Play – Page 2 – resurrecting an old blog

February, photo series

The daylight is increasing, but the evening commuters are still passing through the downtown when the sky is dark. People in the buildings across the street are getting home, too. More lights go on. I can step onto the balcony now. I can even go to the railing, which I sometimes do, and lean over to see up and down the street. One fear gone.

It is becoming clear now that something unusual, not just a bad flu, is happening. The first case arrived in Canada and we are eager for news. Some people may say patient 1 brought the disease, but it really is that patient 1 brought information. We know now that the Chinese government has not been releasing all necessary information, and that a doctor in China risking his life by speaking out to the world about what is happening has himself died of the infection.

I learn that my husband has begun a slow stocking of canned goods as well. He’s bought dried beans and lentils, which he will never eat. Not ever.

My daughter is asked to present a paper from her China studies class at an undergraduate conference. She’s excited. She’s also feeling the pain of discovering that there are courses at university that you can’t like, no matter what.

More snow. This city looks freshly cleaned, even if it’s just new snow covering the old.

Blue, photo series

Every afternoon, the blue comes. I’ve read about the math behind the blue hour. Despite all that is happening, and beginning to happen in 2020, this mathematical thing about light gives me calm. I feel connection when I better understand the world outside. I feel like a child again, daydreaming about numbers, turning them into games that were puzzles.

These games belonged to a quite space I had inside my own mind, a way to pass the long hours on the school bus, a place to escape when bored or worried. It felt like a made-up thing, not real anywhere else, and so it seemed a secret the universe was whispering to me, unspooling like an invisible thread that connected me. I felt I belonged. I felt I was embedded in the pattern itself.

The blue is a consistent comfort as the coronavirus spreads and the calm begins to break.

Snow, photo series

We settle in for winter. The snow stays. New classes start and I have dropped the one pure math class that I had intended to take. I have only applied courses, and I am finally beginning to enjoy math again.

We’re told that we choose the path we take in mathematics, but I don’t know if that’s true. I feel the path was determined by a lot of other things outside of my own choices. I hear from the students that some of the degree courses in applied math have not been offered for several semesters. Some students are switching programs, and I’m not sure where I am going from here.

We continue to watch for more news from Wuhan, China. The words continue to say it isn’t serious, but the actions are showing that it is. I wonder what it is like for the students and faculty who have family in China, how they are managing their worry.

December Break, photo series

We are home for Christmas. Sleep, food, family time.

We are beginning to hear on the news about an illness, maybe a bad flu this year. We watch the news and wonder if this is worse than what the governments in China, the US, Canada and around the world are telling us.

For a while we discuss if we should go back to London, and decide that not enough information is available to know for sure. We will stick with the plan and revise as necessary.

Exams, photo series

December is snow, rain, melting, sleet, snow…. We hardly notice. My daughter is entering her first semester final exam period. I have exams as well.

I always had a heavy reading list as an English major, but math assigns more. One book this term is nearly 800 pages, and we’ve done most of it plus additional material. My daughter shakes her head and I can hear her wondering what her upper years courses are going to be like.

“Tell me,” she says, “Why are we doing this?”

Campus, photo series

Snow comes and goes in November, and the fruit from the tree drops. It’s putrid. This thick carpet of rotting gingko fruits is amazing and disgusting all at once.

I pass by, going from a class in the Social Science building to the bus stop near the math department. I’ve never noticed the tree before. Most days, I walk with the professor after class and we usually talk about the life and times of mathematicians of the past. More recently, we both have been exposed to the idea that we are due for a pandemic. He tells me about a guest lecture he’s recently attended. I tell him about a Netflix special I watched. This day, when I’m alone, I smell the fruit. It reminds me of bad milk, like a baby has been sick.

November (2), photo series

The first day of real snow, the kind that stays as it falls and lasts the day, came on the 11th, Remembrance Day. The university doesn’t close for the day and I left for class, standing at the bus stop for too long without seeing a bus.

A young woman is in the bus shelter. She is wearing a dress, ballet flats, and cardigan. She has no socks, mittens or hat.

An older woman walks past and calls out that the buses aren’t going through the downtown. “You have to walk to Richmond,” she says. “There’s a parade today.”

I thank her, and the young woman does the same. “I don’t know where I’m going,” the young woman says to me.

As it turns out, she is going to campus. She’s a master’s student at the business school. I ask her if she’s cold, if she’s certain she wants to go through the day without winter clothes.

She tells me she is homesick for India, for the heat and the people, and wants to dress like its summer, to feel closer to home. Then she says, “I know I sound like I’m crazy. I am depressed. There’s no sun here, it does strange things to the body.”

She tells me she has a degree in psychology from Stanford and as we walk, I listen to her talk about her Stanford experiences and how she felt as a student there is very different than how she feels here. It’s more than a lack of sunshine; here she observes less collegiality among her classmates, more pressure to perform and little freedom to make mistakes. This leads to less exploration, fewer risks, an unsatisfactory learning experience.

I’ve also been in programs without a grade curve policy, and it is different. Here, my faculty has policies that explicitly restrict the majority of grades to a certain range. High enough to pass, too low for grad school.

It’s a thing now to be academic. I think some of the kids get here out of high school, expecting to become professors and researchers. They quickly learn to do the math, count how many are going to get through, and decide which ones it will be. Group strategy is to break up the workload, each doing some, and then trade answers with each other. You have to be in the group to get the answers and the conversation about how the problems are solved. Belonging is a way of excluding. I’ve been watching two students being culled from their group. The emotions of exclusion become another weight.

I exchange contact information with the young woman from the bus stop as we ride the bus to campus and talk. I text her once after, but I don’t hear from her. My daughter is surprised. “You never give out your number.”

November (1), photo series

matching cars and one red. London. November 2019

Leaves have dropped on most of the trees by November. There are black squirrels in the neighbourhood. I eat my breakfast at the window so I can watch them run the gutters of the house below. I can’t see what they do with the leaves they carry up there. I know they also take food to the house roof tops sometimes. There are oak trees and walnuts here, and the squirrels gather the nuts and acorns. Squirrels are a constant. They live here, and they live back home in Regina.

I tell my oldest daughter about the squirrels. She is taking a gap year. She’s determined that the usual path after high school is not one-size fits all, despite the pressure to believe that it is. She’s decided not to grow or shrink to make it fit. She has my blessing, but I miss her and sometimes its hard not to tell her I wish she were with us.

Night rain, photo series

In all the places I’ve lived before, rain quiets people. They disappear home, to shelter, to work. This is not the case in London.

We live in the downtown area. There are shelters and food kitchens that we could see if we lived on the other side of the building. Down the road is a large tent city that Google doesn’t show.

I’ve been told London has one of the largest homeless populations in Canada. I don’t know if this is still true since Covid. But when it rains, people hurt. They shout. They argue. They howl.

Living here has changed how my daughter thinks about security, shelter, food, and especially money. She isn’t casual about it now, like most teenagers her age, less certain that it will always be there.

We enter a rainy phase in October. The afternoons get dark early, and the world washes away during the worst of the downpours.

Finally, photo series

The first time I lived in London I was staying in a room on the main floor of a house. The trees were like awnings, covering over the sky. It was beautiful, but cloistered.

We are above the trees this time and the sky is beautiful. Changeable, like a personality with moods and passion.

I get to the balcony rail. I can touch it, but not lean over. It’s close enough that it doesn’t show in the photos. There’s still a time limit, as though each second compounds the likelihood of disaster–a black swan event counting down–so I don’t stay out for long.