Clintonville Spotlight

Documenting this past year has been critical to coping



On Feb. 11, after 335 days since exiting his school doors, my fifth-grader walked back in for his last “first day” of elementary school. The night before his return I found myself looking back over each one of those days in what I hashtag in my IG feed as #thenewnormal, #thecovidlife.

Yet after almost a year, I’m not clear that anything feels normal to me.

I’m a documentarian – sometimes with words, always with photographs. On the day the world seemed to come to a screeching halt, Friday, March 13, 2020, 13 people tested positive for Covid-19.

In an all-too-familiar scene, the Tien children Calliope and Taran crowd around a table to participate in a virtual discussion. Families throughout Clintonville have been using online options for education, work and entertainment. (Spotlight photo by Rebecca Tien) More photos in gallery linked below.

I was sent on a flurry of assignments to capture stories before it was no longer possible to do so. Half of those stories never saw the light of day: opening-day preparations at the ballpark that never opened; the sustainability initiatives of a local restaurant that has been left barely sustaining itself; the madness of the TP run at the grocery store and the book run at the library before they shut their doors to the public; and the heartbreaking final dress rehearsal for a high school musical whose cast members never had their opportunity to shine.

By the following Monday, the number of positive cases had increased to 50.

I remember telling my children when I picked them up on that last day, “In three weeks, when this is over, we’ll invite all our friends over for a big ice cream sundae party” – silently knowing the time probably would stretch far longer than that. But we stayed optimistic. We planted a victory garden, drew rainbows on our windows to cheer passersby on the street, serenaded the elderly neighbor in a now infamous front-stoop concert, and like the butt-end of the worst pandemic joke, learned how to bake sourdough. Three weeks turned into three more turned into 335 days.

During the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when I left the house only to replenish groceries, the streets felt strangely quiet, almost apocalyptic. People hurried past each other, barely looking up, and grocery shopping felt like entering a war zone. The stay-at-home order was extended from early April, to early May to May 29.

Then on May 25, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis and people defied lockdown throughout the country, pouring out of their homes and onto the streets. Protests, mainly peaceful, continued for weeks and I was there to document them as well, from the small gathering on a Clintonville corner to the marching of hundreds through the Downtown streets into the historically Black Bronzeville neighborhood. I worried about the crowd but wanted to be present to tell a story that mattered.

Many of the stories I’ve told this year, though, have been quiet ones of home and family. I was moved by my daughter’s gracious acceptance of her Zoom birthday tea party in April and delighted by my son’s unbridled joy when we finally found an unpopulated spot in a Metropark creek for swimming in June.

I helped a couple greet their newborn and bore witness as a proud teenager read from the Torah from the confines of his own home, sharing this rite of passage through the Zoomiverse. I grieved the loss of a friend at a memorial service in a park because restrictions didn’t allow for a funeral.

We built a chicken coop and jumped on the trampoline for hours and explored every last inch of our back yard when there was nowhere else to go. My children’s annual “back to school” photo was snapped barefoot on our front stoop before heading off to their computers.

Their tears over the endless “No’s” to various outing requests and frustrated meltdowns over endless Zoom meetings and asynchronous school days have been equally fair game in my documentation of our “day in the life” when life looks so weirdly different than anything we’ve known previously. Yet, call it pandemic fatigue or evolutionary adaptation, we’ve also found rhythm and acceptance after a year of so much change.

My lens is my memory keeper for myself, and others. Although I’ve had far less time to do it, I am deeply grateful for my work. Witnessing these stories, and using the camera to step back from the moment as an observer, has given me the chance to process events and circumstances that might otherwise have been overwhelming.

I am moved and inspired to tell the stories of my family, my neighborhood and my city as we all find our new normal.

Rebecca Tien is a regular contributor to the Clintonville Spotlight.

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