Ted Cruz vs. The Ladies Pandemic Writing Group
Covid Diaries: Process Notes of Pandemic, February 21, 2021
I have a routine for writing these blogs. Early in the quiet, still-dark morning I pour my cup of coffee, generously prepared the night before in a high tech coffee machine by my old love, then sit still on the soft couch in front of the massive black windows. My own version of the blank page. Then, I close my eyes and wait for the pictures to arise in my mind’s eye. Most weeks it is easy to find the one or two images that wiggle and squirm and beg to be examined. Recently, I read that Joan Didion wrote this way. She gave the wiggle and squirm a much more alluring name, she called it the “shimmer around the edges.” She said she used these images as a portal into her thinking. Yes, I thought, recognizing myself as I read her essay, “Why I Write.” Me too!!
But this morning there are so many images with shimmer and wiggle that I cannot choose. There is the image of a family in Texas looking forlornly out the window of their home, the children wrapped in blankets, huddled together for warmth. Of Ted Cruz getting on a plane for Cancun while millions in his state face the life-threatening conditions of biting cold and lack of food and water.
And too there is the face of the Mars Rover NASA mission team leader looking into the camera seconds after the Perseverance landed flawlessly on the planet’s surface, sudden cries of joy sounding all around him. “If we work together as a team,” he said to all of us on the other side of the camera with so much conviction in his voice that I put down the papers I was sorting through and stood at attention, “we can accomplish not just this but anything we put our minds to.”
How do all these pictures fit together, what do they want to say?
Before swooping out to Texas or Mars, let me first interrogate a picture whose edges shimmer beguilingly this morning. What I see is the Zoom image of the faces of the women in The Ladies Pandemic Writing Group, six of us this week, lined up in squares, three over three. All the faces pressed to the screen. Pressed to the words we’ve written, to each other. One of us speaks, she is back to writing again in her eightieth year. She is beautiful and smart and kind.
“Thank you so much,” she says with tears in her eyes after each of us comments on the stunning piece of hers we’ve just read. “I’d come to believe I had nothing to say. I was all turned around and feeling worthless. But now, I can go on, now I can believe in my story.”
A month after Covid swept our ordinary lives into some realm of extinction that still feels so bizarre I wonder even now if I am living in a dream state or an altered reality, I joined a writing group. There were nine women in the group, only one of whom I’d ever met. At the time it was led by the inimitable writing teacher and author, Susan Conley. We met once a week all through the dark Covid times of early spring, and into the lush summer light of August. By fall, Susan’s class had ended. But seven of us had formed such a strong bond that we decided to go on meeting without her.
If it weren’t for the group, I would never have started this blog, or believed I had anything of value to offer people through my pandemic writing. If I’d never been in that group, I would never have written the almost two-hundred page Covid Diary I will finish on March 15, a year after the beast arrived here in Maine. “You all have birthed my writing,” I told the members of the LPWG at a meeting a few weeks ago. “You have listened my words onto the page. Into existence.”
As good as that experience gets, it is matched by my delight and joy that each person in the group feels the same way about her own experience of having her words born into existence by the acute and powerful force of the group.
But let me return to Texas where some people don’t believe in joining forces with others to make their lives better. They refused to participate in a Federally regulated energy group that monitors the industry and requires life-saving updates to the system. They shrugged off the taxes, the obligations, and ultimately, their responsibility to their citizens’ lives. Individual rights, limited government, John Wayne self-sufficiency, Don’t Tread On Me and all that. And now Texans are in a State of Emergency and relief organization are begging me via email and text to help out.
People are dying. And Ted Cruz is on a beach in Cancun.
But blaming Ted Cruz, much as I relish the thought, takes responsibility away from the people in Texas who vote for people like Ted Cruz and Governor Gregory Wayne Abbott. It ignores the consequences of the ideology of nine other states which allow drivers to put “Don’t Tread On Me” stickers on their license plates. And lets off the hook those who don’t believe that the money we contribute in taxes should go to helping all of us in the group that is the United States of America stay safe, stay alive, thrive.
Yesterday I got my second vaccine shot. But I did not dance in the street or throw confetti in the air. Too many people still can’t get an appointment for the vaccine. The roll out is getting better but it is still anxiety producing. "My predecessor -- as my mother would say, God love him -- failed to order enough vaccines, failed to mobilize the effort to administer the shots, failed to set up vaccine centers,” said President Biden at a Pfizer manufacturing plant in Michigan this week. His predecessor knew nothing about teamwork.
Like Biden’s predecessor, I was raised on a mealy gruel of competition and independence. Sort of the way the energy system works in Texas. It has taken me the better part of my life to trust a group, to want to be part of a team, and, in turn, to learn how to create trust for others. And now, I think there isn’t much time left. For our planet. For our survival. If we continue on the path of competition and independence we are going to look like Texas does today: broken, cold, frightening.
Maybe we are learning. Maybe Texas and the pandemic will be great teachers. Maybe we can learn from the Rover space team as we did with Sputnik. Together there isn’t anything we can’t do.
