Volume 53 - Issue 4

The New Journal Volume 53, No. 4

The magazine about Yale and New Haven

February 2021

Editors-In-Chief Helena Lyng-Olsen Candice Wang Executive Editor Elena DeBre Managing Editor Hailey Andrews Associate Editors Jack Delaney Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Madison Hahamy Meera Rothman Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

Copy Editors Nicole Dirks Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

Creative Director Meher Hans

Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

Design Editors Brian Chang Natasha Gaither Rebecca Goldberg Annli Nakayama Illustrators Alice Mao Cindy Ren Sydney Zoehrer

Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Eli Mennerick Elliot Wailoo

Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, What a whirlwind. Somehow an entire year has passed, made up with 365 days of blurry Zoom calls with talented writers, remote production weekends that spanned continents, and sleepless nights of editing. We’ve cherished every moment with The New Journal, and now we leave you with our final issue at the tail end of TNJ’s 2020-2021 managing board.

We end with some words from our beloved editors: Hailey Andrews—TNJ was my initial bridge into New Haven and the community that kept me tethered, both pre-COVID and during remote instruction.

Elena DeBre—Writing and editing longform can be tough! But with the support, friendship, and community of TNJ, I felt able to take the plunge. So grateful I did.

Meera Rothman—Editing with TNJ and joining such a kind, vibrant writing community has been one of the highlights of my senior year.

Zachary Groz—In this year of separation, TNJ’s community of writers and friends kept me feeling connected to Yale and New Haven.

Madison Hahamy—Working with TNJ has simply been the best. The best people, the best writing, the best experience. So thankful for this wonderful publication!!

Alexandra Galloway—I’m so happy to have built friendships with the gifted writers and editors who have made TNJ such a wonderful community, even despite the challenges of a global pandemic.

Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits—My favorite thing about TNJ is that we are one of the few groups that actively encourages students to get to know our city!

Jack Delaney—In a rough year, TNJ has been a source of warmth and connection for both myself and the Yale and New Haven community at large—thank you!

As always, enjoy reading, and stay warm.

Yours, Candice & Helena

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The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

The New Journal February 2021

Jack Delaney

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essay: HIDDEN WORLD

Renee Ong

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photography (also 21, 37)

Amelia Davidson

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snapshot: ELM CITY, FOOD CITY

Anya Ramzi

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essay: SEVER

Lily Dodd

16

essay: THE NANNY DIARIES

Nimran Shergill

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poem: ANTI-PASSION

Auguste White

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poem: JOCKEY’S RIDGE STATE PARK

Charlotte Wakefield

23

poem: SUNFLOWERS

Sanya Nair

24

essay: THE SANDAL AND THE STAR

Nicole Dirks

28

creative: BACKSPACES

Kaylee Walsh

33

critical angle: REOPENING, RESTRICTED

Zachary Groz

38

critical angle: THE CAMPAIGN TO CONVINCE

Meera Rothman

42

essay: RUNNING AS...

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E S S AY

Hidden World JACK DELANEY

When Jack returned to New Haven, he noticed the squirrels.

4 Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

M

uk-muk. SKrEE! Ch ch ch ch!

The New York hardwiring kicked in; my muscles tensed. Slowly, with a sense of doom, I craned my neck to see not one, but three of their frantic bodies shivering above me on a branch. SKree! SKREE! Squirrels!

I had reason to fear. Last December, a spate of squirrel attacks tore through the neighborhood of Rego Park in Queens. One survivor, emerging from bloodstained snow, compared the ordeal to an MMA cage match. Another said her assailant would wait atop the mailbox to harass her husband. And the threat goes beyond NYC—these terrorists’ reach is nationwide. Squirrels remain the top cause of power outages across America, despite utilities’ efforts to prevent them from gnawing into substations.

Luckily for me, I was in East Rock, and this particular trio was wracked by infighting. Two of them skittered from limb to limb, nipping and twisting, all the while screaming epithets at each other. The third ambled about placidly, only darting away when one of the combatants tried to mate with her. Occasionally their chatter was punctuated by the THWUMP of snow tumbling from nearby roofs, or by the elm’s pained groan as it weathered their acrobatics.

The battle stopped abruptly. One male hopped about, the female dozed, but the other male came near to her and, inhaling deeply, began to sing. Uooo. Uoooooo. My girlfriend Saachi and I sat down in a snowdrift to listen.

I had never noticed how expressive their voices are—an eclectic mix of whines, chirps, chirrups, and chatters. And after a while their movements, seemingly manic, began to feel like part of a ‘squirrel time’ with its own internal logic.

My bottom burned from the cold. Above the meshed branches, a snowy owl was cutting generous circles in the blue sky. Sun on puddles.

French fry smells from Archie Moore’s. Melting icicles sent rivulets running to the base of the elm, and glancing up I realized the squirrels had noticed me. Ch ch! Ch Ch! Two told me off heatedly, but as a furry rump edged out of a burl I could also make out, just barely, the faint ee of small childlike voices.

The pandemic has made human connec-

tions ing most of the days with Saachi, things were different. Streets lined with seemingly-inert trees became a rich network of nutrient exchange with fungi; mother trees fed their saplings sugar, and young sprouts buttressed wandering wrens. A spider crawled into the sink. The river froze over, and one night a Great Blue Heron rustled past me on the bridge. Crescent mushrooms poked out from the snow. Squirrels ran the telephone cables.

One morning, the two of us woke up at 6 a.m. to drive to Hammonasset Beach State Park. It’s teeming with wildlife; its sprawling salt marsh produces more biomass than a rainforest each year, and I was excited to spot some of its incredible birds. We took the highway for about half an hour, then pulled up to the entrance only to confront a roadblock and an imposing truck presiding over the passageway.

I stepped out. I was wearing pants that stopped at my shins, and a green shirt embroidered with monsters. A park ranger exited the van and yawned, squinting at me. “You with the National Guard?”

As it turned out, we were over an hour early.

We drove around aimlessly to kill time, until a cop pulled us over because we seemed lost. So we sat opposite to the ranger as the sun rose. Finally, the gates opened and we rushed through, our excitement unabated. We parked at the point and ran out to explore.

It was three degrees Fahrenheit. That was fine when I had ducked out for thirty seconds, but within five minutes our toes were in excruciating pain. The beach was deserted. A single seagull huddled by the toilets, skeptical. We waded into the grasses and tried to appreciate the brilliant sea, only it was much too cold for appreciating anything. Shhh-phhh. The marsh laughed at us airily.

We were fading fast, so we ran back to the car—the engine was frozen up. Panic. There was no heat, no one around, it was a rental car. Our breath came out in plumes. Miraculously, the car eventually started on the fifth try; we fled Hammonasset for the safety of home.

I collapsed on the couch when I got home, drained. What about being out in nature? I got up to lower the shades… and came face-to-face with a robin. It was fat and plain-looking, the squirrel of birds. It hopped about the dogwood tree right outside the window, nibbling on berries and poop

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hard to sustain, but it’s also revealed how many nonhuman beings I had never noticed. Bugs, for instance: an average house, no matter how clean, is home to about 100 arthropod species. People don’t often think of their houses as ecosystems, yet as with any other there’s an intricate interplay between creatures of wildly different timescales and needs. That’s inconvenient for us humans, for whom ownership means sole rights—insects threaten the ideal of the home as a sterile place beyond nature. Yet leaning into that interconnection, wherever we go, can make us more empathetic (and less lonely).

One night in fall, done with problem sets, I burst into the backyard. I cycled through happy dances—Erratic Hip Swing, Napoleon Dynamite, the Wriggle. The post-rain ground gave a moist squidge with each leap. Squip. Squidge. Halfway through my Devendra Banhart tribute dance, however, it struck me that concrete backyards aren’t typically squidgy. Uh oh. Sure enough, in the light of my phone flashlight the ground was littered with splattered slugs, more than a dozen of them, their innards glimmering Pollockly throughout the yard. It was their dinnertime; they had come out at night to eat fallen leaves and curled bugs.

It might seem ridiculous to cry over spilt slugs.

But it struck me that my anthropocentrism wasn’t far from that of companies devastating the environment on a larger scale. If the damage I caused was less critical, it was because my feet were smaller.

The mindset is the same: humans are alone in the world. “Nature,” out there, is separate from daily life. It’s a place to go to relax; a resource bank; a loose assortment of trees being chopped and re-planted, rivers toxified and cleaned, the whole earth progressing and regressing in linear lurches.

Our abuse of the planet poses a material threat to society and is inextricably tied to institutional racism and classicism. What’s at risk isn’t merely the future of national parks, but the ability of people today to survive and lead healthy lives, especially BIPOC and low-income communities. And I’ve found that disregard for one’s surroundings, which enables their destruction, is also simply a recipe for unhappiness.

When I moved back to New Haven in January, I was worried it would be depressing. Last winter’s skies were usually gray, and I was now living far from campus in East Rock. But this year, spend-

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ing indiscriminately. But its head tilted curiously when I waved, and it didn’t take off. The next day it was back, and the next after that too. Most days now, it’s there outside my window—maybe it always was—if I remember to look.

– Jack Delaney is a sophomore in Pierson College and an Associate Editor.

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Molecular

Photograph by Renee Ong

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ELM CITY, FOOD CITY

SNAPSHOT

AMELIA DAVIDSON

Local restaurants are reinventing New Haven’s post-pandemic culinary scene.

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W

hen I’m missing New Haven, my mind turns to late-night pizza and ramen, or chai lattes hurriedly consumed in the cold. In my nostalgia, my thoughts linger on the spaces that provide such delicacies—the late-night fluorescent glow of Est Est Est punctuated by laughing students, or the ice-cold air that hits my face as I struggle with the door of the York Street Blue State, chaider in tow. But recently, I realized with some alarm that I was conjuring up places and situations that no longer exist. Sitting in my childhood bedroom, where I have spent the duration of the pandemic, I often think about sipping tea in Jojo’s Coffee, even as 307 miles away, the corner of Chapel and Park Street stands vacant.

The pandemic has scarred the restaurant scene in New Haven, prompting a turnover unlike any other in the last few decades. Around 600 restaurants have closed in Connecticut since March of last year, and New Haven, in particular, has witnessed the closings of city favorites such as Jojo’s and Duc’s Place. However, new restaurants such as Ahava Vegan and Haven Hot Chicken have risen, sometimes in the same storefronts.

The industry itself has been transformed, successful restaurants shifting their focus to takeout and delivery, rather than in-person dining. When the pandemic ends, and the city’s streets revive, New Haven residents will find a vastly different food scene than existed in February 2020.

One restaurant in particular encapsulates the chaos the industry has witnessed over the last few months.

Next Door opened in 2017 at 175 Humphrey Street, in a standalone brick building in the shadow of Highway 91 that once housed a prohibition-era speakeasy. The restaurant was founded by three veterans of the New Haven food scene, one of whom, Doug Coffin, owns a pizza catering business that operates just down the street—hence the name Next Door. Coffin described

Design by Rebecca Goldberg

the restaurant to me as a combination of pizzeria and upscale dining locale, with chef Robin Bodak constantly experimenting with innovative dishes and craft beer to go along with no-fuss pizza.

When Next Door closed in August due to the pandemic-related financial pressures, Coffin expanded his successful catering business—Big Green Truck Pizza— into the space at 175 Humphrey.

During one of Coffin’s late-night shifts at Big Green Truck Takeout, Coffin recalled to me over the shouts of his cooking staff in the background how he got his start in the New Haven food scene, and its evolution in recent years. He spoke with a knowledge that could only come with decades of experience in New Haven restaurants, referencing local restaurant owners and chefs by their first names.“The pandemic is rewriting the restaurant scene,” he told me, his voice rising over the din around him. “I’m glad that people are paying attention.”

Coffin attended Yale College in the early 1970s, but dropped out because he wanted to be a part of the social movements that had characterized much of the late ’60s. Laughing, he told me that by the time he arrived on the scene, the only social-justice oriented movement he could find in New Haven was the New Haven food co-op, a community organizing project which provided residents with healthy, cheap food. So that is where Coffin went. The co-op eventually went bankrupt, but Coffin decided to stay in the culinary business. After striking out a number of times, he developed a catering business that morphed into Big Green Truck Pizza.

For the past 15 years, Big Green Truck Pizza has catered all over Connecticut in its fleet of—you guessed it—big green trucks, which double as travelling pizzerias outfitted with wood-fired brick ovens. During the pandemic, the business lost around half of its sales, no longer able to cater large gatherings or school events.

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However, because Coffin already owned all the trucks and the Humphrey street staging location, he continued the operation even as revenue dropped significantly.

When Big Green Truck Pizza expanded into 175 Humphrey, it began offering takeout from a central location for the first time, instead of relying on the usual trucks for catering. This aligns with the broader trends in New Haven’s pandemic restaurant industry, which increasingly favors takeout and delivery. So while Next Door could not sustain its in-person dining, Big Green Truck Takeout could take off in the exact same space.

As for whether these trends will continue post-pandemic? “I think the best analogy I can come up with is that if the restaurant world was a snow globe, it’s suddenly been shaken up,” Coffin said. “And we’re waiting to sort of see how it’s going to settle out. All of us are trying to figure out what particular format is going to work for us.”

New restaurants have been opening their doors in the shadow of a decimated restaurant industry, thriving on the low overhead costs of takeout and delivery. Ever since Covid-19 changed social norms such that more restaurants can now survive exclusively as takeout or delivery locations, it has been easier for some restaurants to start up during the pandemic. At least six new restaurants have opened in New Haven during the pandemic—Crafted by Hand Cafe, Vegan Ahava, Edible Couture, Haven Hot Chicken, SaladCraft Co. and L’épicerie Choupette—most of whom remain centered around takeout and delivery even as Connecticut has allowed up to 50 percent indoor dining capacity.

Especially during this pandemic-induced delivery surge, many New Haven restaurants have outsourced food delivery to apps such as UberEats, Grubhub, or DoorDash. Coffin reached out to me unprompted one evening to discuss the rise of these delivery apps, all of which have become massive Silicone Valley conglomerates. As a self-described “pizza guy,” Coffin has been shocked at the apps’ success, as “back in the day” New Haven pizza restaurants had to do delivery for free to maintain their customer base. The apps don’t just charge customers—they also charge restaurants large fees,

sometimes up to 30 percent per order, which further lowers restaurants’ profit margins in already trying times. Beyond financial pressures, Coffin feels that the prevalence of these apps undercuts the small-town feel of a thriving local restaurant scene.

I have long admired the stretches of local restaurants just blocks from campus; even perched Pauli Murray College pre-pandemic, I frequently took the mile-long trek to the nearest restaurants, and only ever opened my Snackpass app late at night. A city full to the brim with restaurants exclusively doing takeout and delivery, streets abuzz with UberEats and DoorDash drivers, is hard to imagine. But New Haven is currently tipping toward that new reality.

175 Humphrey Street shows that physical locations can serve as a testament to the food that has been lost in the pandemic, and the food that has been found. But until Coffin’s proverbial snowglobe begins to settle, we will not know the lasting effects of the new takeout and delivery phenomenon. It is possible that physical locales will no longer be a part of the local restaurant scene at all, with the Jojo’ses and Next Doors of the city being replaced by restaurants focused on getting food out the door, rather than customers in the door.

Coffin is keeping his options open. Although his co-founders have pulled out of the operation, Next Door still exists as a corporate shell, and Coffin is considering reopening post-pandemic. His decision may ultimately be reflective of what is to come—a reversion to the New Haven food scene of February 2020, a post-pandemic reinvention of New Haven local dining, or something in between.

The future of the restaurant industry is uncertain right now, but some losses are clear, and near to the heart—I will still mourn Jojo’s ginger tea every time I walk past the empty Chapel Street storefront.

Out of the closures and openings and reinventions and adaptations will come a landscape radically changed from when I departed the city in March 2020. And when I return to New Haven in August, I might just come across a new dining experience to miss while I am away.

– Amelia Davidson is a first year in Pauli Murray College.

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Sever

A personal essay by Anya Ramzi

Illustration by Cindy Ren

M

y mother’s frown is brittle. Her hovering is making the hairstylist nervous, I can tell. She offers my mother a coffee in another room. My mother’s eyes track the tiny silver scissors, the sizzling straightener, and the array of thickly-scented styling products. Polite and cool, my mother says, “No, thank you.”

“Mom doesn’t approve, then?” the hairstylist jests, her voice a little high-pitched. But the joke falls flat in the strained silence between us.

“Right,” she mutters, shaking her head and grabbing the straightener. She begins to chatter as she splits my hair into sections and scorches each into obedience. I can feel her relax into her routine: her deft, thin fingers pulling and pinching and burning. She talks about her two dogs, the week of pleasant weather we’ve been having, and how much she loves the Shake Shack down the street. I appreciate the effort. She must sense the anxiety building in me, climbing my spine and seizing my shoulders, leaving me wide-eyed and frozen in the mirror. In the reflection, I watch as the hairstylist rifles through a drawer, pushing a pair of scissors aside in favor of picking up a pile of hairbands. It is easier to focus on her actions (quick, loud, sure). It is easier not to look at myself.

When she ties the first hairband, I swallow. Her

hands, pale and manicured, lack the warmth of my mother’s. They braid with efficiency and precision, tying the second band an inch from the ends of my hair. “Cutting two feet of hair!” she exclaims. “That’s incredible.”

“Yeah,” I say awkwardly. “Thanks.”

“You ready?”

I nod, and the world narrows down to the chink-squeak-chink of the scissors sawing their way through my braid. I can see my own eyes widen in the mirror. There’s a last bit of resistance, and then—then— My shortened hair springs free from where the bands have been severed, swishing around my shoulders. My god! It’s so light! A part of me squeals. I feel vaguely dizzy, grinning. My mother is saying something—the hairstylist is passing her my cut braid, now a limp, dead thing, to be wrapped in plastic and donated—but all I can hear is a faint buzzing in my ears.

The hairstylist continues to press and snip and pull. I watch it all in the mirror, the tension leaking out of me, leaving a pleasant, tipsy sensation.

When she is finished, I have been born anew. I remove the towel from my shoulders. I cannot stop smiling. Somewhere beside me, my mother is watching intently. Her hands grasp the bag now weighed down with my braid. She is bristling

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with disapproval.

“Well?” the hairstylist asks. “What do you think?”

And then, before the idea can be clamped down or tempered, I think: I look American, now.

In elementary school, letting my hair down is more of an event than an action. I call it “opening my hair”—the result of learning English from two Pakistani immigrants. My mother forbids me from undoing my braid in class for fear of tangles and catastrophe, but every once in a while, when I feel particularly rebellious, I pull off the hairband and let my curls dangle down to my knees. Some of my classmates stare and giggle.

Others do a double-take, unable to recognize me with wavy blackness framing my face. Others still frown or grimace, or ask, out of genuine curiosity, “But why?” and “Will you ever cut it?”

As a child, my answer is always no. My friends make bets on how long my braid will be by my wedding day. I explain to one of my third-grade classmates, with a little too much honesty, “I won’t be pretty without my hair. It’s what people know me for.” In the winters, when I visit Pakistan, my aunts praise my braid. My younger cousins watch with rapt attention as my mother carefully interweaves the locks, coating each section

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with coconut oil and tenderness.

In Pakistan and India, hair has long been a point of pride for women. My mother and my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother all carried the same black braid down their backs, the same proud tilt to their shoulders. In ancient Indian sculptures and paintings, the women’s hair is styled in draping loops and piled knots, embellished with jewels and tiaras.

In everyday life, scholars believe, coiffures were used to differentiate amongst social classes. In religion, gods were distinguished by their individual hairstyles: Shiva’s jata. Lord Krishna’s curls.

Today, the pressure on women in the Indian subcontinent to keep their hair long is so strong that styles above the shoulders are considered radical. Models are fired for cutting their hair. Bobs are seen as unprofessional. Pixies and buzzcuts are unheard of. Women who choose to wear their hair short do so knowing that they are an exception to the norm: a tiny, rallying rebellion. I think of my mother’s disapproval, of my own elation. I think of all the times my mother told me, you’ll regret it; I think of her running her hands through my hair, helping me cover it in thick, wet mehndi, praising its tint of red in the sun.

I try to convince myself that I am defiant.

By the end of middle school, though, I am

tired. The stares—the smiles—the questions— the attention in which I had once basked begins to feel draining. I want to be one of those girls who wears her hair down every day, soft and brushing her shoulders. I have stopped visiting Pakistan. It matters less and less that my family would be disappointed if I returned with my braid chopped off. I spend six months watching “Cutting Off My Long Hair!” videos on YouTube, and another six convincing my mother to let me go through with the cut. I run through my list of reasons: I’m tired of the inconveniences of long hair.

I’m entering high school next year. I want to feel fresh and older and new.

When my elder sister finds out about my decision, she teases me: “What?” she exclaims. “But you’re a good, Pakistani girl!” I bristle. It is only years later that I realize it is not the good I object to. It is the Pakistani.

When I am seventeen, my Indian friend, who has pale skin and pale eyes and shoulder-length, layered hair, is complimented for her beauty.

I watch her smile and shake her head and feel something writhe inside of me. I wish it were jealousy. Instead it is a deep, rolling rage, one that I tuck in and smother. In my head, I imagine all the girls tanning and bleaching and cutting and dying, vying for the same sort of attention.

My friend confesses to me that in India, it is only her skin that is complimented. For her aunts and uncles, her hair is short enough to be shameful.

Afterward, I think about the Femina Miss India 2019 pageant pictures and the Twitter storm criticizing them: all the women chosen look the same.

One tweet rants, “They all have the same hair, and the SAME SKIN COLOUR, and I’m going to hazard a guess that their heights and vital stats will also be similar.” I look at the contestants. I think: she is right. And I try not to think: they are all pale. They are all pale and long-haired and beautiful.

That summer, I am sitting on a bench in our tiny neighborhood park. The grass is dewy and bright. My t-shirt dress brushes the top of my knee-caps. The sun, harsh and unforgiving, heats up my shins, and my mother frowns at the exposed skin. She says I should try and preserve my color.

I remember how, every day of elementary school, she would lather me in sunscreen and full sleeves and long pants, until I was old enough to protest.

Now, she sits beside me in her jeans and UV-protected long-sleeve. She looks young for her age.

Her skin is healthy and fair.

“You’ll tan,” she tells me, and I shrug.

“All my classmates want to tan,” I reply, and I’m only half-joking. The Caucasian girls in

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my year complain of their paleness. They think whiteness looks sickly. After a summer in Florida, one holds her forearm up against mine and says, “look, I’m even tanner than Anya!” with no small amount of pride.

After my day in the park, I examine my tan legs and short hair in my bedroom mirror. I try to imagine what my grandmother would think. The truth is I did not want to be fresh or new or older in high school. I wanted to be white—or whiter, at least.

In Pakistan and India, women cut their hair as a sign of defiance. They sever the link between femininity and hair length with proud grins and the chink-squeak-chink of scissors. They reject the models with pale skin and quiet, plastic smiles. 7,000 miles away, in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, I wonder sometimes if I cut my hair because I wanted to conform.

The first night after the cut, I lie in bed and indulge myself in one moment of terrible, all-consuming panic: my lungs freeze in my chest; my nails dig into my palms; my eyes go wide and dark against the ceiling. Feeling the foreignness of my straight-pressed hair, my throat thickens. I feel sick. Like a phantom limb, I imagine my braid stretching out beneath me, curling underneath

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my pillow, and I realize suddenly, terribly, how it is gone, really, truly gone, that by now it has been deemed worthy of donation and shipped away, that if I ever want to grow it back it will take years, maybe a decade, before I feel the weight of my braid again. I have made an irreversible decision.

I have become something I am not, or, rather, have given up something that I was. I fall asleep with my cheeks wet.

The next morning, my panic feels silly. Walking up the steps of my high school, I do feel new, with my short ponytail pretty and bouncing. The day is bright with winter sun. In assembly, my friends giggle and grin. Classmates I rarely talk to stop to compliment me in the halls. In the evening, when my mother asks me if I regret it yet, I shake off any remnants of the night’s grief. “No,” I reply. “Of course not.”

Four years later, and my hair has grown back long enough to braid. It is nowhere near its old length. I doubt it ever will be: I am in the habit of cutting it at the start of each year. I do not feel rebellious. At least, not anymore. Sometimes, looking at my reflection in that very same salon, I feel that I am severing away little parts of myself (my cousin’s gaze; the smell of mehndi). But I hold on to that doubt. It tethers me in a way that

“Like a phantom limb, I imagine my braid stretching out beneath me, curling underneath my pillow, and I realize suddenly, terribly, how it is gone, really, truly gone, that by now it has been deemed worthy of donation and shipped away, that if I ever want to grow it back it will take years, maybe a decade, before I feel the weight of my braid again.”

I know cutting my hair is a choice, and that choice is mine; I suppose that sometimes that responsibility is hard to swallow. Alone in my dorm room my first year, I braid my hair before bed, for fear of tangles and catastrophe. Against the bustle and novelty of college life, the action is soothing. I miss, sometimes, the weight of my long hair against my back, the subtle shifting when it swung side-to-side. If I think back far enough, I miss my mother’s brown hands weaving the strands together, slick with coconut oil and the smell of home.

—Anya Razmi is a first-year in Pierson College.

feels necessary. Secure. Other times, I feel the same elation at my short hair that I felt four years ago. I relish in its soft swishing and high ponytails.

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The Nanny Diaries A personal essay by Lily Dodd.

I.

A

t the end of August, I am offered a job as a live-in nanny with a family in L.A. There’s a lot of backstory here, but it might be kind of tedious to explain. Here’s the key point: I don’t know this family, but the dad grew up Jewish in Oklahoma, and so did my mom, and in the same town, and it’s a small world down there. So small of a world that, when my mom was a teenager and my future boss was four years old, my mom babysat him. (He liked dinosaurs.) It turns out this is enough information for both of us, and I leave New Haven to move into his house for the fall.

Actually, before I move in, I quarantine for ten days in an Airbnb in Silver Lake. Almost every evening, I mask up and ride a Lime scooter down a massive hill, past Echo Park lake, and up another massive hill to have al fresco, fifteenfeet-away meals with my bosses and their tiny children. Daisy is four-and-a-half and Marie is seven months. (These are not their real names.)

Because Marie is a little baby who spends most of her time sleeping, eating, and benignly vibing on the floor, my job will mainly be entertaining Daisy, who has been home from preschool since the pandemic began.

When my quarantine is up and I test negative twice, I move into the house in Echo Park. I think I may have the nicest living quarters of any governess in the history of governessing. I’m not sure what, exactly, I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this: a giant room on the second floor, one window looking out onto the branches of a giant sycamore, the other onto downtown Los Angeles.

And the sheets are made out of something called “eco-latex,” which I can only describe as feeling

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like sleeping under a layer of Starbucks’ cold foam (This is a positive thing.)

In many ways, by accepting this job, I have flashed forward fifteen years into my ideal future.

My bosses do absurdly cool work for real money.

They wear clothes from independent designers and have sustainable fish (including the bycatch!) delivered to their house. I am intimidated by their friends in our pod, who include an architect, two fashion wizards, the host of a quite popular podcast, and all their elaborately-named children.

But really, the person I like hanging out with most is tiny Daisy. In the beginning, I ask her a lot of questions. What’s her favorite animal? A unicorn, because when it jumps over houses, it can make rainbows. What’s her favorite color?

Pink and purple and blue and white and rainbow.

Talking to Daisy is easy—I can tell we’re going to get along, and taking this job was a good decision instead of an insane one. Daisy has an answer to most questions, and if she doesn’t like the question, or if the question is too stupid to warrant a response, she just ignores it.

As we spend more time (many hours of most days) together, I learn that this quality of hers, this constant having-of-answers, extends even to questions that I might have thought too difficult, or too upsetting, for her. But she gets it. She understands it all. It’s simple for her. Why do we wear masks on our walks? To protect our neighbors. Why are all the grown-ups sad? Because a great woman died, and they’re scared about what might happen without her. Why can’t we play outside today? Because someone had a fucking gender reveal party and lit half the state on fire.

design by Annli Nakayama

II.

W

e flee the fires for La Quinta, California, an oasis town sandwiched between the Palm Desert and the Coachella Valley. This is where they filmed the entirety of The Bachelorette this year, and I can tell you right now—it’s a weird choice. La Quinta seems like the kind of place that shouldn’t exist, the kind of place where you’d pull over at a truck stop, pick up a bag of Funyuns, and suddenly all the lights would start to flash and the cashier would blink his third eye and you’d realize you’d accidentally crossed an interdimensional portal. But it’s also kind of bougie and kind of LA, and the Airbnb we stay in is clearly set up for Instagram influencers, with glittery donut pool floaties, a neon sign that read ELECTRIC LOVE, and a ton of barely-functional furniture in rose gold and bottle green.

That first night, Daisy and I spend an absurd amount of time in the pool. The glittery donut is her golden calf. The pool is so over-chlorinated that, when we get out, the skin on my face burns.

Daisy’s eyes are bright red. We’re both euphoric.

We go to bed and wake up ready to do it all again.

Except that when we come back out to the pool, there’s a weird smell. Like an almost chemical stink. We call the Airbnb guy, who in turn calls another guy, and that guy comes and stands a dozen feet away by the hot tub, sniffing the air. He has two theories: something died over the fence, or there’s a rattlesnake nearby. Rattlesnakes secrete. He says this in front of Daisy, who promptly decides she never wants to go in the pool again. Or outside, for that matter. Remember that we drove this far for the sole purpose of going outside.

And suddenly the landscape changes. Suddenly Daisy doesn’t have the answers, and she’s scared, and the person who’s supposed to fix it is me. I decide immediately that the rattlesnake-secretion expert/pool guy is my nemesis. The only way to defeat him on the battlefield of Daisy’s beautiful mind is to bend reality and the laws of nature. In other words, to falsify a PhD in herpetology. In

other words, to make up fake facts about snakes.

I tell Daisy that rattlesnakes hate both the morning and the afternoon. They cannot stand heat and they abhor cold. They don’t like people.

They don’t like trees. They don’t like anything. I have Daisy thinking that rattlesnakes only come out in the dead of night, in void-like spaces that exist at perfectly neutral temperatures. Nowhere near her. Please can we go back in the pool.

We can. We succeed at being outside for the next several days. Then, when it’s time to leave, I’m taking the trash out and the bag rips on the pool deck and a few chunks of Peking duck, a lettuce leaf, and a globular mass of yogurt fall in the water. I don’t know then that, later today, we’ll spend almost an eternity in a smoke-choked corridor of Southern California, the baby wailing, the air acrid, the Taco Bell bathroom shuttered—yes, even if you buy something—because of the ongoing global pandemic. As I try to fish the flaccid placenta of duck meat out of the water, I wonder briefly if this will cause the rattlesnake to return, if there ever was a rattlesnake in the first place.

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III.

W

hen we get back from La Quinta, I drive to Beverly Hills to get my weird mole checked out at my boss’s dermatologist. I noticed this mole during the summer, and the most romantic way to describe it is this: imagine I’m the heroine of a Bridgerton-esque period drama, and the handsome lord whom I’ve ensnared needs to attend to the affairs of his estate, but he also can’t bear to be away from me for more than a few moments, so he decides to manage his correspondence while standing over my prostrate form, and a little droplet of ink spills from his quill and lands just to the right of my belly button. Or, it’s a really dark mole with irregular edges that just popped up this summer, so I should probably go get it checked out, even though I really don’t want to because I hate driving in LA and it’s probably nothing.

But actually, it’s not nothing and I get a call from the dermatologist, who informs me that my mole is highly irregular and needs to be removed ASAP. This makes me cry, even though the guy is like, “You’re going to be fine.” In my defense, it’s stressful to have to find a dermatological surgeon who is covered by your insurance and available in the next few weeks when your weird little mole is like a tiny ticking time bomb, just waiting to spew more of its evil seeds into your body.

Eventually I pull myself together, find a doctor in my network, schedule an appointment, don my N95, and ask my boss to drive me back to Beverly Hills because I’m scared that, after my surgery, I’m going to be too high to drive myself.

At the surgery, the nurse looks at my mole in con-

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fusion and calls in the doctor, who looks himself and says, “This is a really bad mole. I’m sorry, because I know you’re young, but you’ll have a pretty decent scar.” He then takes out a big blue pen and draws a line about three times the size I was thinking it would be, right on my skin.

I’m actually feeling ok, though, because I think I’m in love with this doctor.

Is this man wearing a mask, a face shield, and head-to-toe scrubs? Yes. Can I still tell he’s an absolute FOX? Yes. (This is not a mask catfish, by the way. I could tell you his name and you could look him up and agree with me. But I’m not going to do that, because I do not objectify our #healthcareheroes.) At one point, whilst fingering my new stomach-hole, he asks me where I go to school and I say Yale and he says I must be pretty smart, huh, and I say hahahahahmmmmwell and he says, “I can tell just by talking to you.” And this compliment, even though it is almost certainly a hollow one—because the most interesting thing I’ve said up until this point is “Wow, anesthetic really works! I can’t feel anything!”—sends me instantly into a daydream where we get married, have beautiful, mole-free babies, and I spend the rest of my days throwing garden parties for his clients, who are probably the Kardashians.

I spend the rest of the day high as a kite on

Vicodin. At one point, I go downstairs to make myself some tea and tell my bosses that there’s some Nutella I’ve been hoarding in my room, but actually they can have some. (If they want.) They politely decline, but do offer to make the tea for me while I sit down. (Go ahead and sit down.)

The problem is, I’m worried that maybe this is what being an adult is: You find the mole on yourself. You have anxiety about it. You call the doctor. You set up the appointment. You go there.

You fill out the insurance form. You get the mole removed. You get the phone call that more of the mole needs to be removed than was previously removed. You go back to the doctor. You accept a bottle of Vicodin and don’t take more than what you’re supposed to, even if you wonder if that might be fun. You tell the small child who lives with you that she can’t touch your big ouchie, even though, yeah, it looks pretty interesting to touch. (And at one point she touches it anyway, and it feels like being stabbed with a blunt knife.)

And as you lie around with your drugged-out brain, watching Enola Holmes on Netflix and wondering, very earnestly, if it might be the best movie ever made, the small child pounds on

the door and demands attention, even though you’ve told her you can’t play because you’ve got Frankenstein stitches in your stomach, and you think about how if a child is very lucky, she gets to be the center of her own universe, and how you yourself were also a very lucky child—one who had countless grown-ups in her life to pack her crackers, to know which towel was the special towel, to comfort you in the aftermaths of tragedies you don’t remember. And maybe, if you do it right, you can be one of these grown-ups for Daisy, too. And maybe, when she thinks about October of 2020, what she’ll remember is this: standing in the shade of the sycamore, blowing bubbles in her twirly dress, the sky so clear that she can see the last one drifting all the way up over the top of her house. Just like a unicorn.

—Lily Dodd is a junior in Silliman College.

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Anti-passion Nimran Shergill When I was younger, I was always admonished: Don’t put your finger to the flame.

Don’t burn in the fire.

When I was older, I learned that fire wasn’t just from the stove, candles, and logs— idealism, perfectionism, and fanatic passion too. I learned the hard way that my dreams’ lithium flames could scorch me instead.

Love something passionately and your heart balloons with hot air.

Energetic, lighthearted, you float to the sky, stretch your fingers out to touch the stars, the incandescent flowers of a barren paradise. I want the stars.

No one told me to watch out for the inferno in my heart that ignites an insatiable hunger for power, knowledge, and perfection. Disquieting self-doubt billows as smoke.

The balloon rocks with turbulence.

Flickering dangerously.

When things don’t go right, Watch out, curious scientist, Don’t burn in the fire.

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Gateway Arabesque

Photograph by Renee Ong

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Jockey’s Ridge State Park Auguste White Walking on the beach felt like kissing a Boy Scout Suddenly in a fine little beard of thin grasses And then a moment later back in the sand The dunes were the entire world Maybe there was sea somewhere but also Maybe there wasn’t. And this blessed us because my grandmother is afraid of water and cannot go near splendor Our footprints were only loosely translated in the sand And there was nothing to suggest That this land had ever known water There was only dry wind and chapped blue sky There is a coin telescope on the boardwalk So you can look out and Read the same sentence as many times as you want

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Sunflowers Charlotte Wakefield Remember when I kneeled in the dirt and weeded for you in the summer?

My knees were dirt-specked and sore, but yours were untouched.

I watched you work with unrelenting efficiency somewhere else in the backyard, as if from a distance.

Maybe you were in the planters, where you tried to nurture life and half succeeded.

Nature was too free for you.

Our front yard was bursting with wild sunflowers whose seeds you had sown years ago.

You let them grow each year, then dug them out in the fall.

Still they grew back.

Maybe you let them because they hid the house from the neighbors’ stares.

Maybe because they never asked for water like I did; the desert rains were enough for them.

I would have lived off rain if I could.

Instead, I begged for bread and water.

Bread and water you gave me, for a while.

You let me grow tall and fragile, then pulled me out.

I never returned to that soil.

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The Sandal and the Star A personal essay by Sanya Nair

I

was seven years old when I went to India for the first time. Now, at eighteen, I don’t remember much from that trip, only snippets: the hot weather, the taste of fresh lychee and rambutan, meeting family members, and—much to my mother’s dismay—forgetting most of their names the following day. Hints of a life I may have lived if my parents hadn’t moved to the States that have since blurred with time. What I do remember is losing my shoe on the side of a mountain.

I am Hindu by birth. My parents practice the faith. My brother and I do so nominally—making occasional trips to the nearest Hindu temple in Delaware, repeating phrases in Malayalam to praise Gods we barely know.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe in Hinduism. It’s just that I’ve already reached my spiritual peak, when I was seven years old, hiking up a mountain to reach a temple dedicated to the Lord Ayyappa, alongside my brother, dad, and uncle.

2 4 Ilustration by Sydney Zoehrer

Sabarimala is a spiritual destination for Hindus everywhere. Located in my parents’ home state of Kerala, it’s the mountain where Ayyappa, a prince and Hindu deity, meditated until he united with the divine world. The pilgrimage is sacred but rare. And this was my chance. Only girls under the age of ten and women over fifty are permitted to enter the temple since the God who resides there is celibate.

The night before our hike, my uncle, fondly known as Valiyacha, took me shopping.

Driving through roads in India is terrifying. My uncle accelerated and swerved past cars like in a scene out of an action movie; the smell of burnt tires permeated the air. Miraculously, we arrived safely at a bazaar with bodegas selling everything from shoes and t-shirts to snacks and tea. I spotted a tiny kiosk with sandals lining its exterior. There, I picked out the prettiest pair of flip-flops in all of India to wear. Sleek and glossy, the black rubber sandals fit snugly around my feet, as though crafted just for me. It would have been much more sensible to choose sneakers or shoes with any grip whatsoever. But I wanted the sandals, so Valiyacha paid and we headed back.

The next morning, we woke up before dawn.

My mother couldn’t believe I’d chosen flimsy flip-flops to wear on my pilgrimage but mustered enough self-control not to yell at me in front of my cousins.

She took me aside. I had to hike the mountain in “the right state of mind”—as an American and a soon-to-be woman, it was unlikely I’d ever climb it again. She told me that a star shone on top of the mountain, which was Lord Ayyappa himself blessing those who made the journey. I

didn’t listen. I concentrated on the way my toes felt pressed against the hot black rubber, soft and supportive—I’d never owned such sleek, sophisticated sandals. I got in the car with my Valiyachan, my father, and my brother, the sandals sealed to the soles of my feet.

Upon arriving at Sabarimala, we strolled past barefoot men holding bamboo chairs, waiting to carry people up the mountain for a small fee.

Skinny men beckoned kids with colorful, plastic toys like bait—pinwheels, poppers, cotton candy—hoping for a rupee or two.

The journey up Sabarimala begins with eighteen golden steps. If it’s your first time, you must break a coconut on the first step. Prideful, I attempted numerous times to throw and break the coconut. Despite my best efforts, my dad stepped in, guiding my hand, gracefully casting the coconut onto the step.

A crowd of people gathered close to the base, mostly the elderly and sick. One woman, boils marking her skin, lay sprawled across a thin, pink sheet and begged for money. Another woman stood nearby, skin barely hanging off the bone, asking for scraps of food. Most travelers ignored them, except the occasional one tossing a coin onto their blankets, which they received with wails of joy. As we walked by, I looked at my dad, who returned my hopeful gaze with despair, implying wordlessly that there was nothing we could do. The desolate and deprived lay begging, while we, fixated on spiritual guidance, marched on. Out of sight, out of mind. I looked down at my new black sandals and, despite myself, was happy. We walked on. I stared in awe at the barefoot men running up the mountain, carrying peo-

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ple on bamboo chairs on their backs, for a wage less than any traditional vocation. My brother and I laughed at the sight of large black boars alongside the trail, defecating freely, oblivious to their desecration of a holy path.

It began to drizzle, and the trail steepened.

Valiyachan, whose hand I gripped for support, slipped as the rock beneath us lost friction. In shock, I pulled my hand away and began to roll down the mountain. I struggled to cling to the path escaping from underneath me. My father rushed after me, but it was too late. One of my beautiful black sandals was gone. It had fallen behind us, leaving my right foot bare. I begged my Valiyacha to go back in search of it, and when that failed, I pleaded to my father, too. They stood firmly and told me it was a lost cause.

I erupted in anger. My dad carried me, patting my back as I cried over my lost flip-flop. Men who passed stared at my father and brother with pity. They were the unlucky bunch tasked with bringing a little girl up the mountain. I pouted and whined on my father’s back until we were halfway up the holy hill.

Calmer, but still upset, I looked around. Vendors sold refreshments to weary travelers. My Valiyachan’s eyes darted across the stands, and he skillfully chose two bags of masala-flavored Lays chips for my brother and me. Soothed by the snacks, I trod onward until we reached the top, but the feeling of slippery rock beneath my right

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foot reminded me of what I’d lost.

At the top, I placed my remaining shoe next to my brother’s in a designated space allocated for devotees to remove their footwear before entering the temple.

We walked up to the entrance, and my fixation on the lost sandal subsided. I looked up at the figurehead in front of me: a tall granite cylinder engraved with curving, sacred symbols. Idols of Gods twice my size lined the inside of the temple, adorned with brilliant red and white flowers and jewelry. The priest handed my father coconut halves, and I was instructed to pour fresh ghee into mine, a representation of body and soul. I felt my heart dance as I prayed in unison with the other travelers. As a child, I never felt overly connected to my culture. My inability to speak Malayalam or understand our religion’s mythology created barriers. Back home, our temple, usually vacant, would host the whole Hindu population of the Northeast on holidays. Down the street from Dunkin Donuts, its Indian architecture created a discernible deviation in the Hockessin, Delaware skyline. But at Sabarimala, I felt more connected to my culture—as much as a seven-year-old American could be. Here was a group of people who believed so much in something, they climbed up a mountain in hopes of maybe, possibly getting blessed by a God who maybe, possibly existed. It may have been foolish, but it was beautiful.

We made our rounds across the temple, praying to the larger-than-life icons for peace and prosperity. After completing the ceremonies, I stood at the top of the hill and looked around.

Valiyacha was teaching my brother how to whistle, and my dad rested before the hike back down.

It was early evening, just before sunset. I looked up at the hazy, blue-pink sky and, in that moment, I saw it. I swear, I saw it. Above the mirage of green trees and hilltops, above the defecating boars, above the beggars, above the men holding up their superiors, above my lost shoe, that star shone. The very star my mother had told me about. Lord Ayyappa was coming to bless those who made the journey. Coming to bless me.

I’d read about moments of clarity in books: a feeling of completeness, being chosen to do something bigger than oneself. My seven-yearold self felt it, too: an air of pride and connection that made me know we had gathered for something real. I rushed over to my brother, begging him to come quick. When we looked back up at the sky, it was gone. He chided me for thinking I was special, as any good older brother does, and went back to whistling. My father reassured me.

If I saw the star, it was there.

The trip down was fast. My mother waited for us at the base and listened as we recounted our journey. I recounted the tale with fervor, emphasizing the great loss of my sandal on the rocky

terrain. I told my mom I saw the star; I received Lord Ayyappa’s blessing. Much to my surprise, she began to laugh. The star appears in January, she said. It was December. And, if I had listened to her and not worn those flimsy sandals, then I wouldn’t have lost my shoe, she told me. No—if I had listened to her, I wouldn’t have seen the star.

I would have been too content thinking about my beautiful shoes.

—Sanya Nair is a first-year in Benjamin Franklin College.

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BACKSPACES A story by Nicole Dirks

H

e was a good man.

It happened first early on Father’s Day. Around midnight, after everyone had gone to sleep, I filed through his study in search of inspiration for a homemade gift––a book he might have half-read, a 90’s-sound-in-contemporary-packaging band he had discovered, anything that could offer a clue about a recent interest he had developed while I had been at college. I found the condoms first, then the drawings of her naked edges. The timing was outstanding.

He was a good man when he was my father.

It happened rather quickly the second time.

Or, quite slowly, when you consider the broader timeline. At 1:09 a.m. on January 10th, we arrived at the hospital. By 1:24 a.m., his colleague in a yellow sheet and face shield told us he had died.

I’m not sure whether it was the first or second time that the loss of my father felt more real. It all seemed overwhelmingly arbitrary.

He was my father.

Standing in the mirror this morning, I wished that I could duplicate myself. If I could exit my body, maybe I could scrutinize myself from more

viewpoints than a mirror’s reflective plane. One of me could stay seated in this folded chair, squarely centred in my empty new apartment. The other me could circle my body, finally concoct some sort of judgment. Maybe then I would know what I looked like––the true sharpness of my stare, the shape of my thighs. More importantly, I could watch myself navigate today, and figure out what I feel, besides very little. Maybe I’d know what to write––we had waited two years to hold an in-person service, and I hardly felt any different from when he passed. My hands smelled like my pencil’s soft wood. Whenever I brought my hands to my face, their odor prodded me for my lack of progress. The paper was still vacant.

He devoted himself to his children and to his patients.

Bullshit. The words felt neither honest nor like what the audience wanted to hear. I shoved the sheet of paper into my pocket. Sophie was waiting downstairs, so I left and folded into her Honda hatchback that always smelled like minty dirt. Her gaze lingered on me as I stared at the morning traffic, deciding from my composure whether our destination should be a topic of discussion.

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“So, are we picking up Michelle?” She had chosen evasion.

“Seems like she’s not coming.” I rolled the window down and watched a frayed dog drink from a small puddle of Gatorade outside the post office.

The sun patched angular shapes of sunlight onto the upper halves of the apartment buildings lining the street. It was going to be a nice summer day, for most.

“She told you?”

“Yeah. And, you know, you don’t have to stay actually, if you don’t want to.” A warm breeze slanted through the window. The air smelled first of dew, then hot smoke from the deli.

“Oh, okay.”

“Thanks.”

“Does your mum have a ride with anyone?”

“She has a car,” I hoped. “She’ll be fine.

Thanks.”

Maybe she would be fine. She would acquire grief, and organize it into a loving narrative that conflated his lack of responsibility for his death with that of his decisions. I slumped into courtesy and texted her “You need a ride?” and she replied a minute later “No thanks. All good sweetie. See you soon xo.” She was always “all good sweetie.”

Something about her propensity for the unsaid, for shielding her distress, reminded me to buckle my seatbelt right then.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

I had been assigned that overdone piece of scripture by my mother. My sister was to read accompanying psalms. I had read it at my grandparents’ funerals; this time, I was told to integrate it with a eulogy because apparently I was an adult.

At my grandfather’s funeral service at the age of twelve, I had felt both weightless and overbearing as I had tried to deliver the words with both maximal politeness and an air of understanding what it means to grieve. Today, in Sophie’s car, my knees bristled with the lob of turns and lane changes––but back then, they had vibrated like two same-pole magnets as I had spoken in front of so many old people and family members. Afterwards, I ate too much carrot cake. Michelle told me that my dad had cried during the recitation because he loved the passage. I later decided it’s because he wished he did. He was never religious

for the right reasons, which I thought made him not religious.

It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Or perhaps it was because he knew he had been drifting away from representing this interpretation of love.

After an hour, we arrived, so I gave Sophie a hug. She held my elbows and took a sentimental breath as I pulled away, which ruined it for me. I resented my coldness to Sophie as I plodded across the soft grass leading up to my father’s house. Her awareness of my family bothered me, even though she was one of my only college friends, and my only college friend who had moved to the same city as me after graduation.

And especially because she was one of the only ones who I had found the vulnerability to confide in about my father before he contracted the coronavirus.

The glass bungalow looked more sterile than in the photo I had seen, more like a horizontal test

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tube than the gleaming construction my mother had told me about. You could see the rows of folded chairs in the cleared living room from the lawn. Michelle appeared next to me on my way inside and looped her arm in mine.

“Jesus, you scared me.” She wore a grey suit, the sort of thing she wears to court every day.

“You came. Thank God.” “Yeah. Not a fat chance I’m saying what’s been prescribed, though.”

“You mean there is a fat chance?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Do you know how she’s doing?”

“We’ll see.”

I found myself breaking from her, then walking toward the folded chairs in the living room, a temporarily empty space for me to write while the guests waded into an adjacent room that hosted peppermint tea and baby crackers. For weeks, I had carried this odd sense of duty toward a speech for a man whom I had felt so little obligation towards for two years. Who was I doing it for?

At the very least, I needed to accelerate a descent into grief.

There were six rows of chairs, separated in the middle by an aisle. Three of the walls in the room were wrapped in those floor-to-ceiling windows that give real estate agents adrenaline rushes.

The mid-day light ran all around the room in gentle slabs. The urn sat at the front, a navy blue ceramic egg with a single brass stripe wrapping around its neck. I approached it, and succumbed to a sudden urge to lift its lid. It was too dark to see anything, except for a few sparkling specks that picked up the sunlight infiltrating the mourning space. I sat down at the seat labelled with my name.

I knew I was supposed to tell a story. Use rhetoric to persuade people that my dad lived a complete, good life and that he could have lived a longer, equally complete and good life had he not died, that I am very sad and moved but grateful and joyful for the time we did share.

I had a choice between two narratives. There’s the one about the father who would oblige my incessant requests to ventriloquize my one-eyed moose puppet every night before I went to sleep, who would stay up and play me The Beatles and give me an itchy blanket when I would wake up with get-naked-on-the-toilet stomach aches every night for a year, who volunteered to coach me and my sister’s house league soccer teams. Then

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there was the one who never tried to spend time alone with me despite my requesting it, the one who told me I “cancelled” him even though I gave him many chances and put exactly what I wanted from him in letters, in texts, in diplomatic conversation, the one who only talked to me to check if I was being praised for my talent or if I was reading an “authentic” book, the one who told me to research “Christian forgiveness” when I was upset that he was not making an effort. The second father was someone I didn’t know––or, more terrifyingly, someone who became who he had been waiting to become all this time.

He was a good man.

I could not help but think that my father would not mourn me at my own funeral. He would be bitter that I was not supremely empathetic to him after he cheated openly on my mother for three years, emotionally abused her, possibly physically abused her (she would never tell), always promised to leave the woman, always disappointed my mother, never thought that his kids could be disappointed, too. And worst of all, staying married.

“The woman,” as we always called her, was an orthodontist. I had googled her once, located a photo. She looked like a German shepherd, her eyes at once endearing, at once like they’d meet a stranger’s eyes with a sharpness that one takes personally. She looked different from the woman my father worshipped in his drawings. I wondered if she would be here today. And then I decided I did not care.

Sometime between my writing and erasing four sentences, my great aunt Abriana, whom I had been named after, had wandered into the room. Well past the early phases of Alzheimer’s, she spoke in circles, always returning to her central point, which was that she loved me very much. Despite her condition, she was conscious of her life in a way that even those mid-life have not aged into. And I wondered what I’d think of my father when I grew old and grateful, a state that seemed unattainable to me even today. Especially today.

Abriana was cupping a wine glass filled with water. Her grey-tan shoes with velcro straps shuffled slowly under the inefficiency of her hinged posture, inching toward the cheap collapsible chair next to mine. Once she sat down, she balanced the stem of her glass on her thigh. She

spilled only a little onto her trousers.

“Did you see the flowers?” She was smiling as she spoke. She always smiled so much. It always made me sad. “Beautiful hydrangeas.” It was odd that my father had hydrangeas planted. They were always my mother’s favorite, so I thought that he would at least let her have the flowers.

“Not yet.”

“You should see them before the ceremony.”

“I will.”

“Still writing?”

“I’m nearly done.”

“It doesn’t quite look that way.” The paper was still open on my lap. “Honey. Is everything okay?”

“Been better. But I’m okay, Abri.” She moved a hand away from her glass and placed it over mine, still gripping my pencil.

“This must be so hard.” She made an effort to twist her head to meet mine. This was a flailing sensitivity I was not accustomed to from my great aunt, but that I was from Sophie. She offered me some of her water, holding it out with two hands.

Sitting cross-legged on the sticky rug in his study, I would think myself an artist, and then he would tell me I could be one.

I told her no thanks.

I guided the glass back toward her knee. “You know. Don’t you?” Our eye contact was overwhelmingly direct. I began darting my gaze intermittently to her forehead to soften the intensity of our seeing.

“Why, yes,” she said. “Dear.”

“Jesus. Okay.” I knew my grandparents had known my father’s secret. But the woman with dementia I saw only twice a year? The prospect of speaking well of my father in front of a crowd of family and friends who were aware of his abandon of his family rapidly nauseated me.

“I love you very much, Abriana.”

After my mum’s speech, flattened with

words like “intelligent” and “well-known” and “nice” and everything that means nothing, she had her singing friend come in with her guitar.

The woman wore a purple dress and played a version of “In My Life” at the ceremony that failed to rupture from the song’s clichéd status.

Most of my memories of the song were from dainty listening sessions with my father in his study when I was a child. He used to expose this strange hole of fragility in himself when he listened, and all I had wanted was to climb in and explore. I had thought it beautiful, rare, and exclusive, revealed just for me. Most of these memories were rendered defective because of the times when I got high in college and played the song softly from my cell phone after getting home at 3 a.m. when Sophie was asleep. These sessions smeared my happy memories with the knowledge that I would only ever understand positive associations of the song in the context of loss. Yet today, despite too-much-ness of the emotion laced into her voice, the middle-aged woman’s singing reminded me of when I used to unskillfully emote while singing the same song.

Sitting cross-legged on the sticky rug in his study, I would think myself an artist, and then he would tell me I could be one.

“And now we’ll hear a few words from Thomas’s second daughter, Abriana.” Apparently Michelle had chosen not to speak. She put her hand on my forearm and squeezed it gently, as if to both encourage me and let me know that she was not sorry about her refusal.

I rose slowly, feeling the dual heaviness and surrealism of a dark dream come over me. My father was a good man. He devoted himself to his children and his patients. I wiped the moisture on my palms onto the sides of my cotton pants.

He loved the song “In My Life,” and because of him I loved it too. Actually, one time, we even I looked up on the walk toward the podium, and I saw that my great-aunt had also risen to the call of our name from the other side of the aisle.

No one had informed her that she was not supposed to speak in the time that she had walked from the third row to the front. We approached each other just in front of the podium, where the urn was placed on a narrow black stand. For a moment, I realized how I might look from the outside, where Abriana walked: wobbly, fogged, and surrendered. In a loud whisper, I said “Abri, I think it’s my turn.”

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Love is patient, love is kind.

But she kept walking toward me as I spoke, trying to hear me a little better. As she shuffled, she turned her ear to face mine. Her shoulder brisked the stand, and she walked right through it. The urn wobbled for a moment, and then it slowly fell into my hands that had jolted into a position to save it. I caught the urn.

Then, I let it fall.

Love is not proud.

Jagged slices of the urn radiated from the ground. The ashes poured out, bloomed upwards and out over the heads of everyone in the little room, and then floated downwards. The air became a suspension of his body, so much so that it quickly became difficult to see the windows on the other side. Larger flecks fell faster onto surfaces, onto guests’ hair, and inside purses. Clarity could be found if you were near the edge of the room, where you could look out the nearest window. It was awful.

It was maybe a little funny. Or at least ironic, that the carrier of the virus that killed him now contained all of him. As if he could now infect

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us.

Sometime after calming my mother with hot tea and a sit out on the lawn, burying the urn in the garden patch with the blue hydrangeas, I left.

Sophie was waiting in her car.

Inevitably, she noticed the windows caked with remains. I explained. She paused before responding until the gravel driveway disappeared and skinny trees replaced the glass house.

“Who’s going to clean it?” she asked.

“Not sure. Someone lucky.”

—Nicole Dirks is a sophomore in Branford College and a Copy Editor.

Reopening, Restricted.

New Haven’s elementary schools reopened in January. Not everyone is on board.

Kaylee Walsh

F

or the first time since they closed in March 2020, New Haven Public Schools opened its doors to students enrolled in Pre-K through fifth grade on January 19, following a reopening plan that Philip Penn, Chief Financial Officer of NHPS, likened to “changing a tire on a car while driving down the highway.”

After months of delay, the Reopening Task Force, founded in April 2020 to assess how schools might welcome students back with new safety protocols, settled on a corporate-inspired plan that involves “tiger teams”—a method of dividing up the work amongst smaller groups, according to Penn.

“If you look at [reopening New Haven schools] as the only problem, it’s overwhelming,” he explained. “But then if you continue to break that down into smaller and smaller pieces, the challenges become less dramatic.” As the leader of the Facilities and Operations team of the task force, Penn’s focus included drafting protocols for safety inside the schools, including floor plans equipped for social distancing, a face mask requirement, and training guidelines on hygiene in the classroom for staff.

Outside the task force, Daniel Diaz, Parent Engagement Coordinator for the district, has worked to include parents in the reopening plans as well, by keeping them informed and involved in public meetings and surveys. Diaz stressed how he––along with the rest of the Youth, Family, and Community Engagement department–– worked to set up helplines for specific needs of families in the district. “We developed a family helpline where parents can actually call and ask questions, even if they needed food, if they needed support with technology, if they needed coats, if they needed computers,” he said. Diaz also explained that additional helplines were developed as needs arose, such as a helpline specifically for homework, and others for IT support and special education.

However, according to Diaz, the most severe need among families using the helplines was food. He noted that the district has provided lunch for students learning remotely, by working with local organizations like Arte Inc. and Christian Community Action. “When parents call the family helpline, and tell us they need this, we actually act on it,” Diaz explained. While Diaz did not provide any specific statistics on the usage

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of the helplines, he noted that they continue to receive calls from families in need, even during the reopening process, particularly among families who are still learning remotely and do not have access to food or the necessary technology in school.

He insisted that the voices of parents and the safety of all involved are top priorities. “The common link in all of these surveys [that were sent out to parents] was safety. We wanted to make sure that the students return to a safe environment,” he stated. “The parents have always been involved. They’ve always been engaged.”

While the pandemic’s trajectory continues to shift on a daily basis, Penn and Diaz are both confident that the district has done as much as they could to ensure as much safety as possible in New Haven’s schools. “I hope people can see the effort that was there… because people can have confidence in the fact that a lot of smart people that were really committed to getting the kids back safely put a lot of time and effort into making that happen,” Penn said.

The reopening guidelines have come after months of labor. Penn cites the changing guidance from local health officials for this fluctuation, but he also acknowledges the opportunities that came with more time. “If the project stops, it’s usually for a good reason,” he stated.

“Anytime you’ve got more time available to you, there’s always things you can go back and do.”

Still, some feel that the work of the Reopening Task Force has not been enough to ensure safety in schools. In a letter published on Twitter on Jan-

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uary 15, the New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) called on the district to delay reopening until February 1 at the earliest, so more specific plans can be put in place. “Since last summer, staff and families repeatedly requested, in various ways and venues, system-wide guidance on infection control policies and procedures, collected in one single reference document, disseminated through system-wide training for staff, as well as communication with families,” the letter states.

“It could draw from, update, and expand upon the preliminary work of the Tiger Team draft proposals last summer.” The letter was signed

by David Cicarella, President of NHFT, along with representatives of other local organizations, including New Haven Public School Advocates and the Citywide Parent Team.

Similarly, in an update posted to their website on January 4, 2021, Cicarella, along with Pat DeLucia, the Vice President of NHFT, stated that their organization was not informed of the plan to reopen until December 31, 2020, and that NHFT was not a part of the decision-making process. “The decision was made by Central Office in conjunction with the City Building Department and the City Health Department.”

The update further asserts, “There can be, and should be, an ongoing assessment of the data to determine if it remains safe to return on [January] 19.”

Likewise, parents and teachers presented mixed opinions about reopening at the Board of Education meeting on January 11, the first meeting after the reopening date was announced.

Rebecca Cramer, a parent at L.W. Beecher School, submitted a public comment in support of reopening. “I believe that it is important to trust in the expertise and guidance of the New Haven Health Department and NHPS district leadership,” she wrote. She stressed that students still have the option to learn remotely, so parents who are worried about safety do not have to put their children at risk. “We can all work together to keep our community safe, but doing so can take different forms including through the safe reopening plan that NHPS has worked so hard to develop,” she added.

Other parents, however, had doubts. Karyn Smith, a parent at Elm City Montessori School, wrote in a comment at the meeting that she was concerned about forced school closures and the need for students and teachers to quarantine, which would disrupt a smooth reopening process.

“Even if the Superintendent and Board want to believe only the studies that support re-opening, with current transmission rates, school and classroom closures will be the norm. Rather than a smooth re-opening experience, students and families will experience frequent upheaval,” she argued. Smith additionally cited the emergence of new COVID-19 variants and higher positivity rates, particularly in Black and Brown communities, as reasons against reopening.

New Haven teachers also voiced their concerns in comments submitted to the meeting. Many of them noted that, at the time of reopening, teachers were not yet eligible to receive their vaccines.

“The vaccine is weeks [away], the end is near,

please do not risk my life and additional community spread for this charade,” Jessica Light, a third grade teacher at Worthington Hooker School, wrote. Mary McMullen, a librarian in the district, echoed these concerns in her comment.

“Please do the only ethical and reasonable thing, and delay the opening of in-person attendance for NHPS students until all NHPS staff (who choose to do so) receive the vaccine for COVID19,” she wrote. According to EdWeek, there have been at least 196 COVID-19 deaths among K-12 school faculty in the United States, as of February 9, 2021.

Despite all the focus on the January reopening, there is still a long way to go before all students return to the classroom. The plan excluded students in grades 6-12, who will continue to learn remotely. Edith Johnson is the principal of one school that is still entirely remote, Wilbur Cross High School in the East Rock neighborhood.

She also served on the Instruction team of the Reopening Task Force.

Johnson also spoke to the challenges of remote learning, specifically with the abrupt halt of in-person learning in March. “It’s really challenging for our teachers that we asked them to do something really different overnight,” she recalled. In addition to training teachers about remote teaching techniques, Johnson noted that many students struggled with technology access over the past year. She cited support from the Dalio Philanthropies and the New Haven National Guard for providing and distributing laptops to students in need.

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Still, Johnson expressed that the work is far from over in terms of equal access. “We need to continue to do those things to build equitable practices across our education system to make sure that all of our students have the same access to education,” she explained.

In addition to physical resources, Johnson also noted the emotional toll that the pandemic has taken on the student body. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the New Haven community who has not been impacted by COVID,” she remarked, noting that many students may have either had COVID-19, or dealt with a family member’s illness or death. “We’re trying to provide as many social and emotional supports, but it’s a difficult thing,” she added.

This difficulty, Johnson acknowledged, can be attributed to some of the disconnect that comes with remote learning. “The majority of kids, even if remote is working and they’re doing well, want to come back to school,” she explained. She notes that it can often be more challenging to provide support, both academically and emotionally, to students when they are not physically in the same room. Additionally, in a recent meeting with students, she learned that some of them had challenges with being on a computer for extended periods of time.

At the Board of Education meeting on January 25, some high school students submitted testimonies that reflected Johnson’s concerns about remote learning. Kiana Webber, a student at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, wrote, “This pandemic took so many things away from us, lives, happiness, the ability to freely see our family, and countless more, I truly hope one day we will get back to the way we were. I want to go back to school more than ever with the right precautions because now that I’ve been out of school, I truly understand the amount of happiness I get from attending school and seeing my friends.”

Of course, Johnson also recognized the specific concerns that high school students are being deprived of the authentic high school experience.

“I specifically talk about our ninth graders and our seniors,” she said. “They all have that true senior or freshman experience that they’re missing out on.” With prom, graduation, and athletic events still up in the air, Johnson recognizes the added pressure she faces as a high school principal, but she is hopeful that the school community

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can keep moving forward. “We have a lot of Cross pride, and we’re Cross strong, and we’re going to figure it out,” she asserted. “And we’re going to do the best that we can for our students and our staff.”

Johnson, Penn, and Diaz all offered different perspectives of how the pandemic has uniquely affected their jobs and their plans for the school year, but they also offered similar conclusions— despite the uncertainty of the pandemic and the pushback that the district has faced, they have confidence in the precautions that the district is taking, and they hope parents will be too.

Johnson reasserted her faith in the efficacy and safety of the reopening, but hedged that the plan wouldn’t appease all parents, students, and staff involved. “We’re not going to please everyone,” she acknowledged, “but we recognize that our kids do need to be in school.”

Time will tell if the reopening plan is effective enough to keep students and faculty safe, and if the students at Wilbur Cross and other high schools in New Haven are able to return to a modified but memorable high school experience.

But after almost a year, the seeds of returning to a somewhat normal education have been planted.

Johnson recalled a scene at Clinton Avenue School, where she offered help in welcoming students, on reopening day, of the young elementary students getting off the bus, clad in masks featuring cartoon characters and superheroes. Despite all the turbulence of the past year, and all the precautions that are still in place, one thing was clear—they were happy to be back.

—Kaylee Walsh is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

Moments of Reverence

By Renee Ong

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THE CAMPAIGN TO CONVINCE The Elm City needs 130,000 vaccinations. It’s not going to happen without a fight.

By Zachary Groz Design by Natasha Gaither

I

’m immune. I don’t leave the apartment. You got sick last April. We don’t know how long it’ll last. I won’t take it. You have a civic responsibility. No, I don’t. If you don’t take it now, it’ll be months before you’ll have the chance again. I’ll live with it.

So it was settled. My grandfather, 89, newssavvy, sophisticated, sartorial, middle name Alfred, usually sweet, crippled by Covid, whose wife, my grandmother, died of it months before, refused the vaccine. There was no convincing him. The next day, my mother tried again.

In New Haven, in the next days and months, hundreds of volunteers––organizers, clergy, students, and doctors––will be trying to do en masse what my mother tried to do with my grandfather.

They’re part of the city’s campaign to convince.

Now that two vaccines are effective and available, what’s left is persuading enough people to take them for their efficacy to matter.

That campaign depends on two conditions.

First, infrastructure: having the sites––converted Yale gyms, parking lots, churches––having the personnel, and having the shots. And second, unburdening healthcare workers––cutting transmission with masks and distance––so they can get out of permanent crisis mode, and onto prophylactics.

So far, the city’s opened five mass vaccination sites: at the City Health Department, the Fair Haven Community Health Clinic, and the Cornell Scott Community Health Center, and in huge hangers like the Lanman Center and the Floyd Little Field House. Each shows an extraordinary human effort and the problems inherent–– that, as impressive these proofs of efficiency and scale are, they’re only a fraction of what’s needed.

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As of this writing, New Haven has the capacity to vaccinate 1,100 people per week, according to Gage Frank, the city’s Director of Communications. And with that capacity, in the week of February 3rd, as tallied in the Connecticut Department of Health’s dataset, the city administered just over 900 first doses. Roughly 80 percent of nursing home residents, the first group eligible, have been vaccinated with at least one dose––past the threshold conferring “community immunity,” where the virus is buffeted from viable hosts by walls of inoculated ones. Close to 45 percent of city residents 75+ have received at least one dose (2,481), which ranks New Haven sixth among all Connecticut municipalities––still missing the state-wide mark, in that age group, of 53 percent.

Achieving immunity in a city of 130,000 will require a pace of vaccination an order of magnitude faster than it’s currently moving.

To make that possible, the city has to plan many thens for many ifs. If the city gets more than the 600 weekly vials it receives now (on top of its original stockpile), which it must in order to reach community immunity before 2023, then it’ll need the staff to administer them; if it has the staff, then it’ll need the facilities; if it has the facilities, then it’ll need recipients.

But the pandemic is still raging in New Haven, and it isn’t immediately obvious how to meet even the first condition. Doctors and nurses are working 16-hour shifts. In-patient hospital services are at 95 percent capacity. Dr. Everett Lamm, a pediatrician at Fair Haven Community Health, told me that, even as the state’s positivity has plateaued at about 3.5, the rate in Fair Haven, a low-income neighborhood on the city’s East Side, has been static in the double-digits––12 percent

or higher, on a given day.

Two initiatives have recently begun lobbying state and federal officials to involve medical and pharmacy students in the vaccination effort to relieve the strain on current staff. In mid-January, the National Student Response Network (NSRN), a coalition of medical, nursing, physician assistant, and pharmacy students, wrote to the COVID19 Task Force and the Biden Transition Team with a direct appeal: “national involvement of health professions students is crucial toward addressing vaccination workforce shortages.”

Those shortages run deep. For the average clinic, the CDC recommends having a 58-person --New Haven Fire Chief John Alston, Jr. is vaccinated for COVID-19 on December 28th, 2020. team of medical screeners, vaccinators, clinical managers, EMTs, and others on site. On the scale required in a city of New Haven’s size, that would mean reallocating a massive is to broaden the success of past campus-specific amount of hospital staff––at the moment, someprograms––to create a sort of medical student thing the system can’t spare. reserve corps, ensuring vaccination doesn’t stall Hirsh Shekhar, NSRN’s National Director and for lack of hands. a first year at Yale’s School of Medicine, menThe other component of NSRN’s work involves tioned two precedents for student involvement allaying fears and misconceptions around the vacin mass vaccination: Stanford’s Flu Crew, which cine (most often about side-effects, which show has run seasonal campaigns since 2001, and the the immune system’s learning to fend off the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, virus; or the speed of the vaccines’ development, which enlisted hundreds of its students as surge the upshot of $9 billion of federal funding, comvaccinators during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. pared to the $500 million to $1 billion a typical “In any accredited pharmacy program, training vaccine receives for R&D). An interdisciplinary to provide immunization is a standard part of the partnership of medical, law, and public health students at Yale started a hyper-local version of NSRN’s framework this February. Danielle

The vaccine campaign depends on two conditions. First, infrastructure: having the sites, having the personnel, and having the shots. And second, unburdening healthcare workers so they can get out of permanent crisis mode, and onto prophylactics. second-year curriculum,” he told me––the point being that nothing besides will and time is keeping the 600,000 students in all health professions from being certified to do the same, after the standard 20 hours of training. One of NSRN’s goals

Miyagishima, an MD-PhD candidate at the School of Medicine and the project lead, explained that its aims are threefold: “decreasing the workload for overburdened health staff;” easing the “accumulation of small inconveniences,” like lack of insurance, time, and internet, which might discourage someone from registering for the vaccine; and having conversations, door-todoor and on social media, to gain community trust. Like NSRN’s and Yale’s, any campaign against misinformation has to recognize its talent for metastasis. Doubts, like inconveniences, tend

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to accumulate, and making the case that they’re unwarranted is significantly harder than seeding them.

The seeders have had a century-long head start.

“Anti-vaxxers today are recycling arguments that were made a century ago, because those arguments are coming from a similar set of mistakes in the way people think about data and look at data, and similar underlying fears,” Jonathan Ber-

modern society with roots in every other fear––of change, authority, lies, unfreedom, illness, and death. It’s been made into a struggle for the self.

For that reason, it won’t, at least wholly, lose to “facts and logic.” The solution’s as complicated as the problem is clear: “Until people deal with the trust issue, there’s not going to be much change,” said Bernard Macklin, the Flu Outreach Coordinator at the Community Alliance for Research

Any campaign to build trust in the vaccines will have to contend with a system that continues to entrench its opposite. man, a professor of biology and physiology at the New York Institute of Technology, and the author of Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (MIT Press, 2020), told me. Fair Haven’s Dr. Lamm had said something similar, that early on, many people had misinterpreted the mRNA method the new vaccines use. While mRNA trains cells to produce a harmless protein, triggering an immune response, many believed the vaccine actually rewrote DNA. Others fixated on the infinitesimally few bad reactions reported in the news. Another law of misinformation: data is often manipulated, but it doesn’t have to be in order to be misinterpreted.

This new generation of anti-vaxxers has the added advantage of leveraging internet echo-chambers and viral misinformation––the sort social media algorithms amplify, and the absence of regulation permits. “Now we have a huge increase in vaccine hesitancy and in people who are actively sharing anti-vaccine ideas,” Berman said. “Part of it is simply that we can communicate better now than we ever could.” I got a glimpse of the bottomlessness of the problem when I went looking for his book on Amazon. The “Products related to this item” box, at the bottom of the page, threw up a pamphlet on death-curing elixirs––what the Big Guys don’t want you to know.

“Part of it is also that a lot of the problems we have socially have never been fully solved,” he continued. “That makes an environment where people can be persuaded with lies and misinformation that are premised on their underlying social concerns.”

Anti-vaccination is a perennial instinct in

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and Engagement (CARE) in New Haven.

Plenty besides anti-vax militants and mystics don’t yet trust that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are safe. In the latest round of polling from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, roughly a third of respondents said they were unlikely to (17 percent) or categorically wouldn’t (15 percent) accept a vaccine. Nearly half in that category will have to come around for widespread immunity to take hold––for the coronavirus to become just another endemic disease we inoculate against yearly.

In Connecticut, the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent survey of vaccine hesitancy found that distrust of the vaccines and of government was most pronounced in the African American

--Vials with the COVID-19 vaccine, probided by the New Haven Register.

community. Thirty six percent of African American respondents expressed reluctance because of a lack of “trust in COVID-19 vaccines,” and close to 38 percent because of a lack of “trust in the government.” In comparison, less than 20 percent of Asian, Hispanic, and white respondents attributed their concerns to either rationale.

Like vaccine clinical trial data, those figures can be prolifically misinterpreted, and used to buttress dangerous conclusions. “We consistently end up with scenarios where instead of asking questions that cast aspersions on the healthcare system, we always ask questions that cast aspersions on African Americans and their behavior,” Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid, a history of racism in medicine and winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, told me. “The question we should be asking is, what is it about our healthcare system that is not getting the vaccine to people in necessary numbers, and not getting the vaccine to every group when it should. Instead we’re asking, what is it about African Americans that would cause them to reject the vaccine.”

Any campaign to build trust in the vaccines will have to contend with a system that continues to entrench its opposite––the “reasons why,” as Washington put it, “African Americans might be barred from the vaccine and may not have access to it. We know a lot of them already: less likely to have a personal physician, more likely to live in an area where the safety net hospitals are closing, lack of transportation, lack of having jobs that allow you to take time off for things like doctor’s appointments and getting vaccines.” Access, like trust, Washington said, begins with understanding systems and individuals’ place in them, not with hypothesizing motives.

The state’s outreach campaign is expected to begin in earnest come the summer, ideally when most who want a vaccine have received at least a single dose. “We’re looking to June,” said Hamden State Representative Josh Elliott, who sits on the Governor’s Vaccine Advisory Board. “That’s closer to when we’ll need to actively reach people who are skeptical.” The process will require central coordination on a decentralized approach–– with labor unions, shelters, pantries, pastors, and local doctors––with the goal of restoring “reasonably lost trust in government.”

The testimony of friends, family, and other trusted messengers will be instrumental to that

effort, which is part of CARE New Haven’s, NSRN’s, and the Yale program’s plans. As more people take the vaccine, others in the community will likely be more inclined to––a general sense, borne out by the data. The Census report from January concluded that “worries about side effects” and “plans to wait and see whether the vaccine’s safe” were the two most common grounds for hesitancy. When we spoke, CARE’s Bernard Macklin mentioned that he had received his first shot just the other day, and felt good. “I’m still here,” he said, “And now, I’m a witness.”

—Zachary Groz is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College and an Associate Editor.

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Running As...

a personal essay

By Meera Rothman

R

unning as magic.

When I was younger, my dad used to tell me the story of how he fell in love with running. He was fifteen, at a sleepaway camp deep in the Vermont woods. One night when he was – frustrated with his counselors? bored of the routine? I’d like to imagine – he ventured down the driveway, and out of the camp. There were no cars on the main road, just streetlights and houses so deep-set he could only see their windows. And sweet, sweet silence.

My dad ran for miles. Just a skinny boy with no phone, tracing the light’s path forward. He says he ran every night after that (seems unlikely), and that he’d run for hours before he turned around (definitely false). My dad has a propensity for exaggerating. But I’m sure that’s how it felt, at least, and that’s how he told the story. *** My dad used to run every Saturday morning when I was growing up. It was his one indulgence,

the only fissure in the armor of my parents’ very busy, very responsible lives—a daily rhythm that consisted of rising at six, arriving at the hospital by seven, and working late into the evening on patient records, which they’d shield with their hands when I’d pass by their laptops. Somehow, they also deposited my sister and me on the bus, spread peanut butter on our sandwiches, and tucked us into bed. Then back to the computers.

But on Saturday mornings, my dad would disappear from our house with the dog and return hours later, covered in mud. At the end of the only decent running trail in the suburbs is a swampy pond that you could, by very loose standards, call a swimming hole. My dad would leap into the calm, green water with our yellow lab like it was the most natural thing to do. At home, he’d squat down to clean the mud tracks on the kitchen floor, beaming and retelling stories of his best running days in San Francisco. ***

4 2 Illustration by Cindy Ren

Design by Natasha Gaither

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami writes that long-distance running is a meditative practice. He references a quote from English writer Somerset Maugham: in every shave there is a philosophy.

Murakami says it’s the same with running. No matter where in the world he is, the 71-year-old runs every day. Every year since he was 33, he has run a full marathon. Murakami notices his speed and his times, but he doesn’t worry about them.

For him, the purpose of running is not to get faster or stay in shape. It’s about the practice–– how an act repeated mindfully again and again becomes a ritual.

“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.” Murakami writes. *** Running as a cure for awkwardness.

I never ran—really ran—until I was sixteen.

I was never on a cross-country team, and I was consistently one of the slowest kids in the gym class 50-meter dash. Needless to say, I was not recruited to join a sports team, and I funneled all of my energy and angst into school.

My sixteen years of awkwardness stemmed from the fact that my nose was constantly shoved in a book. I read for English and World History, worshipped the twin pillars of schoolwork and homework, and when I finished my assignments, I buried myself under books for pleasure. Surfacing into the real world felt disorienting, stressful, and disappointing. None of the Big Feelings in books could be found in my real life.

One weekday in December when I was in eleventh grade, my dad suggested we all go running.

We had just finished dinner, and my sister and I were trudging upstairs to study. It was thirty degrees outside, and the thought of running seemed ridiculous. But somehow my dad convinced us, and we bundled ourselves in layers of shirts and two pairs of pants each. We dusted off clunky yellow flashlights from the top shelf of our laundry room and got in the car.

Ten minutes away, deep into the labyrinth of suburban streets, was Jerome Jay— an endless hill of mansions, each unbelievably grand. Driving down Jerome Jay feels like passing a procession of strange and magnificent birds. On our way

to school, my sister and I liked to rank them, our eyes always settling on the cream-colored house with the stone cherub fountain in the yard.

Through the car window, the houses became indistinguishable, a dark row of identical monoliths. My dad parked halfway up the street, past the initial incline, in the flat space in front of someone’s house. The lights on the first and second floor of the house were on, and I thought how strange those people must think it was to see three bundled figures jogging past their house at nine at night.

My flashlight with its weak bulbs shone only a few feet in front of me, and I followed the light mindlessly, my thoughts still wandering in the margins of my calculus textbook. Under layers of clothing, my blood slowly warmed up and my fingers felt less cold when I touched them to my cheek. My knees and hips and arms started moving as one, as awkward steps turned to ease. I drank the cold, spacious air and suddenly became aware of the shape of my lungs, the sensitivities in my nose, the place where all the air tunnels inside me connected.

We ran, each in our own trance, the three of us filling the width of the street. After fifteen minutes, my sister got tired, so we turned around. The way back was downhill, and my dad spread his arms wide like he was one of the birds on Jerome Jay. He sped ahead of us, flying down towards the car, my sister chasing at his heels. Annoyed, I kept my pace. I listened to the rhythm of my breath—in, hold, out, hold—steady, even as my body fell quickly, surely, joyfully down the hill. *** In the Buddhist novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha – the beautiful son of a revered Indian Brahmin – runs away from home, leaving behind his family and village in search of spiritual fulfillment. He joins a group of wandering ascetics and adopts their practices, but ultimately, he decides he must seek meaning on his own. After parting ways with his best friend, he sets off alone, walking slowly through nature and pondering the world around him.

Finally, he is awakened.

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time… Blue was blue, river was river, and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and divine lived hidden...

The purpose and the essential properties were

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not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.

When I run, I look at the rivers and the sky and the forests, and I feel this everything. It feels like a collective breath in, and sigh out. Like the closest thing to religion I’ve felt. *** After I got into college, I spent my senior year running up and down the inclines of Jerome Jay. If you run from one end of Jerome Jay to the other and back, it’s an even four miles, but if you turn left and run until you reach the main road, the entire loop can reach up to eight. I memorized the plants in front of the houses, memorized the place where my feet made a strange sound because the road is filled in with a different concrete, and noticed the passage where the trees become so thick that for a few seconds it feels like you’re in a wind tunnel. I ran Jerome Jay regardless of the weather, my homework, friends, or whatever else was going on in my life. At school, I often felt my body longing for the unparalleled freedom and stillness of running.

Running as a physical addiction. Running as the substance of life. Running as My Big Feeling.

________________________ When I run, I look at the rivers and the sky and the forests, and I feel this everything. It feels like a collective breath in, and sigh out. Like the closest thing to religion I’ve felt. ________________________ *** Running remained my savior in college. My elixir for all evils. I found another hill – Prospect Street – and I ran up and down every day.

Sometimes I’d run twice in one day and my hair became bone dry from showering. One weekend, I ran a half-marathon.

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There was no sadness or anger or loss that running could not heal. It was not so much that running fixed whatever was bothering me, but that it returned me to myself. To a feeling of power and stability and connection with nature. When my friends coupled up and found boyfriends and girlfriends to hold them, I’d wake up early and run. Yes, there was loneliness, but running was a fundamentally un-lonely feeling. I got in the habit of outstretching my arms like my dad did when I ran down Prospect Street and I felt that the world was embracing me. In this sense, running became a form of praying.

When I reported back to my dad about my runs, I swear he sounded jealous, as if I had gone to visit a mutual friend without inviting him. As a peace offering, I sent him a copy of Murakami’s book. *** During spring break of my sophomore year, I returned to my Jerome Jay running route. As much as I loved the burnt orange leaves of Prospect Street, there was something about Jerome Jay that felt deeply comforting.

On a particularly euphoric run, I veered off onto a new side street to extend my route. The sun had just set, and the sky was stained with dark blue clouds that clustered around the impossibly large mansions with their sprawling front yards.

I had never been down this street before and it turned out to be a long cul-de-sac. I turned around at the end, pleased with my extra distance and discoveries.

Then suddenly: fear. My breath caught and my body turned into tingling, screaming nerves.

An orange car with its top down drove slowly towards me. It was the only car on the street and I scanned quickly and saw no cars in driveways.

Found nothing in my pockets.

The man in the front seat watched me speed up, fumble with my phone. At the last second, I hopped off the road and darted through the front yard towards the woods behind one of the houses.

The car paused before the end of the cul-desac, where it meets Jerome Jay, and I thought for a second it would leave. That I had overreacted.

But it re-entered the cul-de-sac, blocking my exit, and heading straight towards me. For just a moment, we made eye contact.

I sprinted deeper into the woods and called my

ning became a new sort of prayer – don’t kill me, don’t kill me– I would chant at every passing car, readying my pepper spray, my friend’s phone number already dialed in. Please – the car slowing beside me – punish me some other way.

I felt small, staring up at the empty sky, my feet pitter-pattering down the sidewalk. My heart dangled a few feet in front of me, a large tangle of blue tissue and feelings and veins.

Running as a reckoning. As a way of pleading with God and being answered, with my life, again and again and again.

One afternoon, a few miles away --Haruki Murakami, whose internationally acclaimed works have been trans- from campus, a car with one man lated into over fifty languages. inside pulled over beside me. This is it, I thought. There is no one else here and no woods to hide in. dad and tried to breathe.

Somehow it felt expected, inevitable. I waited. *** Coincidentally, a friend texted me, asking On the drive home, my dad asked questions. what I was doing and I frantically tapped out a He said he didn’t understand how this had hapresponse. She stayed on the phone with me, as I pened. I said I was not surprised. ran into someone’s backyard, and called an Uber I stretched out my legs in the car. Left leg. back to campus.

Knee to nose. Right leg. Knee to nose.

Back in my room, I thought I had misjudged For the rest of spring break, I wanted to run, the situation. The car had probably been harmbut every time I got out of my car on Jerome Jay, less. But the big ball of blood and veins groaned my heart started racing. I’d bring pepper spray, a out. Something was wrong. Is there something button sounding an alarm, and a ring that conyou believe in? Anything? verted into a knife on my finger, but I’d still spend I sat down at my desk and returned to my the entire run looking over my shoulder. Every classes. time a car passed, I’d hover my finger over 911 *** and plan out my escape route in my head.

Running as just another ritual.

There was nothing that could be done. I asked In “Writing Down the Bones,” Natalie Goldmy dad to run with me a couple of times, and I’d wait at the front door as he finished his work. I felt powerless sitting in the car next to him, like a child that needed a chaperone just to go outside.

I felt ashamed of being so upset. *** At school, I began running with friends. Our chatter fueled my legs further than they could take me alone, but the next day, the urge to run by myself remained, like a small but persistent plant begging to be watered.

So just weeks after the incident at home, I ran up Prospect by myself, weapons in hand. Run-

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berg compares writing to a meditation. Through the practice of it, the steady ritual, a writer learns to trust herself. The practice of sitting down every day, of filling stacks of notebooks with scribbles that will never be published is a practice in selftrust, in mind-body synchronicity.

“It is undirected and has to do with all of you right in your present moment,” she writes. “Think of writing practice as loving arms you come to illogically and incoherently. It’s our wild forest where we gather energy before going to prune our garden...It’s a continual practice.”

Like Murakami, Goldberg identifies the incredible similarity between writing and running. In fact, she finds them similar to any other immersive practice. Running could be subbed

Running as a reckoning. As a way of pleading with God and being answered, with my life, again and again and again.

out for dancing, praying, mindful walking.

I stand in front of my dormitory bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth. The brush makes little foams of toothpaste on each tooth, a coating to be swished away with water. I try to empty my mind. *** I have read six of Murakami’s books and dozens of his short stories. I even taped a picture of him to my wall at home last winter break. My printer was jammed, so I went to the FedEx near my house and asked for the cashier’s help to print on off-white cardstock for an extra 99 cents. We watched together as the paper emerged from the printer – materializing, inch by inch, the overinked image of an old man running.

“Who is that dude?” the cashier asked me.

I told him and he asked if I read a lot and where I went to school. I think he may have been flirting with me but I’m not sure.

I’ve been noticing lately the way Murakami portrays women in his books. His stories are usually about a solitary male protagonist embarking on a mystical journey. On that journey, women

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are objects of mystery, vessels for the protagonist to liberate himself sexually, and accomplices to guide him towards clarity at the end of the novel.

I know this because I did a deep-dive into all the Internet criticism one night.

I wish I hadn’t, though, because it makes me feel weird every time I look at the picture on my wall. Murakami’s gait looks steady, and his expression is earnest, like he is seeking something far off on the horizon. Even when I took down all the other pictures, I still left his up. *** These days, I run sometimes. I joined the club swim team at school, and we practice two nights every week. I lose myself following the speckled blue line on the pool’s floor, comforted to hear the splashes of my teammates in the lanes beside me. I walk home from the gym at ten o’clock, my hair dripping a cool stream down my back, and turn the shower to the hottest it goes.

At home, I run side-by-side with my dad, pounding our feet in rhythm along the road. We rarely talk about what running means to us these days – it is too much, like drawing the ocean with a Crayola box – and yet I know that running is both of our crucibles, no longer pure magic for me, but still worshipped in the depths of our innermost minds.

Sometimes, when I am feeling – confused, alone, brave – I set off by myself. I don’t venture too far off campus, at most a mile in any direction, before the houses become sparse and the blue-light boxes stop. When I return, I spread my arms wide, no matter how many people are around to see.

—Meera Rothman is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College and an Associate Editor.

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