Chain Reaction

http://polaroid41.com/chain-reaction/

Sunday, November 10th, 2019 - 11:22pm.

Hello. I’m not sure if you are reading this or listening to this, or maybe both. If you are reading it you might have noticed the date: November 10th, 2019 - 11:22pm. Just over a year and half ago but as it was “pre-pandemic” it feels like a moment that belongs to a different lifetime. I remember sitting up in my bed with my computer on my lap while my husband drifted off to sleep beside me. I had just returned from a wedding and a trip to see friends in New York and was wide awake due to jet lag. The concept for “Polaroid 41” hadn’t fully come into focus yet, but I had started the practice of writing about the moments that grabbed me and made me feel something. This was certainly one of those, but some stories are harder to tell than others and this has been sitting patiently in my ‘polaroids’ folder for all of these months.

I’ve been thinking a lot about isolation and also about the invisible threads that link us to each other in unexpected ways. It feels like time to tell this story.

Here goes:

My mom is an elementary school teacher, she is 65 with no retirement in sight. After school, she tutors. A second job. She’s happy to do it and have the extra income, but I can’t help thinking, “A 65 year old school teacher taking a second job : this is America.”

For the past three years she taught the same little boy, a homebound student named Marcus about the same age as my son. He required an oxygen tank 24h per day, which is why he had to be homeschooled, and my mom went to his house 4 or 5 afternoons per week. She has always described him as a sweet, spirited little boy and she tried to make learning fun for him. She brought games, crafts, books. When she came to visit us last Christmas, she brought a card game for my son that she’d been having fun playing with Marcus. My son Elliot loves The Berenstain Bear’s Almanac, and we talked about how it’d be a good book for her to share with Marcus. I’ve often thought that he was lucky to have someone like my mom for his very own teacher : she is just the right blend of tender and firm, she knows how to make it fun without it getting out of hand. She loves learning and is a natural teacher. I’ve thought about how strange it is that this other little boy gets to spend so much more time with “grandma” than Elliot does.

In July my mom got a call that Marcus’s lung had collapsed and he’d been taken from Minnesota to Texas, to a special pediatric hospital where he was placed on a wait-list for a lung transplant. This past weekend, he died, waiting for a transplant.

My mom called today to tell me about it.

She told me again what a special, sweet, spirited little boy he was. She told me it was like he somehow knew he wouldn’t have long, so he lived his life so fully, so vibrantly in the short time he had. He loved hockey and followed a minor league team in their town, he knew all of the players and all of the stats, he often attended games and was welcomed to visit the team in their locker room. He loved to laugh and joke. She talked about how for three years she had been with him through all of the seasons, doing crafts and activities for Halloween, Christmas, Easter, making Mother’s Day cards...

The complete "polaroid" - text, minicast and polaroid photo - availble at: http://polaroid41.com/chain-reaction/