Stay-home edicts and orders preventing Illinois residents from public congregation have only been in place for about a month as I write this, but people are already feeling the effects of living like Emily Dickinson (albeit with access to a 24/7 news cycle and grocery delivery). Dickinson is perhaps one of our most famous American homebodies, but even the confines of her father’s house in late-19th-century Massachusetts was inspiration enough for her to come up with worldly and lascivious lines like “Rowing in Eden — / Ah, the sea / Might I moor — Tonight — / In thee!” (from her poem number 249, aka “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!”).
Jerry shared a painting that his goddaughter Zoharia (now in college) gave him when she was in second grade. “Zoharia is the first daughter of my former roommates, and I was her Ba’al HaBeracha—I gave the blessing at her naming ceremony. Christians know these traditions as godfather and baptism, and we often use godfather/daughter so other people get the relationship. She’s a freshman . . . majoring in environmental studies, and I got to cover her as a legal observer at an environmental protest last year. I’m so proud of her. I love her to death, and seeing her painting every morning when I get out of the shower reminds me of her and her two sisters (who also have names beginning with Z—we call them the three Zs), and reminds me that children are our greatest blessing. And they are Gen Z, and awesome, and our future, and we owe it to them to leave them a world that is as much a blessing to them as they have been to us. It’s a good way to start the day, at least for a guy who grew up in a big Irish family, in neighborhoods full of big Irish families, and especially when I’m quarantined at home alone. Children are a precious gift, even if they aren’t ours, and even if we can’t see them in person.”
SHARLENE KINGUser-experience designer and information architect Objects: dinosaur costume, cat castle, resistance band platform
Dan has been making masks with his Singer. “It started with just making masks for my family using scrap fabric around our house and then I kept unearthing boxes of fabric that my wife Janice and I had collected over the years. We’ve sent over 150 masks out now to people we know, people we don’t, frontline nurses, an entire preschool class. It’s become my morning ritual now to get up and cut and sew masks before school and work starts. I’m always making things—though mostly online—so this is the perfect mindless busy work for me right now. And, it helps people. I know how to sew (thanks 1980s public school home economics) and usually make the kids’ halloween costumes—bought this machine a few years ago after the ancient one we had finally broke—but that’s the totality of it. When I just wanted to make masks for us, I had to look up the sewing machine manual online to remember how to thread the bobbin once the one that was in there ran out. But now this machine sits on our dining room table, moved to the floor for meals, and then back up for another round of stitching.”
Mr. Cusack graciously sent me this image, which includes a white crystal that seems to have a prominent place in his home. While he wasn’t available to chat about his object, white crystals are well known in the spiritual community as a clearing stone that attracts good light and energy and invites peace into a home. Even Emily Dickinson could get into this: as she wrote in poem number 1510, “How happy is the little Stone / That rambles in the Road alone, / And doesn’t care about Careers / And Exigencies never fears.” v
