Breadcrumb #687
Kathryn Curto
“I see boxes. So many boxes.
A mixed bag.
Of boxes.”
***
It’s 11am and we’ve been going strong for an hour. I’m teaching in a skirt I’d never wear to work and a shirt that frames my upper body in a way that makes the day a little easier to tackle. Earrings I love and a little eucalyptus oil behind my ears and on my temples. I stare at the screen.
Breathe.
Zoom. Rhymes with room.
But a real room is where I want to be now. A real room, with walls, some windows, chairs, a table to gather around or a series of desks to arrange in an orderly fashion before I leave and say to a colleague, the professor waiting to enter, “Have a good class.”
I want to grab a coffee at the campus snack café in between classes and run into a former student who tells me her piece, the one she read in class, is being published next month and, “Yay, let’s meet up to celebrate! Email me.”
I want to circle the parking lot three times and see those bright, bodacious brake lights shining to my right. I’ll tip my blinker down, flash the quintessential car smile accompanied by the quintessential car wave, to the driver who’s leaving. Off to work or home or maybe to Target. Then I’ll slide into the spot. The parking spot. The one I prayed I’d find.
Like Dorothy says when she comes to, in the final scene of The Wizard of Oz, “But it wasn't a dream. This was a real, truly live place.” But lately I’m far from coming to. I’m still dreaming of the “real, truly live place” that was, until March 15, 2020, where I spent most days.
Campus. School. Work.
Zoom. The word rolls off our tongues now. But before Covid when I heard the word Zoom I thought, very loosely, of two things. Fast cars. And that PBS show from the 1970s for kids bigger than me who were instructed to smile wide and yell out their names to the tune of a catchy theme song that I did not remember until right now.
Zoom. Rhymes with room.
Breathe.