Tucson COVID Tales No. 8: Love in the Pandemic, by Kathleen Williamson

Sometimes I feel like I landed the leading role in an existentialist film. Then, as changeable as the weather in Hamburg, or Chicago, or whatever city enjoys such claims, by afternoon, I’m back to my usual persona: an action hero in a dystopian novel with a spiritually uplifting light at the end of the anthroposcenic tunnel. Five months into my pandemic hermitage, I’m staring at a black postcard on my desk with bold white print that says, “Don’t Be Afraid.” Next to that is one of the last photos of Joanna and me together, taken in our barrio homestead, Villa Grace. It was the second or third time her hair had grown back. I’ve lost count.

Before the pandemic dug in, I was very gratefully absorbed as Joanna’s ally, advocate, company, and spouse as she braved what she called a “breast cancer experience” that metastasized at the end of 2016. We graduated in late 2019 from Banner Cancer Center to Casa de La Luz home hospice. I was tending to my little urban homestead. Liz Fletcher, Vivian Smith, and I were working up a list of pop dance tunes for what was to be a popular local cover band called Kat and the Mehitabels. My law practice was reduced due to Joanna’s health, but still a daily responsibility. Songs I had written over the last few years were in the oven, waiting for some time to get into Duncan Stitt’s studio.

As was typical for Joanna and me, keeping current and (increasingly) concerned about politics and the environment was also time-consuming. And, thankfully, there were the heart-fortifying rehearsals and Sunday worship gatherings with the Southside Presbyterian gospel choir, led by Dorothy Reid, in which I sang tenor. As Joanna’s culinary palette narrowed due to chemo and radiation, she came to depend on the pizza at Time Market, where we loved to dine together.

In January 2020, news of the virus in Wuhan as a potential pandemic made its way to Tucson and for the first time in many years, due to Joanna’s compromised condition, I decided to avoid the Gem Show and annual visits with my dealer friends from Bali. I stopped taking any new cases and stopped visiting clients in the prisons.

Joanna died at home on February 20. Per plans that she approved, she was waked and buried at our home on February 22. It was an amazing gathering of locals who knew Joanna as a friend, professor of art, artist, writer, and yogini, and as my wife. Her sister from Missouri, and old friends from Nevada, California, and Illinois flew in. I could namedrop here but won’t except to say how grateful I am for all those who came to the house and brought food, music, good spirits, prayers, and helped create a good old-fashioned personable, simple, noncommodified, organic, Irish wake.

Joanna died just in the nick of time because the pandemic came up fast on the heels of that gathering. If it were a week later, the wake probably wouldn’t have happened. At the wake, I jokingly warned all my friends that for the next few months I was going to be a whore for hugs, little realizing hugs were going to disappear off the face of the planet before I could change the page on the monthly calendar. In hindsight, we see early March super-spreader funeral events were happening in the United States. Mrs. Reid’s funeral at Southside Presbyterian on March 7 could have been one, but thankfully was not. I sang at that service but ducked out before the final moments to avoid the crowd, many of whom would have wanted to hug and console me. I knew it wasn’t a safe environment for any of us. Some folks thought I was “cray-cray” paranoid, but I was just informed.

From that point on, I was in a trifecta storm of life changes: Joanna was gone and with that all the good and difficult activities, all the great conversation and snuggles, as well as all the endless medical and/or hospice appointments and caretending. My law practice was down to two cases, which have since wrapped up, and the Pandemic caused a shutdown of personal social life and live cultural events. Since March, I can count on one hand the friends with whom I have visited, always outdoors, usually with masks. My dress and professional clothes are gathering dust. Band practice ceased. The church finally stopped gathering in person, and Zoom sucks for performing music.

Like a lot of privileged folks who aren’t in dire financial straits, I have found my inner introvert (people who know me would be shocked to hear this). Regardless of the three big time demands suddenly being gone, however, aside from obsessive doom scrolling, the days are richly active and stimulating. I’ve got about twenty books cracked open and read whatever I like whenever I like. Among the novels, I especially liked The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. The most inspiring media I’ve taken in during the pandemic lockdown is an unedited “On Being” interview with John Donohue (thanks to Simon Donovan, who sent it to me after Joanna’s wake), perfectly timed to our current needs to embrace blessings and beauty. I’ve also been handwriting letters to family and friends, which I’ve wanted to do for years, at a small writing desk situated in the part of the house where there is an internet dead zone.

Whatever happened to the hug whore, you may ask. I haven’t had any real hugs from humans since shortly after that wake. On Easter Saturday, however, within a few hundred feet of (Capricorn) Joanna’s homestead gravesite, my Oberhasli nanny, named Scosee, gave me two kids, uniquely named “Billy” and “Bucky.” They were supposed to be goat chops in about twelve months. After three days of nursing and getting essential colostrum, the greedy kids were masticating poor Scosee’s teats, and I separated them. That entailed ME having to milk Scosee and bottle feed the kids three times a day, which eventually went down to twice a day after about two months.

With the more relaxed pandemic, post-Joanna, almost-retirement pace of life, I was able to just hang out with the little cuties without any concern about the clock and discover from observation and experience, rather than farming books, how very smart, attentive, and heart-meltingly affectionate goats can be when given time and attention. They became friends instead of assets or exotic home-raised organic dinner.

They have been providing lots of entertainment and oxytocin. These wethers—neutered bucks—are now three months old, and I have them trained to be gentle with me, not jumping up or pushing. We take walks in the riverbed of the Santa Cruz, where they are learning to stay with the herd rather than run after some cute jogger on the Loop.

But for the pandemic, more than any other reason, I don’t think I would have had the relaxed time to hang out with the kids to the degree required for a high level of bonding and trust. It’s a gift to experience this and learn. A mature wether can carry about 25 percent of its body weight. Now, with my back not getting any younger, I’m fantasizing a future with goat walking, hiking,  and camping with Billy and Bucky as eager pack goats and Scosee Mama feeding us all.

Seasons, calendars, clocks no longer measure the passage of time for me. It rained softly for the full day of Joanna’s wake and burial. Yesterday, for the first time since then—and a whole month after the Fiesta de San Juan, the official calendar start of the monsoon—we finally got real rain again, the first monsoon rain.

Blessings noticed are marking time now.

Kathleen Williamson is a Tucson-based musician, songwriter, organic farmer, anthropologist, and attorney.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 7: We’d Go Out Dancing, by Duncan Stitt

I got lucky with this song. Usually, I get a little snippet of a melody with a phrase attached to it and I have to build a song from there. “We’d Go Out Dancing” dropped out of the sky fully formed, with the first two verses and a chorus. From there it was just a matter of filling space.

I think the inspiration for the music came from the band STEAM, who had just finished recording a CD in my studio. Their waltzes, in particular, stuck with me. One was about a dancing chicken(!), the other was a young woman getting lost in the magic of the music and her partner’s embrace. In my mind, I was seeing an outdoor barn dance, with twinkling lights strung up above the dance floor and the moonlight shimmering silver in the trees.

“People are waltzing, under the stars” was the original first line, but it didn’t lead anywhere. It was just a sentimental snapshot from our pre-Covid lives. I already had “slap on the back and a shot and a beer” in the first draft of the second verse, so I reset the first line to match: “We’d go out dancing down at the bar.” The rest of the song is, basically, my life. 

“It started out as a very good year” was based on my gig schedule before the shutdown. It had been a busy season, between lucrative C&W band gigs and the Paul Green blues band on the side. When the shutdown hit, my old-school monthly planner became useless. I had no gigs and no studio clients, so I spent the next eight weeks remodeling the recording studio for social distancing, adding a separate entrance, a partition, a couple of exhaust fans, and a UV light in the A/C system. 

It took a couple of weeks to finish off the lyrics. Even after getting past the first draft, it seems I’m always stuck with one weak line that lingers, much like a mosquito when you’re trying to go to sleep. Suddenly, a new line pops up and the mosquito is gone. It can be maddening, but also rewarding in the end. 

This song isn’t particularly profound, it’s just a snapshot of a moment in time. Fortunately, I’ve moved on from that moment. My calendar is no longer gathering dust in a drawer, the recording studio is getting some bookings, and I’m feeling better about what’s to come. I do feel bad for all the venues and restaurants and their unemployed workers. It’s such a shame our country couldn’t have handled this better, but that’ll be covered in another song, no doubt. For now, all we can do is hope Dr. Fauci is right about a vaccine coming. I’m dying to go out and eat someone else’s cooking.

Duncan Stitt has been a longtime presence on the Tucson music scene, playing with the Saddle City Band in the 1980s and with John Coinman, Kevin Pakulis, and many other local musicians today. A recording artist and producer, he was the music director for the Last Waltz 50th Anniversary Show at the Fox Theater and the piano player and songwriter for David Fitzsimmons’s Old Pueblo Radio Show. Visit him at www.duncanstitt.com.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 6: A Letter from the Dampendic, by Howe Gelb

Hello Greg. 

Well. It’s about bedtime. 2:31 AM

And today is still Sunday. 

I have not forgotten your invitation to partake in taking part of the daily grind of covid.

I started to write it several times and it never really came out like what I had been doing. It read more like a call to arms. Which weirded me out. 

I’ve noticed there’s been a permanent patina of depression for around 6 months or so that I figured was just like what it’s like when we get this old and not have a bevy of diversions to remedy during pre-pandemia. 

So I chose to see it as a new allergy. Something ya learn to live with. Some days a little gets done. Other days not so much once summer hit. And the monsoons quit. And even back when the Catalinas had their fire time. It’s impossible to tell. 

Although I woke up yesterday and felt great again. My son has had to leave college and come home. Took up a job delivering for amazon. What other jobs are there? He and I went down to the covid test site for a father son date. When we self swabbed, it caused a barrage of rapid fire sneezing by us both inside the truck cab so that if one of us was a covid culprit, we had just bombarded each other. Hilarious. 

An hour later both results came back negative. (Walgreens on Valencia & 12th. )

So. We took the day. Got some take out and ambled about the roadway with windows down at 108 and it felt fine. We drove around all day. This and that. Eventually got more take out. And even when I was back in bed around midnight, the son felt like getting a burger at in and out. Which is where we go to then park and babble about life and any lack of. Earlier that day we also managed to get in some exclusive indoor court time for an hour. That was huge. He had not been privy to an indoors court for 6 months since his basketball world came crashing to a halt when his school and team shut down. 

The next morning I woke up with no depression. The old spirit had returned. 

Anyhow, just before the dampendic hit, I had made the decision to quit touring anyway. Something about it signaled it was time to stop. So. I figured out a way to do that and buy an abandoned house everyone thought was condemned because the walls were falling down. However, since I had been a renter there 27 years ago, I had some inside knowledge of what was really wrong with it. 

It’s the same place I lived in when the 90s began and held such promise before they went topsy turvy and impeded. The week it finally fell back into my care, the UK record label coincidentally was rereleasing the album that featured the home in its artwork.

Somehow the home and all its haunting memories impossibly called me back in.

The plan was to work on that house everyday instead of touring. Then touring shut down anyway all around us. That in itself is a sea change that doesn’t seem to generate the attention it deserves due to all the other sea changes occurring at the same time: social injustice unrest, unparalleled unemployment, disastrous pandemic handling resulting in tremendous death and despair, tragic global warming condition escalating and in general a grand lack of inspired leadership in these uncharted waters of sea change galore. 

For the music maker, the era of Spotify had stolen the back-end income of touring by gutting all royalties from recorded works. This forced all recordists to have to tour more in hopes of maintaining their livelihood. The more touring you do, the less your value expands because of the relative saturation of your availability. This slow motion train wreck is a recipe for home wrecking too. When pandemia hit, the wrecks weren’t even an option anymore. This dampendic has killed off more creative prowess than can be processed and in its place came a torrent of terribly lit and awful sounding bedroom iPhone concerts whereby every right handed player was portrayed as playing left handed now. What was left of the music world had literally turned sideways. 

I kept working on the house. Some days it’s monumental. Other days it’s just mental. But as hard as it’s been to tear down and rebuild walls, update wires, find new used parts & windows, score & plaster, plumb pipes, delegate a crew of one or two pandemically, accidentally destroy stuff trying to fix it and then paint endlessly  . . . it’s way easier than touring with jet lag. 

When the shutdown hit, the house was a steady gig. A job you have to pay to work at. 

It’s been like that now for 6 months while the world has cocooned. 

During this time many songs have come this way anyway. I have a simple screen-less home setup and have been recording hours of original piano songs I’ve never bothered to learn. Since they are as loud as a whisper  but seem to roar during this time of stillness, I’ve put them out on bandcamp and blatantly titled the album Cocoon. 

Also, my co-writer director and I have been working on finishing a film we were lucky to have shot just before pandemia forbade further production. It’s a western you don’t have to take acid to see because it’s already embedded into it. 

So maybe I’ve just finished your assignment here trying not to. 

All I know is I’ve always been suspicious of the man made clock and now I know why. It was never really real. The sacred clock is another matter however. It knows when is when and what is not. 

There is no man made time anymore. And when we think of how relentless and insane travel was before all this, it makes some sense that something had to give. To snap. To come crashing. 

For all the front liners and folks with sickened loved ones, and those themselves befallen with the virus, along with the torrent of visuals depicting brutal systematic killings and abusive protest responses, it’s all been an unbearable sadness to withstand. We are changed. We have been deprogrammed from the brainwashing of our previous existence. 

Back when the virus was headed this way, I’d begun a regime of natural immunity boosters and maybe it helped. There had been a coupla times when something invasive was attempting to pounce, but it didn’t take hold. 

I will end with some advice. Gargling with mezcal is an essential practice. It’s no joke. It’s actually mezidicinal. 

Love,

Howe
Howe Gelb has been making music in Tucson since the 1970s. Find his latest album, Cocoon, and other releases here.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 5: Loving Nature in the Time of COVID, by Roseann Hanson

In January 2020 I was in a planning meeting with colleagues at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, where I am coordinator for the Art and Science Program.

Someone suggested that we start offering online learning experiences, that it was the wave of the future for all universities. (Biosphere 2 already has a robust, impressive lineup.)

I smiled, noted the suggestion, and quickly changed the subject. I’ll admit to inwardly rolling my eyes and scoffing in disdain. Online? For nature-oriented learning? Our specialty is teaching science and art through direct field experiences. We teach field sketching, nature journaling, nature writing—all of which relies on being . . . in nature. Online is for people with no soul, no sense of reality, no adventure!

By the end of February I was just finishing up a new book, Nature Journaling for a Wild Life, which was all set to debut in the booth my husband and I have rented for several years at the Tucson Festival of Books in mid-March. We’ve written many books on natural history, outdoor adventure, and Southwestern short stories, and always do well at the festival and meet many readers and make new friends. 

With this new book I was excited to sing the praises of learning to practice “intentional curiosity” as the core of nature journaling: to ask questions, to dig deeper, to focus one’s mind both intently and intentionally. In the book I suggest that we learn about nature by learning to see, not just look. By drawing to learn (not learning to draw), we also succeed in practicing a very satisfying and healing kind of meditation.

I had the booth prepped; new posters and promotions printed; talks planned; and looked forward to a busy summer already filled with sold-out nature workshops, events, and adventure guiding gigs . . . and then. COVID. 

Cancellations. Lockdown. Income zero, overnight.

In the first month it was just pretty much being stunned, glued to the computer reading horror stories, watching our country fail. 

But then a funny thing happened. My book sales took off. People were desperate for something to bring them inner peace, to take them away from these horrors.

Membership in the Facebook group The Nature Journal Club grew from 9,000 to 15,000 in just a month, and a small group of us started offering fellow members Zoom “meetups” to nature journal online. We had no idea what we were doing but just jumped in with crude tutorials and demonstrations. I figured out how to use my iPad as a document camera to demonstrate live sketching and watercolor.

Interest exploded. Soon our little club gatherings format was too small, so I started offering free online workshops on Zoom through my own business, the Field Arts Institute, on our website.

Not happy with just “show and tell,” I started working with a friend who is the field program coordinator for Stanford University’s School of Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences. We developed a fun way to take our students on virtual field trips using the latest 360-degree viewer experiences either through university resources (ASU and University of Worcester in the UK have excellent ones) or the new Google Earth tours.

Ryan and I took students on field trips to Tuolumne Meadow in the Sierras and the Lake District National Park in northern England. Then Ryan got busy in his online teaching for Stanford, so I continued on my own and have since taken students on field sketching and nature journaling field trips to Sabino Canyon, the Dragoon Mountains, Yellowstone National Park, and Botswana.

As many as 150 people have registered for my virtual field trips, joining from all over the world. This never could happen in person—this meeting of like-minded people just for a morning, to enjoy a wild place together, learning about plants and geology and wildlife and conservation issues.

A group of 300 middle school students (four classes in one school) used my book, which I gave them free in PDF form, as their text book for the first virtual “BioArt” fusion class and it was a huge success: kids in Boston learning to sketch leaves and observe birds and ask questions about nature they never even thought about. 

On Summer Solstice, a group of people in The Nature Journal Club even organized a global nature journaling event, with people from all corners of the earth measuring the sun’s arc throughout the day, sketching diagrams, and sharing them on Zoom the next day. We had a father and son in South Africa comparing their pages with a woman in Ontario, and a family in India showing their results in comparison to someone’s observations in Brisbane.

I don’t think any of this would have come to pass if not for COVID.

And as much as I have come to love this global reach, there is one aspect I had not counted on that took me by surprise and brought me to tears. I had several people let me know that they loved the virtual field trips because they are disabled and could never do these adventurous “hikes” and safaris in the reality that is their life.

And thus I’ve spun 180 degrees, and learned not just to accept teaching Nature in the Time of COVID. I now love it. I think it is here to stay, and I’m glad.

Will it replace in-person nature explorations? No, not a chance. And best of all I think it will encourage many thousands—hopefully tens of thousands—to learn to love nature, and that means more will want to see it protected. Mission accomplished.

Roseann Hanson is a naturalist and explorer who has been keeping nature journals for more than 35 years. She studied journalism and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona and has worked in the American Southwest, Mexico, and East Africa as a conservationist, naturalist, and writer. Visit her at http://www.exploringoverland.com.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 4: Petey Mesquitey’s Pandemic Report, by Petey Mesquitey

Petey Mesquitey was born and raised in Kentucky and came west to attend the University of Arizona. In the spring of 1980, after some years of college and ten years of playing country music in bars around the Southwest, he applied for a job as a laborer in a wholesale nursery. As he likes to say, 40 years on, “Doggone it, I’m still a laborer in a nursery!”

In May 1992 he recorded and aired his first “Growing Native” radio show on KXCI-FM, our community radio station. Every week ever since, to this very day, he has regaled listeners with stories of the flora and fauna found in the wild borderlands of southeastern Arizona.

Petey and Mrs. Mesquitey live on a small homestead near the Chiricahua Mountains with their dogs and cats and various other critters both domestic and wild.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 3: Wild at Dawn, by Lydia Millet

What’s mostly kept me going is my writing. But even a sedentary person needs fresh air and a bit of natural light. So in the spring of the pandemic, before it got hot, I’d go running in the morning along a trail near my house, in the western part of the national park. When I use the term run, in this context, it’s mostly because it’s quicker to say than “slowly, awkwardly jog.” Have no fear: you don’t need to picture a sleek, self-righteously fit athlete and feel irritated/envious. I’m typically outfitted in compression tights for a creaky knee and hip, plus weird, armored-looking ankle-and-calf gaiters I wear as a rattlesnake defense—I’ve leapt over several in my time, but someday, I figure, one of those sleepy jokers will wake up suddenly and surprise me. I also wear an elaborate hat, sunglasses, and earbud setup, since I can’t run without music, and a geeky water-vest apparatus with ugly-looking, intermittently slimy feeding tubes that flops as I go. I love the desert, true, but I also value the trail for its solitude. Even when no plague has descended over the land, I don’t care to risk encountering my fellow humans. As a jogger I demand nearly complete invisibility. Though I do like to see other animals, jackrabbits and mule deer mostly. I tell myself they’re not inclined to judge.

When it got hotter, I couldn’t get up early enough. I’m not intrepid and I can’t stand to exert myself outside once the temperature at 7 a.m. hits the 80s. I lapsed into inertia and focused more on drinking mail-order wine at the cocktail hour. It was biodynamic, though, so 100-percent healthy. But I did make a couple of excursions into the White Mountains, where my children spent a week in a so-called pod with their friends’ family for a break in the quarantine monotony. Up there I decided not to run, not wishing to subject my hosts to the spectacle of me in my compression tights and water vest. There’s a psychological limit to hospitality, and I try to respect it. Instead I went for quiet early-morning walks in the forest. There I saw lupines blooming, a small herd of feral horses, and an Abert’s squirrel that maybe had a nest nearby and got angry at me, chuffing and slapping a tree trunk until I retreated. My favorite part was the sound of the wind moving the ponderosa pines.

Lydia Millet is a Tucson-based writer. Her latest novel is A Children’s Bible (see here for an excerpt). Visit her at www.lydiamillet.net.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 2: Valentine’s Day, by Gabrielle Pietrangelo

Gabrielle Pietrangelo is an independent musician and teacher based in Tucson. You can find her latest release at www.gabriellepietrangelo.com or find her on most music streaming platforms. Enjoy this beautiful contribution to “Tucson COVID Tales”…

Tucson COVID Tales No. 1: I Miss, by Peg Bowden

I MISS

grocery shopping without fear
sipping a perfect martini at a classy bar
Tucson Symphony concerts
piano improvisation duets with John and his clarinet
hugs
my kids
learning Dungeons and Dragons with my grandson
Art receptions and art walks
potlucks
my brother Chuck
talking politics in someone’s living room
flute and piano sessions with Jerry
a campfire on a lake with family
riding in Panchito’s ambulance
playing the timpani with the Green Valley Band
the morning prayer at el comedor
teaching English in 100 degree heat in Nogales, Sonora
fish tacos with Pancho
Ronin (g-daughter) playing her ukulele
shrugging off a minor sore throat or cough
cheek kisses in Mexico
dressing up to go somewhere
a president who talks in complete sentences
dinner parties
breakfast at The Goods with the Wild Women of Tubac
driving to Puerto Peñasco right now
bookstores 
patio dinners with friends
Ashland Shakespeare Festival
hopping on a plane to anywhere
sharing a condo with girlfriends on a beach
airports and people-watching
a family reunion in Iowa
hello hugs, goodbye hugs
being dirty and not worrying about it

—Peg Bowden

Peg Bowden grew up in Tucson, left for 30 years, and came back, like most authentic desert rats. In pre-COVID days, she spent time in Nogales, Sonora, trying her best to upend the draconian and inhumane immigration policies of the US government. She has written two books: A Land of Hard Edges and A Stranger At My Door. Peg lives on a ranch in the San Cayetano mountains with her husband, two dogs, a feral cat named Tamale, and a lot of open-range cattle.

Send us your written work, poems, video clips, photographs, or some other expression of what you’ve been creating or doing during the pandemic. Offer advice, confess to slothfulness, celebrate having down time, lament the extra burdens that the plague has imposed, share beauty—whatever your response, we’d like to hear from you and consider your work for publication on social media, on our web page, and/or in some future edition of Zócalo. Email editor@zocalotucson.com