Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Tuesday, June 2: Black Lives Matter. All black lives, all the time. After the murders of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, within the context of hundreds of years of racism, police brutality and violence against black people, my usual diary entries felt inappropriate. As a white person, what are some things I could do to work against our violent system of white supremacy?

I can listen to and follow black leadership, particularly black women and femmes. Here are just a few of the black women local to Charlottesville that I have been able to learn from when I pay attention and listen: Lisa Woolfork, who organizes BlackWomenStitch on Instagram; Zyahna Bryant, who grew up in Charlottesville, is now a UVA student and has been a leader in the local movement for racial justice for years, is on twitter; Nikuyah Walker, the current mayor of Charlottesville, who has also been working for racial justice in Charlottesville for many years, and is on Facebook; Jalane Schmidt, who has been working towards changing the racist narrative in Charlottesville, including getting the confederate monuments removed, is on Twitter. There are many more, as well.

I can speak out against and resist white supremacy: object, call it out, say no, and participate in  protests like the ones that have been so successful in so many cities across the country in recent days.

I can donate to and support local black-led advocacy organizations. There are many in Charlottesville. Lending Hands has helped countless people, including many black women, get re-established in the community after being caught up in the criminal justice system and is a great resource for racial justice work locally. Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR) is a leader in the movement for housing justice in Charlottesville. The People’s Coalition does great work on policing and criminal justice in Charlottesville. Black Lives Matter-Charlottesville was formed in 2017 to work against white supremacy and support black people locally. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has hosted many important events on racial justice in recent years and is a center of African American history in Charlottesville. Again, these are just a few among many.

Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Tuesday, May 19: The steps in the picture above are where I smacked our former law library director in the nose. It was an accident. Taylor (the director at the time), my colleagues Micheal and Cathy, and I were on the law school front entrance steps preparing for our American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting presentation on Leadership Styles for Conflict Resolution. We were, of course, dressed as the Knights of the Round Table, as whenever Micheal, Cathy, Taylor and I did a presentation at the big annual professional conference, we always did it in costume. Cathy was Lancelot the Brave, Taylor was Galahad the Pure, Micheal was Robin the Not-So-Brave-As-Lancelot, and I was King Arthur (not sure why). Because we were cutting edge, we decided to do a videotaped opening for our live presentation. The plan was to gallop up to the steps of the law school using coconuts to mimic the sounds of our horses’ hooves—Monty Python style—and then gallop into the law school and down the main hallway to the library entrance. It would create a seamless transition to our entrance to the conference hall in Portland, Oregon later that year where we would again gallop in, clomping our coconuts, to begin our presentation. On the steps of the law school, we stood as a group to exclaim, while throwing out our arms, that we were “On a Quest for the Holy Grail of Conflict Resolution!” I apparently threw my arms out with too much gusto and caught Taylor right on the nose. I felt terrible when I saw the video afterwards, which we did not use for the presentation, as it showed Taylor doubling over in pain. Taylor has always been a pretty tough person, though. She would often tell of her childhood in Bumpass, Virginia, where it sounded like they did not have a lot other than a competitive spirit and love. She laughed off the whole nose thing, and I kept my job at the law library, for which I am grateful.

Right now, I get down some days. Working from home mostly, or going into a completely empty library once a week, I realize how much I treasure the human contact that is part of being a librarian. Without being able to see and talk with people in person—students, colleagues, patrons—it feels sometimes like all of the work is there, but none of the joy. There are days where I feel like we are stuck in something endless and unchanging. Not much good news in the world. When Taylor was the director, before she retired, we would sometimes have rough days as well. Who knows what they were: the library skylights leaking, construction projects getting overly messy, issues with librarians’ faculty status—something. I would sometimes be sitting out at the reference desk at the end of those days and Taylor would walk by on her way to head home. She would say to me, “Ben,”—in her rural Virginia accent, she pronounced my three-letter name as if it had nine letters and two syllables—“Ben, I am going home and I am going to have a cocktail. And tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to be a brand new day.” And she would smile and walk out, usually in something quite stylish. And the thing about Taylor was, that at that moment, even after however rough the day had been, I believed her.

Thursday, May 21: It’s been cloudy and cold all week here. I think somebody said maybe it’s the outskirts of Tropical Storm Arthur. I took these two pictures back on Tuesday, my day to be in the library. We’re lucky in our library that we have a lot of windows. Most of the time, with the indoor lights blazing all day and the library full and busy, you don’t always notice how much of an effect the outdoor light has on the library atmosphere. On a day like Tuesday, with no-one around, the indoor lights off, and not much sun outside, it feels particularly dark and lonely.

Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Monday, May 4: The moon is pretty tonight, bright and steady behind the quickly moving clouds. My friend William lives in Daegu, South Korea, where they have been implementing public health containment measures for much longer than we have. He is a teacher. With the pandemic, and travel restrictions, and just the normal uncertainties of life, I don’t know when I will ever see William again. I also don’t know if he looks up at the moon. But tonight it makes me feel better to know that, if he does, it is the same moon.

Tuesday, May 5: There were once goldfish in this pond in the law school courtyard. Big ones. Small ones. Gold, white, orange. All kinds. They did not disappear because of the current crisis. I think a few years ago it just became too difficult to keep relocating them during the winter months. In most years, there would be law students sitting out in the courtyard right now, relaxing under the trees in between studying for final exams. Or the law school might be setting up for one of their big alumni reunion events, where they put a tent up with all kinds of festive decorations over the pond and a dance floor right next to it. It always seems like a pretty fun occasion. The courtyard is completely empty right now—quiet except for the burbling fountain. It was just as empty ten years ago when I snuck into this courtyard on an early Sunday summer morning so that I could secretly add two more goldfish to the pond. My younger son had won them when he went to the Dogwood Festival carnival with a friend. When we are not in crisis, the Dogwood Festival takes place in April while our dogwoods are in bloom and the carnival runs for the full duration of the festival in one of our city parks. It’s a classic traveling carnival with games, fried food, and rides that seem to have a little too much duct tape and for which you know they lost the assembly instructions decades ago. The Ferris wheel is only about 50 feet high, but it’s about the most terrifying ride I have ever been on, because you’re just. . . not . . . sure. My son was very excited about the two goldfish he won. Then, after a couple months, he wasn’t so excited to take care of them anymore and asked if he could move them out of his room. I didn’t want to take on the difficult task of caring for goldfish, and I thought, “You know what, I bet they would be happiest amongst friends in the goldfish pond at the law school!” So, being a rule follower, I asked the building manager if there was any reason that I could not add a couple more goldfish to the pond. He laughed and said he wasn’t aware of anything stopping me. Still, I felt it best that I do it by sneaking in when no one else was around. I drove the goldfish over in their bowl (harder than you might think), snuck through the outer doors, ran over to the pond splashing half the water from the bowl onto my shirt, and dumped them in. They paused for a second in their new environment, but then swam off under some of the vegetation! You’re welcome! And no one caught me! When I went back to work that Monday, I visited the pond to see how they were doing, but it’s surprising how hard it is to tell one goldfish from another.

Tuesday, May 5, that same day: There is some pretty fun art in the law school and since the building is completely empty and quiet, I decided to walk around to take some pictures. My favorite is this painting called Pink Cow and Calf at Night by the local artist John Borden Evans. The cows are looking right at you. I like it because it is in the main hallway, right on my route from where I park my car to the library, so I pass it every morning on the way into work. Law school can be stressful and intense. There are many wonderful events and people in the school. The students are talented, creative and kind. Law school can be a challenging experience though. For the students, it is a lot of work and there can be a lot of pressure to perform, and to take all the right steps for their careers. When I walk into the main hallway on normal mornings, students are usually hurrying into the classrooms so as not to be late. I’m usually thinking about what I need to do that day, which can sometimes get busy pretty quickly. When I walk by this painting, it’s a nice reminder that, “Yeah. . . but also. . . pink cows.”

Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Tuesday, April 28: Tonight would have been grilled cheese night. “I think I’ll miss you most of all.” We have been doing grilled cheese night in the law library for about ten years. During each Fall and Spring exam period, we pick a night shortly after the first 1L exam and make hot grilled cheese sandwiches for any law student in the library. We usually serve about 130 or 140 sandwiches in an hour to the students in our myLab space. By 6:00, when we start, we have a line of students out the door of myLab, reaching all the way to the reference desk. This year, myLab is dark and the line is gone. I’m really sad about it. I miss the grilled cheese team: Micheal, who started it all with me and works the griddle right next to me; Tim, who manages the line and has never failed to catch a grilled cheese that we flipped to him; and Rebecca, who helps with the line, stands in at a griddle and does the social media stuff the rest of us don’t understand. I miss the students, who are always so polite and appreciative, even as they have to wait 20 minutes for a “grilled cheese WITH tomato” or a “grilled cheese withOUT tomato.” I miss Carol Sue, who always works late and is there every year to help us clean up at the end and sample a sandwich. I miss doing the shopping in the morning with Micheal at our local grocery store, where we always have to figure out how much cheese, bread, chips and tomatoes to get from scratch because we never write it down. I miss spending part of the afternoon with him as he prepares the cheese slices and I slice the tomatoes in our breakroom while we listen to music on his phone. I miss our outfits: aprons and matching t-shirts that my wife, Lisa, made years ago. I miss “Grilly,” our giant, grilled cheese sign that we always hang up on the window to announce the event.

Micheal and I came up with the idea a decade ago. Like most of our ideas, it was spontaneous and we committed to it 100% without thinking it through. Our original thought was to make comfort food for the students during exams, and we first decided that pancakes, bacon and sausage would be the best—breakfast for dinner. We had the foresight to realize that cooking twenty pounds of bacon and sausage would produce a lot of grease, so we decided to pre-cook them at my house and then just reheat them on the griddle that night while making the pancakes for the students. We did not anticipate just how much grease it would produce, though. In my small kitchen, we had pans of sausage and bacon going in the oven at the same time that we had several pans cooking on the stove top. In just a few minutes we were overwhelmed by hot grease. We could not find enough containers for it. Soda cans, jars, milk cartons—we filled everything we had. My house still smells like bacon grease. We also did not realize how much grease the bacon would produce even when just being reheated that night in the law library. We had one griddle going for fresh pancakes and another for reheating the sausage and bacon. We soon had a steady drizzle of boiling bacon grease pouring from the side of that one griddle and had to start running back and forth to the break room to cut up metal soda cans to catch it. As soon as we set down a quarter soda can, it would fill up and we would have to replace it. Micheal and I both ended up with cuts and burns on our hands. But it was fun and the students loved it. After that, we switched to grilled cheese and never had the same technical problems, other than the two separate occasions that we blew an electrical fuse in the library. We hope to be able to do it all again soon. I love it.

Wednesday, April 29: My library gymnastics coach says that a good developmental progression would be cartwheel, roundoff, back walkover, and then roundoff back handspring. I’m not sure. I’ve been practicing my cartwheel on the one day a week I’m in the library now, and the spots in my eyes are getting smaller, so that’s good. I think I may have done a roundoff during my life. I don’t know about a back walkover, and I am frightened about the roundoff back handspring. But I guess that’s what makes a good library gymnastics coach—they have the confidence that you don’t yet have. Plus, everyone needs goals I suppose. And at the University of Virginia, I know they are supposed to be S.M.A.R.T. goals, so here goes: (1) Specific: “Cartwheel to roundoff to back walkover to roundoff back handspring.” (2) Measurable: “Judges? ‘Ten!’ ‘Ten!’ Ten!’ ‘Eight point five.’ What!!??! You never liked me anyways.” (3) Achievable: “Don’t doubt me.” (4) Relevant. “Well. . . yeah! [eye roll]” (5) Time-based: “Camera-ready by the time our doors open back up.” Cool.

Thursday, April 30: It really is remarkable what a nice job the landscapers and grounds crew do here. I’m not in the library today, as our onsite skeleton crew is on a one-day-at-a-time rotation, so this picture is from the other day. Normally, I could not take this picture because, on any other day, there would be students at these study tables from the time I arrive to the time I leave and I wouldn’t want to bother them. When the library is empty like it is now, sometimes I notice things that I haven’t necessarily noticed as fully in all of the years that I’ve worked here. Some of our second floor study tables really do feel like they are in the middle of a forest when the light is right.

Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Tuesday, April 21: You know what is frightening? Lord Mansfield. Or at least our life-sized portrait of Lord Mansfield (shown above)—especially when you come around a corner in the dark and empty library and he is just looming there over you. It is a huge portrait and it is hung up on the wall a bit so that Lord Mansfield is a good two feet taller than you. When the library is full I usually just pass right by the portrait and I might think, “That’s a big portrait,” but that’s about it. Today, with no one else here, and the library still dark since I hadn’t yet turned on the lights, it made me stop in my tracks. Fortunately, like my hero Beaker, I’m not one to get flustered easily. I don’t know Lord Mansfield, but I do know that he looks mean in our picture. Or at least he looks stern. And I actually think “stern” is the same thing as “mean,” except that some people think that being “stern” is a leadership quality. Anyways, if I was ever getting my portrait done, first of all, I would choose a different wig. But also, I would hope that my family and friends would say, “Hey. . . Ben. . . maybe a different facial expression? It’s just that you look kind of mean is all.” And I would be thankful that they said that because I’m not one who, two centuries from now, wants to be up on a wall scaring people in an empty library. Though maybe that’s a thing, because it turns out we have quite a few pieces of art that look pretty spooky when the lights are off and the building is empty.

Tuesday, April 21, later that same day. . .: You know what is even more frightening? The Basement. Most of our students think that the law library has three floors: the first floor with the circulation desk and main reading room; the second floor with its reference area, technical services department, stacks and study tables; and the third floor, with a few more books, study carrels and special collections department. We actually have four. Few people have reason to visit our basement, even though it is an open floor. It’s small, there are no study tables and it has only a small collection of books, though it includes our famous Oceans Collection. It’s the only place in our library where we have compact shelving—movable shelves that save space by opening and closing with large cranks that allow you to move an entire range of shelves by yourself. Compact shelving is pretty cool because one person can actually move hundreds of pounds of books at once as you open up one range or another to find the book you need. It also has a sinister side. When we were having it installed, I took one look at it, and asked the group “Wait a minute, what is to prevent an evil villain from cranking the shelves closed while you’re all the way at the other end trying to get a book, trapping you in the shelves at best or crushing you to death at worst?” No one had a good answer. The Basement is scary on a regular day when there are plenty of people around to rescue you. Today the library was empty, and I had to retrieve a book for a patron about a fishing community in Nova Scotia, which, of course, was in our Oceans Collection in The Basement. 

I took the elevator down, knowing that I would absolutely faint if the doors opened and there was anyone standing there. I tried to remember my training from years ago as part of the Scooby Gang (one of the Library staff’s yearly Halloween costume themes). “Be brave like Daphne. Daphne wouldn’t be scared. Daphne is not afraid.” Thankfully, when the doors opened, I was greeted only by an empty hallway. I scooted back to the Oceans Collection, cranked open the shelves, dashed down to our three copies of OCEANS 35.2 CAN .A8812, grabbed Copy 1, and hightailed it back to the elevator and up to the safety of my office on the second floor. Whew! Time for some Scooby Snacks, or whatever it was that Scoob and Shaggy used to smooth themselves out after high anxiety. I can’t remember.

Wednesday, April 22: I emailed the library director to ask if we could replace the portrait of Lord Mansfield with a portrait of me, just so it’s less scary. I haven’t heard back. I’m picking out my outfit.

Top photo: Sir William Murray, Lord Mansfield, 1932, by Paolo Troubetzkoy.

Chronicles of sadness and strangeness in the time of COVID-19

Thursday, April 9: There is a path behind the law school. It goes over a stream. When the building is full of people and energy and excitement, it is a nice place to go to pause and take some breaths before heading back to the project on which you’ve been working. Now that the building is empty and locked down, it is nice place to go after a rain storm to watch the water splashing off mossy rocks and think, “Oh! It is going to be ok.” Even if just for a minute.

Friday, April 10: I cried today.

Monday, April 13: “Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim!” . . . “Beeeeeeeeeeen!” We’ve been greeting each other this way for years. There is an inflection on the end now, though: kind of a sigh, or a hollow laugh—an understanding that we don’t know exactly where we are right now. There are some people in the building, but they are always at a distance. Tim has been a stalwart part of our onsite library skeleton crew these past weeks. On the days that I’m there, it has always been good to see him, even if briefly and from far away. It gives me some reassurance when all of the other offices and workspaces are dark. A couple of weeks ago I saw one of the electricians here that we all know. I was on the second floor and heard his immediately recognizable voice talking on his phone, along with the jangle of his large key ring. I ran to our balcony and hailed him as he walked through our main reading room below. He smiled. That felt good. He said he was ok and staying safe and was also part of a skeleton crew taking care of emergencies and keeping the buildings running while everyone is gone. We agreed that we had never seen anything like this before. Last week, I also happened to see one of the people on the team doing the crucial public health work of keeping the building clean. We’ve worked together at the law school for a long time—he’s been here one year longer than I have—but we never see each other because we work different shifts. He said he was also staying safe. We agreed that these were scary times. He said he felt the most bad for the students because they were missing out on the full law school experience.

Tuesday, April 14: Staring at the long expanse of empty carpet, I thought, “I wonder if I can still do a cartwheel?” We have an extremely long runway of carpet on our second floor. For library folks in the know, it stretches all the way: from our American Law room (the KFs!), past our state codes (KA-KW!), in between our CFR (KF!), U.S. Codes (KF again!) and secondary reference materials (A-Z!), past our coffee station, through microfilm and government documents (SuDocs A-Y 4!), and ending at the 700-pound sculpture in between the Law Review and Virginia Journal of International Law offices. When I was new at the law library, I once offered to help lift that sculpture onto a cart so that it could be moved to a different location. The sculptor said, “Yeah. . . how about you stand back and let these guys do their work?” I was now gazing down to that sculpture, 300 feet away, and trying to remember the last time I had done a cartwheel. It may have been 20 years ago. I realized the only thing that had ever stopped me from doing a cartwheel here before was that this expanse was usually populated by students at the many study tables and standing desks. There was no one here to see me now. What could go wrong? I limbered up by setting my keys and phone down on one of the shelves in American Constitutional Law. And then . . .Yes! Got it on the First Try! Well, not really. First try was a little crooked, and my feet definitely came down too early. I was also dizzy, which I did not remember happening before. So, I tried again, and . . . it felt right! Like I remembered a cartwheel feeling. Though I now had these interesting spots floating across my eyes. I decided that was good for the day. I asked the library director if we could spring-load the floor so that my future routines could be more explosive. She said no.