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It's a difficult time to write.
The difficulty is partly personal, as is the nature of all creative work. In my case, it's been personal and physical because our household is completing a month-long moving process to another apartment here in Toronto. Due to the pandemic the rental market has been depressed so prices have really come down, and with Baby en route (ETA Summer 2021!) we really needed a more family-friendly layout so this was our time. M. is on strict orders not to carry heavy boxes so it's meant a lot of trips back and forth for me. It's a good thing for our family, though, and thanks to a friendly rental agent we landed in a recently-updated corner unit high up with a gorgeous view of the sunrise and the city. We're not in lucrative careers, but do I feel guilty about our wealth?
One of the skills I've had to develop is that of cutting my own hair. My first attempt was with my grandma's old, blunt hair clippers and a cheerfully-blue pair of Fiskars craft scissors; my last attempt used tools much better suited for the job. I'm proud of the results. Especially these days when my only professional look can be just what the webcam sees, my selfie cut is more than adequate. I miss my barber, though. She was expensive and I looked it, but we've put a lot of conversation time in over the last four years, and—corny as it sounds—it's about that relationship. I'll be driving back down to our old neighbourhood for our mechanic and my barber. There's value in those relationships. Proud as I am of having the resilience to grow my autonomy at the expense of my hair, I don't think I want to keep it.
The other piece of history happening this week is the trial of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, MN, over the death of George Floyd. The trial is being televised live, and it's hard not to feel responsible for watching. Today featured the testimony of witnesses from the scene together with the videos they took, and their mingled pain and fury was evident, though carefully controlled by their desire to be heard in court. Running throughout their testimony was their sense of impotence that evening, captured in the quiet tears of the off-duty EMT who described her frustrated desire to do her job: "I was desperate to help . . . I would have been able to provide medical attention to the best of my abilities, and this human was denied that right."
Talking about the trial with a friend—another white stay-at-home parent—she described conflicting feelings of not wanting to look but needing to look because she has a responsibility to understand. Black people in America don't have the luxury of ignoring the distressing details of cases like this one that help define their relationship to police authority, the legal system, and civic society that maintains them.
There is deliberately no thesis in this post, no moral or pat takeaway conclusion.
I have nothing to say, just a responsibility to endure, hold on to what people I can, and to listen. Somewhere in there, there's space for writing: I think this year's silent project is to find and inhabit that place.
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