In the second grade, we learned about ones and tens and hundreds. Our school had just received bright yellow plastic cubes and rods to show us how these numbers worked together. Ones were tiny cubes, about the size of a dime, delightful to hold in the palm of your hand or listen to scatter under a desk when it fell down. A rod was a group of ten cubes, neatly lined up and solidified, ready to be sorted into groups to make those larger numbers (thirty, forty, fifty, we chanted). Finally, ten rods could be pressed together to make a hundred, a slab of one hundred cubes with perfect grid lines, brilliant yellow.
What I remember most about these yellow cubes and rods and slabs were what happened when we asked about larger numbers. Our teacher one day stacked ten slabs together and secured them with a rubber band and triumphantly held up a thousand. A thousand! But we were children and we wanted to know the whole universe. What would ten thousand look like? One hundred thousand? One million?
So our teacher went to the copy room and photocopied one of the hundred slabs over and over and over again. Then we spent weeks constructing cubes with scotch tape and scissors to cut out the big squares. Our crowning achievement was displaying our thousands of thousands down the hallway outside our classroom, around the corner, past the library, and on and on. We were children and we triumphed to see the numbers stretched to their limits. The thousands stayed up for months until it was recycled. When I think of that hallway with its painted cinderblock walls and pale green tiled floor, I think of the concept of one million stretched around me in haphazardly taped squares of paper.
It has been a year of numbers. I look at the graphs everyday, the soaring parabola, the unfathomable six digits of the dead, forever rising, rising. I feel like it is my responsibility to bear witness to the numbers, to sear them to memory. The number of Americans who have died of Covid is greater than the population of St. Louis. Is it morbid to want to digest the numbers, or is it reality? There is no wrong way to meet catastrophe, especially if one does not have a reference point for it.
I’ve always loved calendars for the same reason I loved cutting and taping and making cubes of thousands in the second grade. I like to see time quantified, both for how it measures what has happened and to try and scale the possibility of the future. In August of 2019 I treated myself to a fancy eighteen month planner. It was navy blue with the year 2020 emblazoned in bright florals and gold font. The design became faded and scratched from the planner being haplessly tossed in my bag for more than a year. But mostly it just seemed like a joke. Within a few weeks of using the planner, my step father was dead. The pandemic upended the world. The country continued to uphold white supremacy over racial justice. The wedding was postponed, the stickers I’d used to mark the blocks of days for vacations and flower pick ups and parties and family arriving were laughable whenever I turned the page and saw them. What use was a planner now?
I almost didn’t buy a new calendar for 2021, but then I thought, I want to see the days. I want to let go of what did and did not happen in my small slice of life last year and just look at the marvel of time stretched out before me. In the last weeks of 2020 I thought about the Jane Kenyon poem Otherwise when I woke up in the morning - I got out of bed / on two strong legs / It might have been / otherwise. (It’s a poem that hasn’t aged well in the idea of ableism, but the sentiment of the poem is what I still return to.)
I keep a calendar to remind of otherwise. Here is the day, the present, the calendar year, and it could always be otherwise. If I could photocopy and cut and tape the shape of this year and see it before me, I would. Instead I have only the paper, the scissors before me. The possibility of bigger questions. What will it look like? Aren’t we lucky to find out?
xo,
c
p.s.
Love and blessings to everyone in the new year! If you’re looking for astrological guidance, Chani Nicholas recently launched an astrology app that I’ve found abundant and helpful in orienting myself to the year ahead.
Join me on January 30th at the Hudson Valley Writers Center! I’m very excited to be teaching a course via Zoom - all writers welcome. We’ll be looking at creative containers for creative nonfiction (hello, new shapes for personal essays), with lots of prompts to inspire new stories and new ways of viewing them. Details here!
What will the best books of 2021 be? There are tons of great titles coming out - I’m banking on the new Audacious Book Club by Roxane Gay for twelve recommendations that will surely be knock outs (scroll down for the list!)
The best thing I baked in 2020: the classic jammer cookie by Dorie Greenspan.
For my fellow New Yorkers: Next Step Hudson Valley is organizing folks to contact their representatives to support the bill to decolonize education and support culturally-responsive curriculum. You can sign the petition and learn how to contact your reps here.