2021-Current
In late May of 2021 it was starting to begin to feel like “normal” after a long school year of virtual learning, in-person learning, back to virtual learning, hybrid learning, asynchronous learning, and finally dual modality learning. My daughter Zimmie was three at the time, and had an end of the year picnic at her preschool. It was outside and it was our first post vaccine outing, with no masks, many families of people, and children laughing and playing on the playground together. My other daughter Lyra, who was eight months old at the time needed to go home, so my wife and I decided that Zimmie and I would stay a bit longer and walk home afterward. When we were ready to leave we made it maybe 5 feet before Zimmie wanted to be on my shoulders, I obliged and continued the rest of the walk home. In typical Zimmie fashion she greeted everyone we saw along the way. One man she greeted was cutting his grass, she pointed at the lawn mower and asked if that was a machine. I said “yes” and she asked about other machines. As I described different machines my mind began to wander and as it did, I stopped speaking and thought about how not so long ago my wife had been hooked up to machines this past October about to give birth to our daughter Lyra. It was such an uncertain and scary time, in the middle of a global pandemic. My mind then doom scrolled through all of the machines that had connected us over the past year, and yet how disconnected we had become as a nation in terms of empathy, grace, humility, and love. I then began to reflect on the stress of the entire school year, the weight of a teacher trying to provide learning and love to each of their students, while the public debated on trivial fabric that protected their children. My mind spiraled and began to fixate on all of the death, all of the hate, and seconds before the weight of that past year brought me to tears, my daughter Zimmie yanked me back into the present by ripping a fart, right on my neck. It was loud, and it was hilarious. I snapped out of it, and the two of us laughed the rest of the way home.