by at least 60 percent, and outright reject any decrease less than 10 percent. Two-minute testimony after two-minute testimony washed over me, sprinkling my understanding of what it is to show up organized; I splash my face before bed and fall asleep feeling soaked through.

[dtsetc]

Practice wherever nets were re-installed.

Look beyond the heavy machinery. Squint at the space between it and the container. Believe me that on the other side of the train tracks, inside the fencing, the six hoops were again netted. I saw three people (two of whom were masked) getting shots up, each with a court to himself. I thought of starting to walk with a ball from this moment forward. Look at the line of rocks. Believe that on the other side there were two masked custodians hauling trash to the housing complex’s dumpster. I thought of starting to carry unneeded books from this moment forward. I’d taken it personally when no one took any from the shoebox I propped next to the tree. I’d felt seen when the box was gone, but perplexed when I found all its contents dumped in the closest Little Free Library to our spot.

[dtsetc]

Rallying itself is a type of bluff.

Inscribed into a stone the shape and size of a grave marker: “THIS BLUFF / WAS USED AS A RALLYING POINT  / BY THE BRITISH / AFTER A SHORT FIGHT.” The rest either trails off or my eyes weren’t sharp enough. I’d awaken to the image of 45 trudging, tie untied and hat literally in hand, across the White House lawn after his BOK Center flop. Turns out it was kids my students’ age who had inflated the attendance estimates. Somewhere a Photoshopped rendering superimposed 45 where Willy Loman should be on the cover of “Death of a Salesman.” We drive a rental Malibu to Concord and park where there’s space. Attention must be paid, I hear a dad say to his toddlers, each with a hiking stick, as they materialize out of the thicket and join us on the Battle Road trail. What lessons about the Greenwood District and what hasn’t improved over the last 99 years will he confer? A lone cyclist warns, “coming up behind you” slightly too far in advance. I jump, seconds later, at the sound of him passing me, having already changed the subject in my head.

[dtsetc]

Heard, but couldn’t see, peripherally.

The Banana Boat I’d rubbed across my forehead and the bridge of my nose pooled and streaked on my way there, as it became sweat. I felt queasy by the time I made it to the shade; there was water but there were no snacks in my bag. I loosened the bandana knot and tried breathing out the bottom. I held my sign above my head and pulled my hood’s drawstrings tight. I intuited more than saw the people in my periphery. Looking down was easy: I saw Sauconies and Sperries, I saw New Balances and Asics, many Nikes and more Chucks than could be counted. Tivas, of course, and Birkenstocks, Keens, Blundstones, and Merrells. I saw an out-of-place pair of red dress shoes pushing a bike at one point. And on the feet of a woman wearing an Operation Enduring Freedom hat, a pair of rubber thong sandals. She never stopped weaving through and dripping sanitizer into people’s outstretched palms, not even when the strap on the right one blew out.

[dtsetc]

Would that the whole world were so labeled.

Neither hydration nor its opposite cause the heels to crack. The biggest of my weaknesses can’t be lotioning (ie, lack thereof), can it? I believe in good guys and bad guys, still. I text my high school circle asking about the differences, if any, between so-called “symbolic” and so-called “real” change. Equipped with better, more inclusive stories, we might go make a just world. I propose we were hosed by our K-12 system--never exposed, not even in Multiculturalism class, to the facts of Juneteenth. I suggest we keep toppling every Confederate statue and take enslavers off our bills. I wake up feeling I owe money, and I dole it out. For so many years I loved the lines established by cones. For awhile now I’ve been starting to stare at the cones and wonder who placed them just so.

[dtsetc]

Be the critter and not the container.

Remember “a rat in the house may eat the ice cream”? Imagine being blessed with a new mnemonic for every skill that comes across your path. Too easy on a day that makes asphalt sizzle to turn down the world’s open invitation to join it. I instead lather my neck, then put on a hat, then drape a hood over the hat. When inside and away from the world, I respond to emails without any salutation. I joined the final faculty happy hour of the year, surprising everyone. The Sambas I ordered two mornings ago showed up at the door, so I double-knotted them to my feet. I got a text saying the spicy fries I ordered were here, so I texted back a note of appreciation. There are businesses other than supermarkets in need of funds. I’ll recycle both the box and the box it came in, the former spelling out the fact that "all day I dream about sports.”

[dtsetc]

Dream more dreams involving less ownership.

Spoken like a true tenant who renews his terms every time the earth starts getting scorched. You stand still like an invited dignitary in someone else’s slowly-falling-apart home. Like you don’t notice the shingle crumbs that pepper the deck, the step up from the sidewalk whose leading edge has bites taken daily out of it. In short, it is like a renter you move through this world. Take the picket fence out of the equation; replace it with a meal railing and put small, potted plants on each step leading into the back entrance. Replace central air with a box fan on books on a chair, let its steady breeze peek over the cover. To rent is to have the knob continually turned on you. Census data says 50% of renters are “cost-burdened,’ meaning housing eats up 30% of their income. I walked by a flyer proposing a citywide rent strike take hold when the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance stops at the end of July, when unemployment benefits will halve from $600 to $300. I read the Greater Columbus Convention Center has been converted into a housing court that’s been hearing 100 cases a day since the start of June.

[dtsetc]

From in front of the net, few ways to miss.

Inspect more closely: a patrol has pulled over an eighteen-wheeler. The blue of its roof’s flashing lights is the same blue the sun splashes on Foss Park field, when photographed. The other day I could have sworn I heard an explosion right as I was calling it a night. Tonight a red helicopter started circling overhead right as I started reading. Non-closure is the law of the land. An Atlanta pastor named Louie Giglio said “we understand the curse that was slavery [...] but we miss the blessing of slavery.” He suggested that the phrase “white blessing” ought to supplant the already circulating “white privilege.” A Russian-American researcher named Peter Turchin had predicted in “Nature” in 2010 that unrest would peak in 2020. This week he went on-the-record saying he was scared things “may escalate all the way to a civil war. Unfortunately, things are not as bad as they can be.”

[dtsetc]

Abundant paths now lead back to basics.

Neither technically sober nor in recovery, per se, I nonetheless repeat daily a handful of AA slogans. The classic (”one day at a time”) comes in handy while scooping eleven teaspoons of Chock Full O’Nuts into the Cuisinart. And rinsing the mugs to set next to the sizzling machine. I keep showing up at the kitchen table, setting my work laptop atop my hand-me-down dictionary and thesaurus. I talk straight into the camera to my imagined students and I deliver another digital lesson. I start by stating my name and the fact I was for a long time addicted to whiteness. I sign off with “before you say ‘I can’t,’ say, ‘I’ll try.’” I bring a new piece of cardboard and cover my face with old black felt and I have retired the cynical internal monologuist. Nothing changes if nothing changes and it works if you work it. I keep coming back to where the flyers say to meet.

[dtsetc]

Wisdom offered grads turns into warnings.

This class, the one graduating in the year that had once sounded like a report of perfect vision, doesn’t need a prospectus to see that things have turned. They started their freshmen years, remember, two months before a 45th President was elected. They need it told straight and no longer in the language of admissions brochures. Cue the pomp and circumstance over broadband. Assign every fellow teacher a parking spot inside which to park or stand. We must either hear our elders out or pay them no mind. “Assisted living” has the quality of sounding like biting commentary on how neoliberalism and/or austerity have hung wave after wave of graduating classes out to dry. What wisdom could I possibly offer this batch? “Make history”? Failing that, at least remember what Marsha P. Johnson said about history only ever happening “because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”

[dtsetc]

Emergency trucks turn onto summer.

We are, NPR confirmed for me, in the first of who knows how many waves. People were out anywhere there was grass. Part of the call-and-response of the protest that formed in Central Square: “in the name of humanity.” I was inside the re-opened bookstore when they marched past. I bought four books and then four gift cards. A man with a red bowl was eating alone in a parking lot. Across the street, a different man with a blood-splattered white tee was turning in slow circles in front of a credit union. I got there right as a cop did and, in a split-second, decided that to stop and watch would be to escalate. I changed my mind when I turned onto the next street, and so doubled back. When I made it back to the stretch of sidewalk where they’d been interacting, there was no cop, no guy, and no blood.

[dtsetc]

Differences between branches and trunks shrunk.

Brick begs for faster winds still. Around here an afternoon of rain is what’s being offered. I lay my cards on the pavement, saying without speaking that I’d hoped for more of a downpour. Mulch jobs, I recall, always seem impossible until they are more than halfway done. An inevitability creeps into the frame, changing the picture's dimensions. The darkness of the clouds asks why you’re bluffing about why you’re out. Like yesterday, you’re out to bear witness. Around here systemic racism has twice been deemed a public health crisis. The City Council graciously covered all resolutions and motions dealing with policing first. After the roll call, two-and-a-half hours in, their President then said, “If you’d like to keep watching your government at work, you’re welcome.”

[dtsetc]

Alleys lit from above on sunny days.

We all remember how thoroughly the post-election safety-pin situation disproved that intent meant more than impact. One sign at the park said “ALLY IS A VERB” and nothing else. One neighbor signed a piece of paper posted in their window that proclaims they stand in solidarity “Ally,” leaving whether that was their name or not unclear. On a walk, I’m forced to cut my stride off at the midpoint to let a kid and his guardian scoot by. They went between two fences, both taller than I. I pretended to be doing anything other than watching them. For once, a shortcut that went out of its way to find me. I was halfway down the alley when a man on a phone took two steps in from the other side. Surprised at there being a me, he backed up. I guessed that he was pretending to be talking about anything other than being annoyed that the neighborhood’s secret was out.

[dtsetc]

Markers, the land underneath, the road through.

A gibbet will catch the eye of a pedestrian who’s already mostly aimless. One of this Christ’s hands and both of his feet were chipped away. The road to one’s Godhead is paved with false idols. Worship the shack housing fertilizer, rat traps, and rakes. Any old stone could have been a curb in another life. The road terminated in a cul-de-sac. One turns around at a monument erected to Cambridge’s fallen soldiers. One starts one’s route to egress and passes under the same open gate one had entered through. Rest assured, fellow Bostonians, tonight the Christopher Columbus statue by the harbor is headless. Tonight its body is in storage.

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Not even piles of junk went unwatched.

Go figure: curfew orders weren’t enough to keep a people cohesive. Why is it that the last American union left standing insists on qualified immunity? A McCain says she’s new to thinking about all this, and asks Kamala Harris in so many words what we are talking about when we talk about defunding. None on live television are immune from forwarding bad-faith counter-arguments. Harris’ answer, in effect: picture a public safety whereby the public feels safe. Go make new orders, cities, to those with the monopoly on inflicting violence. Stand down, disarm yourselves. Come up with a three-digit hotline to access mental health services and another for food. Picture calling for help and someone arriving to help de-escalate. If what we call junk was allowed to just be, we’d stop calling it junk.

[dtsetc]

Neither stump, steeple, nor gray area.

There is one revolutionary act, the theory goes, and one revolutionary act alone. Bearing honest witness. There are, says the man with the megaphone at Ruggles Station, people who watch it happen, people who let it happen, and people who make it happen. It’s left to the people who stay the latest to write what happened and to the people who get up the earliest to read about what happened. Too many applauded too freely the spineless reforms the Commissioner proposed, said the woman from the front row after he’d left. Do your research before clapping, she rightfully implored. The woman speaking through her mask asked all white people to raise their hands and then to keep them up if they’d trade places with a Black person for a day. The last hand to go down practically cried out to be pointed in the direction of the right side of history. The last man to speak at Ruggles asked the crowd if they knew the origin of the term ‘white trash,’ if we were all on the same page that it was deployed as a tool to make solidarity if not impossible less likely. I whistled through my black felt mask.