July 2, 2021, Starting tomorrow I will be dropping the place designation, it is yours to deduce

July 2, 2021, Starting tomorrow I will be dropping the place designation, it is yours to deduce: I used a phrase today that I made up on the spot to describe a situation that I had never imagined would come about. I have written about this before. More than a year ago when it was clear that our Wednesday afternoon porch gatherings were not going to be possible, we switched to the Zoom virtual porch. People happily came. Every Friday at 4:00 pm we would gather. Some with a glass of wine sitting in the backyard, others on a sofa in a living room. We would solve the World’s problems, talk of the pandemic, spur over politics, we grieved the loss of one of the rectangles on the screen when one of us passed away. This thing was set up by me and it was my responsibility to do the set up on Zoom and invite everyone. Every week. About 56 weeks now. I attended nearly every one of these. My nomadic body was committed to the 4 pm time. Wherever the body was. Sometimes the 4 pm became 1 in the afternoon, sometimes it was 1:30 in the middle of the night and sometimes it was 2:30 am. On somedays in the winter nights it was tricky to get up in the middle of the night. I would doze off when the others were just settling down as another week of the pandemic was over. The middle of the nights was challenging, but sometimes it would be right after a College Senate meeting or a conversation with a student, so I was already awake. On those nights it seemed easier. Whenever there was something else before or after the 4 pm gathering it made it easier to attend the meeting. The next meeting is a week from today and there is nothing else happening that Friday afternoon, so I was a little hesitant first, and was thinking of making it a Zoom meeting that anyone could run even if I could not be there. And then it struck me, I said, “I think I can surf the jet lag” and come. Because I would be new arrival to a different time zone the memories of the old time “the lag” will help me to attend the gathering, because the gathering did not need me to go anywhere. In the old days, I would have to say, “sorry I will miss the gathering,” today I was “surfing the jetlag.” In the old days, about 56 weeks ago, the meeting would have been missed because it was an analog world where the analog body resided. For the past year, our analog bodies were thrust into the digital zoom screens. Perhaps the rush to return is the rush to get the analog body back to familiar places. The seminar rooms. The classroom. The Boardroom. The cubicle in a cubicle farm nestled several floors above the ground of New Town. But what about the analog bodies of the youngsters whose analog bodies are comfortable in the digital world. To some that is a significant world they know, especially if they reached school age during the pandemic, to be able to say, “I started Kindergarten on Zoom.” How will they finish their education? I have a group coming into one my classrooms soon where they all did the last year of their school life on the screen and will be thrust back into a real room. In college. At the end of August. New realities. Most events like pandemic eventually come to an end. Or most do.  And when it does, the elation of the end is the driving force. To know it is over. The treaty has been signed. The last body recovered from the wreckage. End. Closure. I had once arranged a closure meeting for a bondhu, who was visibly relived when that missing closure was achieved. Closure is essential to move forward, as a person, as a culture. The nagging issue with the pandemic is that no one is promising closure. No one has said, other than erroneously, that this is over. In fact this might be one of those situations where closure will not be achieved. And right there I see the mismatch – you cannot go back to the time before the beginning of an event that is not over yet. You cannot turn back time – the ultimate cliché. Here you cannot surf away the lag, instead you can look at it the way Queen did in the iconic song, ’39, “Don't you hear my call though you're many years away”