Flashback Friday
Given that a deadly virus is in the news again, I thought I’d use today to flashback to the virus that created the most recent global pandemic. People are worried, and rightly so, that the hantavirus will affect us like Covid did. The experts are almost certain that it won’t, which is good. Another global pandemic so soon after the last one would be even more devastating than Covid, I think. We are still feeling the effects of the one in 2020. We don’t need another one so soon, or really, ever again.
But since Covid is on the minds of lots of people, I thought I’d throw it back to the journal I kept during the lockdown. As a teacher during that year, there wasn’t a day to prepare the students for what was coming up. We left school on Friday, March 13th thinking we would be back on Monday. And technically, we were. But the students weren’t. The teachers came into the building that day so that we could help parents clean out their children’s lockers and desks. They took home all of their textbooks and notebooks and any other materials that would help them with what we initially thought, would be only 2 weeks of at-home learning.
The kids naturally had questions and concerns prior to this. So while we couldn’t prep them for learning at home because we didn’t know if it would happen, I did tell them that regardless of what happens, they should keep a journal through this. I impressed upon them the importance of documenting what they were experiencing so they could share it with future generations. I emphasized that they were living through history.
I don’t know if any of them actually did it, but I did. I didn’t write a full on entry for every day that we were locked down, but I did make frequent notes. Many times it was to write down what I was hearing on the news. I kept a list of buzz words that I was hearing repeatedly on news broadcasts. I wrote about what was happening in my daily life in addition to what was going on in my state and the country and world as a whole. My observations and notes were kept in my writer’s notebook. I taught my students each year how to keep a notebook like that. I use it now for jotting down my own thoughts and ideas for writing pieces.
I filled up many pages in my notebook over the course of the first year of the pandemic. I won’t transcribe all of it because it’s quite a lot, but here are photos of some of the pages.
The first page:
This is the third page. The list of buzz words is fascinating. These were fairly new terms back then. There was a uniqueness to them at the time. Almost a vocabulary novelty. Now, they blend in with all other words because they have been used repeatedly, exhaustively for the past six years.
Two months later…
This is the final entry. One year later…
Here are two other notes that I made about things happening in the news:
7/29/2020–North Carolina’s agriculture commissioner announced today that the state fair in October is cancelled. Not enough people would come to justify the millions of dollars it would cost to put it on. This is the 1st time since World War II that it has been cancelled.
8/3-8/4– Hurricane Isaias came through North Carolina as a Category 1. Because of Covid, people were encouraged to evacuate to friends and family or a hotel rather than shelters. They were open though. Symptoms and temperatures would be checked at the door.
I have other tidbits in here about things happening nationwide with the president and the election and the murder of George Floyd, but in the interest of not getting political, I’ll skip those parts. I wrote facts, but also opinions, just sayin’.
I don’t know that the information I documented will ever be shared anywhere other than here. I’m sure in my actual journal I have further commentary during this time. So that will perhaps make the cut for my book, but I don’t think this is going anywhere. It’s still interesting to look back at though. I remember very vividly being glued to the t.v. every time the news was on so that I could write down the latest statistics and what decisions had been made about reopening and other relevant issues.
Hopefully we don’t have another situation like that again. One global pandemic is enough for one lifetime.
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