Diary Writing in the Time of Covid

Diary Writing in the Time of Covid-19

By Jane P. Perry

I am an ethnographer. I write through the words, sounds, actions and ephemera. When I found a collection of photos in a junk store chronicling milestones in one girl’s life, I became intrigued with the idea of telling a coming-of-age story using memorabilia and recollections: diary entries, vignettes sparked by snapshots, school assignments, doodles, cereal box text, letters, workplace documents, professional reports, and telephone calls. Once compiled, I became curious about the writers of diaries and journals. What do they write about? Why were they writing?

The result was White Snake Diary: Exploring Self-Inscribers, published in the midst of our global pandemic and highlighting the role of records when we crave both the documentarian and the reflective functions during a time of tragedy and cocooning. What I did not anticipate was my own coming-of-age story as I compiled diary entries during a pandemic.

March 10

Hosted a subcommittee meeting of the 1000 Grandmothers For Future Generations. Only five of us. Then two said they would do it remotely. I suspect they are scared. So I was only having two people come over, but I truly did not want to inadvertently expose either one. Washing and wiping down door knobs, light switches, the table, serving "boiled soup," off dishware that had been in the hutch untouched for two months..... The first arrived, curious what "boiled soup" was. "So it was disinfected," I exclaimed.

March 13

Collecting phrases overheard while out walking: “That’s a different strain. This one lasts longer on surfaces.” “So what are you going to do? Can you pay for child care?” “I kinda feel like I am pretty sturdy health-wise.” “Have you seen the movie The Seventh Seal?” “Oh, look! [pointing to two ducks sleeping on the lakeshore]. They don’t look worried at all!”

March 15

March 17
The front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today;

Coronavirus Pandemic STAY AT HOME

6 Bay Area Counties Order Nearly 7 Million People to Shelter In Place

Keeping my ancestors close in my grateful heart, thankful for their spirit and survival, and humble in the recognition that I am here to do the work that they and future generations are calling us to do.

May I receive and act on your advisement.

March 18

Chris Hayes on MSNBC: “Do you have anything to go by? Anything in history to measure the trajectory of this?”

Guest Epidemiologist Guy: “Yes, The Black Plague. It went up and down in incident rates.”

Camera cuts to Chris’ jaw-dropping face. Hold. Then his quick recovery: “Well, that is totally unsustainable when we are talking about the economic impact of this pandemic. The Black Plague lasted a century.”

Guest Epidemiologist Guy: “I know.”
I could not stop laughing. Laughing. Laughing. It felt so good.

March 19
The newspapers are getting thinner and thinner as reporters shelter-in-place.

March 20

A SIX FEET STORY
I went for a walk to Lake Temescal. People did not get “six feet.” After reminding a few, then getting exasperated and mad, I spied a dried fennel stalk. Just my height. Holding it horizontally from my hip out the additional four inches, I created the required space, much to people’s perplexity. Until some appreciatively got it. Now I am happy, said I the third gen teacher. Two runners took my picture, calling it performance art.

March 21
Yep: doing just fine. Put a raw slice of onion into my sandwich in an embrace of survival tactics. It’s so quiet I heard a bird fly by.

March 22

As I fell asleep last night I had unsolicited images of being out walking and a person or, even worse, a group of people walking toward me until they had crossed into my six foot space. I kept having to wake up to stop them.

Do I have a cold?

March 24

Day 2 of self-isolation in kid's old bedroom (There is a funny burning twinge in one lung, who knows, right?)

8:30: Wake up. Feel no worse. Yay! Put mask on and go to bathroom.
9:00: Call Bob with my cell. He brings up tea. When he goes out to grocery shop, fret, fret, fret as I was the designated one to risk exposure. While Bob is out, put on mask and wash hands and waste all kinds of paper towels as barriers to heat up medicinal soup I had already intuitively made and peanut butter sandwich.
10:00 to 5:00: where did the time go? Emailed, read online. Listened to radio. Did yoga for breathing until head started to hurt and stopped. Napped. Bob adds hot water to my tea and lemon jug. Take big breaths outside and stop because it feels cold out. Write letter to an investment company that intends - they better not! - to invest in the GasLink Pipeline project in Alberta. Tell them I am in quarantine with a head ache but we are all in this together so cut it out. I probably ate lunch.
5:00: Another call to Bob. Pose question, which will be repeated in the following days? "Am I making this too hard on us by self-isolating when it really is a moot point?" Answer always the same from both of us: "I don't know."
7:00: Dinner arrives. Bob, who is highly adverse to onions, has put raw onions in my salad. We never comment on how thoughtful that was. I eat everything, facing the window, until it is dark. 7:45: Hear a frog! Tell everyone on Facebook.
7:55 to 12:30: Reading Lisa Lutz's The Swallows not knowing anything except Lisa Lutz, why not? It is terrific and I love the inserted texts, notes, a map, and a textual drawing. As I say in my book: women write in a weave!

All parks in California had to close to ensure physical distancing.

March 27
The news says an ice rink in Spain has volunteered to take the overflow dead from funeral homes. We are living in gruesome, horrifying times while Nature shows us differently. The sky is so technicolor blue I am doing double-takes.

March 30

I am feeling better, but now I am afraid to come out of my room! Because ....[sing along with me now] "I Don't Know. I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know!” Am I contagious? I was before I went into the bedroom...... Bob made me a little container of hot water with a dab of Vicks Vaporub to breath in, under a towel. That helped. I feel like I am going back in time, remembering all the remedies and rituals that I have forgotten, like the healing properties of eucalyptus oil, and giving thanks for our food and the many people, front line people now risking their health, who made this meal possible.

Feeling very humble in prayers for this as a time of healing and transformation.

March 31

Sat in the sun for a bit. We are all getting sunburned because the air is so clean. I am waiting three days before reading our newspapers after Bob is done, BECAUSE WE DO NOT KNOW. Elders who feel anxious: call (833) 544-2374. Call 211 if you are infirm and need food. 3.8 Million jobs lost in March. Donate The Oakland Reach until relief bill comes.

April 1
We have been given gifts in this time of quiet: To remember what
we are grateful for. What nature is telling us. How Mother Earth
heals. What compassion and conscience look like and feel like. To
remember our ancestors and that we are the answer to their prayers.
These gifts come at a great cost. We will be humble in this quiet.
My respect and gratitude to the Ohlone people upon whose land I am a guest.

April 2
6.6. Million people filed new unemployment claims in the U.S. last week. The two week total is close to 10 Million.
I am putting labia moisturizer on the leather that is the scalded back of my hands.

April 3
Dear Dr. Phipps,
I am deeply grateful for your service, & hoping you & your family are safe, healthy, and have all that you need. For 13 days, I have had symptoms of slight burning in my right lung, occasional surprise coughs, headaches for 1-3 days on top of my head or back of my neck that last one to three days, a thickish but not sore throat, & fatigue with the headaches. I have not left the house. Six days into this I felt better. Then I had a relapse. It took five further days before I felt better again. Then I had a relapse for a day. Now, today I feel refreshed again. I have had no fever, just very slight shortness of breathe, and aside from the occasional surprise cough, no coughing, no loss of smell. I stay in a separate room, otherwise I wear my mask around the house to protect my husband. When would I qualify to get tested so that I would know if this is a very mild case of C-19? I would like to be close to my husband again.

From my doctor the following day. How she could have responded so quickly I do not know.

Hi Jane,
Thank you for your warm wishes!
I'm sorry to see that you're going through this. I ran your situation by our Infectious Disease docs, who didn't feel that you'd meet criteria for testing with current supplies. However, that could change if you continue to have symptoms next week - we may have more tests, possibly even access to the antibody test, depending on how fast it can get rolled out.

Typically, we recommend that patients continue to self-isolate until 48-72 hours free of symptoms including fevers and productive cough. The dry spasms of cough and fatigue can last for several weeks, and is not likely contagious at that period. You may be at this point, but I'd give it at least another day or so to see how you feel.

All the best.

March 30-April 5

April 6
I have had four relapses. I keep thinking of the Bob and Ray Radio Hour episode where they are cowboys each trying to get off their horses. They keep thinking they are off, but then they find they are not. It goes on and on, with them trying out all sorts of ideas. At one point they consider spending the night up in the saddle and waking up fresh in the morning to dismount “like cowboys should.” They decide to eat up there. One drops his mess cup (the audio is marvelous). “At least that’s down,” the other says.

April 10
My book was born today. 10.1 ounces.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 6:53 PM J <xxxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote: Wow, your book just appeared at my door?!? Was that you?

J

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 6:57 PM Jane P. PERRY <jpperry@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Yep! I am retooling my author business into a delivery service, much like vodka producers are now in the hand sanitizer business.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 7:03 PM J <xxxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote: Joyce Carol Oates has never done that for me.
Michael Chabon doesn't do that for me and he lives here.

J

April 22

April 24

Our West Coast HMO leader Kaiser Permanente urges us in its health newsletter to keep a diary: “Why Everyone Should Keep a Journal – 7 Surprising Benefits.”

Since March 15, when our San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order went into effect for those 65 years and older, we have been thirsty for records of how others are faring. My “Quarantine Diary” fell into the mix when McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern called out for voices from those “marginalized, scapegoated,” or worse yet, considered sacrificial “to save the economy.” I did not feel sidelined as they portrayed, but I appreciated respect for elder perspective and wisdom. Similarly, Persimmon Tree, the online magazine for women over 60 looked to us elders for insight, seeing my art print “Through the Window” as part of the poetry of “Love in the Time of Corona.”

In White Snake Diary I write, “The everyday details are indeed what can bring the past alive, filling the gaps that the big history books overlook. Fortunately, we have had an abundance of compulsive diarists who help us understand daily life in their eras. The noted English civil servant Samuel Pepys wrote a diary in shorthand (for which he provided a key). His is an unfiltered account of turbulence, culture and domesticity of British life during the reign of Charles II and the second Dutch War, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London and including everything from historical events to meetings with royalty, dancing as a means of upward mobility, infidelities, and frets over his wife’s irregular menses.

He wrote from 1660 to 1669—until he stopped, thinking, mistakenly, that he was going blind.

The thirty-seven diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a mid-eighteenth century Jamaican planter and slave- owner, detail the assignment of work and provisions, discipline, personal and sexual relationships—some with slaves—slave rebellions, and lists of temperature and rainfall amounts.

A diary found on the frozen body of Robert Falcon Scott, an Antarctic explorer, gives a harrowing account of his two-year expedition in 1910, which ended in the death of his small team in a makeshift tent on the Great Ice Barrier. His diary ends with a plea to take care of the surviving families back home: ‘Last entry. For God’s sake look after our people.’”

We do not know how The Time of Covid-19 will turn out, but our collective records of a newspaper clipping headlining 102,107 dead in the U.S., a neighborly grocery delivery of paper towels and rice, the unanswered texts and the gut-wrench of tragic family loss, a Buddhist chant that turns out to be a close by bumblebee, the litany of phone calls, call backs, online crashes and weeks without unemployment support, an overheard conversation on the movie “The Seventh Seal” while out walking, our prayers to Mother Earth for humanity’s awake up call, the fear from unsafe distancing behavior or the annoyance of a sweet family of four walking side-by-side and hogging the path, notations on a calendar marking symptoms that might be Covid-19, the cat tail sticking up across the torso of the 10 O’clock News weather guy reporting from home, the crying in the middle of a webinar on isolation, thanking the postal clerk for his service and how very grateful I am and us locking eyes over our masks and then he imploring me to come back, and June 1st and the preschool teacher has no money to pay the rent. All will tell the tale.

May 28, 2020
Unceded territory of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Ohlone (Oakland)

Jane P. Perry is a retired Researcher and Teacher from the University of California, Berkeley’s Harold E. Jones Child Study Center. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from U.C. Berkeley and writes on the importance of play in early childhood, the charting of thoughts and observations as a flâneuse of daily life, and climate justice. She is a member of The Society of Fearless Grandmothers and 1000 Grandmothers For Future Generations. Jane’s most recent book White Snake Diary: Exploring Self-Inscribers (Atmosphere Press) released in 2020, highlighting now more than ever a diary’s documentarian and reflective functions. She has diary-related pieces in Persimmon Tree, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Women Writers, Women's Books, and The Oaklandside. She has released sound poems with Sonic Terrain’s World Listening Day 2014 and 2015, WPRB’s 25 Hour Holiday Radio Show, and in 2016 she was featured in G. George Arts’ online audio art gallery, The Listening Booth. Her sound poem "Echo Bridge" has been selected as one of The Missouri Review’s poetry finalists for 2021 and is featured in the Miller Aud-cast. Jane has poetry on our critical relationship with nature in Paper Dragon and forthcoming in DoveTails. She is an expert in outdoor play, publishing with Teachers College Press, Pearson Education, American Journal of Play, National Association for the Education of Young Children, Wayne State University Press, and Huffington Post. 100% of the return on purchase price for White Snake Diary goes to Ohlone sovereignty through Sogorea Te Land Trust. She lives as a guest on the unceded Ohlone territory of Huichin (Oakland). Find Jane at janepperry.com .