Day Diary April 4, 2022
The day begins with thoughts of Ukraine. A daily habit now since February 24.
A hug.
Morning rituals commence. Girls up. Taking care of the body. Getting ready for the day.
A rabbit has birthed her young in the most vulnerable part of the backyard.
The dog is very interested.
I restore the make-shift fence around the spot where several baby rabbits await.
The bad habit of a morning Diet Coke, now in day number ‘I don’t know.’
A flamingo story, backed by ZZ Top.
Settling in to read student work. It’s 7:30 a.m.
Grits and veggie sausage to power the day. We’ll see.
In the office by 9:30, I see a student in my office talking to my office mate. I introduce myself only to be reminded she took a class with me. That it was online only and via Zoom for the pandemic is some slight consolation, but only slight. In or out of masks, on or off Zoom, they all look differently to me. Or maybe they’re all blurring together.
My computer desktop has decided to wipe itself clean with asking me. I trek to the tech department to have them look at it. Turns out the cause was an “unknown weird anomaly”. Ok.
I spend time preparing for tomorrow’s class, reading Denis Woods’ Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas.
Lunch at 11. I’ve managed to put fruit rather than cookies in my lunch. Small victories, too infrequently.
I take some pictures of my office environment, and some experimental self-portraits, just for this diary:
Class at 12. I exhort the students to go hear the talk today by a Holocaust survivor. We have a moral imperative to hear their testimony. Most of my students won’t show.
We have a rousing discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” from The Social Contract. I confess I have never murdered anyone, though it’s not the law against it that stops me from doing so. I offer that example to help them understand a point.
50 minutes goes fast when you’ve got good material and a willing class.
I am informed by one student that the student peace conference from last Friday included the insight that we can solve racism by just being nice to each other. Sounds good to me, but it’s likely more complicated, yes?
Now it is time to catch up on odds and ends. What I really want to do is draw in my sketchbook.
The constant groan of a trench digger outside my office window. That lady must be as strong as an ox.
Twenty minutes until my next class is not enough time to do anything. Time to draw!
And now, we bring you another round of class discussion with students over the concept of the “general will”.
A trip to the dining hall results in cashews.
My daughter’s club meeting cancelled, she gets to the Atrium early. I’ve asked her to attend a talk with me. We listen to a Jewish man of Czech origin, aged 90, who survived three different concentration camps during WWII, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Terezin, and Malthausen. I’ve been aware of the history of the Holocaust for many decades now, of course, but I’ve never seen a survivor in person. It was a strange experience being in the same room with him but imagining the rooms and places he had been in during that period. It felt odd that I could be seeing this person now who was there then. A kind of collapsing of time and space, I suppose, historical knowledge and imagination meeting the reality of what my eyes were seeing. He reminded, among many other things, of the role of pure chance in our survival in this world.
My daughter seemed compelled by what he said, but then it’s hard to say what her understanding of all that is.
Home and tired at almost 6:00, my daughter asks if we can check on the baby rabbits that a mother rabbit birthed in the very worst part of our backyard, vulnerable to our large and powerful dog. We learned this on Friday when our dog unearthed the den, killing one rabbit and uncovering another before my wife noticed and stopped her. I gently moved the uncovered rabbit back into the den with its siblings, covered them back up, fenced the area off from the dog, and buried the dead baby rabbit. Animal funerals are part of my job brief as a dad. I take care of all critters in the house and any other such events, so I’ve buried a number of fishes, birds, a dog, a cat and others over the years.
Now, today, my daughter wants to check if the rabbits are still there. We do some gentle uncovering, mostly of mulch and fur from the mother rabbit. We find the two I spotted on Friday gone, likely moved by the mother or they emerged and hopped away. But then we spot the one that was uncovered by the dog and put back by me: it didn’t make it. My daughter’s upset. She feels for all the animals and creatures of this world.
When she goes in, I bury that rabbit with its sibling from Friday and intern them with some of their mother’s fur from the nest to keep them company on their journeys to whatever is beyond, if anything.
My wife and I are sucked into this show called Severence and we are watching an episode when my animal-loving daughter emerges from upstairs. She’s made a rock into a tombstone for the two bunnies, with pictures on it, dates of birth and death. She wants to place on the secret place where I’ve buried them. We go out to place the stone. We are both tearing up. She mostly for the bunnies, and me for the bunnies but mostly for her. I tell her, “The reason this hurts so much is that you have a big loving heart, and that’s a good thing, even when it hurts. It hurts because you love so much. That quality in you is one of the many, many things that make you so special and one of the many, many reasons I love you so much.” That just pushed me to even more tears, and that’s ok, too. Maybe she got that big heart from me, in part. I hope so.
When I tell this story to my wife a few minutes later, she reminds me that one of the beautiful things I’ve done with my life is to raise a daughter with a big loving heart. These days, I needed to hear that especially.
My older daughter has returned from volunteering at a retirement community. She loves it. Her mentor’s last day was today, so that’s sad for her.
Tired and hungry, we punt on dinner and order take-out sushi. I’m early, so I made a few photographs. Take a look: 
After dinner, with a Holocaust talk and a rabbit funeral behind me, I relax in the living room and draw in my sketchbook. Here’s the drawing from last night:
Time passes and it’s time to get ready for bed. It’s been a good day, not in spite of the emotional events but perhaps because of them. I hope to remember that moment with my daughter for the rest of my life.
I do my nightly ritual, checking on the news from Ukraine, transfixed by that suffering and injustice while also ignoring the injustices in other parts of the world and in my own town.
Bedtime reading right now is Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Events in Ukraine have inspired me to pick this back up.
This is what my day looked like today, a 54-year-old college professor in Middletown, working his job, raising his kids, thinking and feeling and being, and sometimes putting on funerals for small creatures.