We are doing fine here and trying our best to adjust and cope with all the changes Coronavirus has wrought in our local communities. Our school is doing okay under the circumstances and has entered a new partnership, which is a real silver lining in a bunch of dark clouds. We are very happy to be partnering with our local refugee friends and some of our immigrant school parents on our THREAD (Together for Hope, Resilience, Empowerment, and Development) Project, a fair-trade sewing cooperative housed at Imago Dei, paying our partners to sew all-cotton face masks at home (sewing machines and all materials and supplies included). To date, since March of this year, they have sewn more than 15,000 masks, earning money and helping to protect public health in Pima County.
Our local refugee partners are originally from a number of different countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our immigrant school parent partners are originally from Mexico. We are proud to be partnering with all of them, and fighting the Coronavirus together, on the THREAD Project here. For more info, please see: imagodeischool.org/thread/
When the quarantine began for me on March 19, I was six months into a period of creating art works after a 15-year hiatus. I had been inspired to begin again by a chance online encounter with a well-known Irish artist, Emlyn Boyle. We became friends on Facebook, and he encouraged me to resurrect my long-abandoned artistic endeavors, making crow quill dip pen and India ink drawings. And furthermore, he persuaded me to post the results on social media to see what sort of reaction I would get. After a period of experimentation with no specific concrete narrative, mostly abstractions that were received with enthusiasm on Facebook, I became interested in pursuing themes from Greek and Roman mythology and literature, which had been a passion from childhood. I made portraits of female characters from the Aeneid and the Iliad, then went on to draw as many goddesses as I could discover. After I exhausted the supply, I turned to those of the Norse pantheon until I swiftly finished with that group, Norse mythology being composed largely of male deities.
At this point, I was contacted by a former employer, Bruce Bayly, a math teacher at the UA, whose mobile science education program, the Physics Factory, I managed for a decade. It ceased operations in 2018, and I basically retired. It then became a smaller, more flexible program and is now run mainly by students with a small bus (the mobile part of the project). This “Cosmic Bus” displays, in its 38 windows, photos of female scientists and mathematicians. Bruce asked me to draw portraits of these women in my characteristic style for the bus, so since the end of May, that’s what I have been working on. I have done about fifteen so far, and because I post them on my Art of Dolly Spalding Facebook page, I have researched their biographies to accompany the portraits as text. It has been fascinating to learn about the lives of these remarkable women.
All such projects have kept me entertained and engaged and enlightened throughout the entire time of the lockdown. And my muse in Ireland keeps me inspired with his own art and daily encouragement.
Dolly Spalding graduated from the Boston Museum School and has been an artist, journalist, graphic designer, archaeologist, magazine and book editor, and administrator and board member for a number of not-for-profit organizations. She was for 10 years the manager of the Physics Factory, a science education outreach program.
In the last few years, my art has been series-based illustrations like the “A Little Tucson Book” covers or custom 3D modeled toys that I cast and hand-paint. The community has been very supportive and has allowed me to share my work at local events like Tucson Comic Con and Made in Tucson. My last scheduled event of 2020 was the cancelled Tucson Festival of Books, and this was definitely a sign that events were going to be put on hold for a while. Without events and gallery shows, I had the sense that it would be a challenge getting my work out in front of people. Although most of my projects are made just for the sake of creating, it is nice to connect with an audience when the opportunity arises.
In April, I decided to take the month off of work to be home with family. Typically, time off would seem like a perfect opportunity to create. I felt the opposite. I felt a strong sense of guilt for not being able to find the need to make art. For the first week off, I stared at my studio, and there was a complete absence I hadn’t felt in years. My creativity was definitely affected, and inspiration was hard to come by.
I decided to pack up the studio space, which contained the new stop-motion workspace that was to be used for my next project, Mosca Roja. I wanted to repurpose the space as an extension of my living space for my family and me. It was wonderful being able to see my two-year-old stretch out into another part of our home. Seeing him there lightened the weight of not being able to create, and as a result, many great memories were created in this newly available space.
By June I had fixed everything I could possibly fix in the house, and the need to create started to come back. The stop-motion studio I was building was for a project that I started 18 years ago. I did several tests and some prop building at the beginning of the year. As much as I wanted to adapt my story into a stop-motion film, I had to consider the time and space needed to produce it.
Over 18 years I have approached the story with several styles. Originally it was going to be a comic book, but it has also been adapted for linocut illustrations, voxel art, 3D printed models, and 2D animation. The images and words never seemed to compliment each other. By mid-June, I decided to take the project on again. Because of the COVID virus, some software developers were being very generous and discounting programs to get them into the hands of people who want to create. The batch of programs became a pipeline that allow digital sculpting, graphic design, character design, and rigging, which is bone placement for animating the characters, allowing me to do both body and facial motion capture and speeding up the process while giving the motion a more human quality. This pipeline of software would allow me to work entirely digitally and require no extra space. After several weeks of learning software and trying to adapt these characters, the look of Mosca Roja finally started to come together. It was amazing seeing 18 years of character and story development take shape in a 3D environment.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t weep the first time I saw one of the main characters moving before me. Being the one handling the animation, it has been fun getting into the heads and motions of the multiple characters. The motion capture for each character requires me to portray each a different way. At only two years old, my youngest son, who does not take orders well, will be doing the motion capture for some chickens that are in the film. At one point I considered having voice actors, but because of the virus I felt it might be best to limit the amount of interaction that is needed to make a film.
I’m incredibly fortunate to be collaborating with my friend Andrew Rivas of local band Sinphonics. He will be providing the score, which serves as the voices for the characters in the film. Any dialogue will be done with subtitles, but for the most part it is a silent film with an original score. It has been an amazing experience working with him. He has an incredible musical sense, and his playing comes from a very special place. Since June I have sent him character sketches and the script. He immediately got a sense of the characters and started to shape their sound. Although it has been remote, it’s been an amazing process.
I strive to make my illustrations look like a part of a bigger story, something to let the audience fill in the blanks. The art also consists of something that feels like a memory. Filmmaking is a new realm for me. I would not consider myself a filmmaker or a storyteller, but this is the one story I needed to tell. I have held onto it until the images and words aligned. The last few months have contributed to a new found focus and energy to make this film. Mosca Roja is being told when it is ready to be told. I’m excited to share the trailer for the film. I’m currently buttoning up production and hope to have a DVD and digital release including the original soundtrack soon.
Things were already a bit cozy well before Covid broke loose.
My husband, having occupied the kitchen table that served as my office for well over a year, was really starting to get on my nerves. During the first few weeks of isolation we were mild mannered, distanced, giving one another a lot of space. Then the kids came home from school—for good—and we felt like animals trapped in a cage.
Not that it was a bad cage. To console ourselves, we said, “This would be a million dollar apartment if it was in New York City!” But we were far from the hustle of Broadway and 104th Street, where I lived many moons ago. No, the vibrancy and texture of my old ’hood had been replaced by a middle-class suburban neighborhood with houses that all looked the same.
Weekend excitement meant bringing out the folding chairs to the end of the cul du sac with bottle in hand to share stories with the neighbors I seldom saw most of the year.
Thank God they’re Democrats.
My husband and I swore we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves. Simple, really: just stay away from the urge to question, opine, suggest an air-conditioned road trip to Patagonia, repress the urge to hit him over the head with a frying pan, which looked funny onI Love Lucy.
Pandemics have a way of letting one’s true nature out of the box. With nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, the spotlight turned on us.
One positive: I finally got around to reading Hemingway’s classic tale For Whom the Bell Tolls. By the end, I felt like Roberto, on my stomach, watching the enemy approach, awaiting the end. The other thing about Covid was realizing I could polish off a bottle of wine by myself and still rise at 6:00 a.m for a hike—that is, until Sabino Canyon shut down because of the fires. It would have done me in, if it wasn’t for juvenile fantasies of returning to masters swim at dawn to see a man I called “Hercules” in all his ripped, 6′3″ glory. But alas, the pool shut down.
I decided to have a Zoom cocktail party. As soon as I flipped the video on and saw the visage that championed my potato-farmer Eastern European stock, the graying hair, a furrowed brow that even Kim Kardashian’s aesthetician couldn’t cure, there was only one solution.
It was time to reignite that old friendship through Facebook. It had been years since I reached out to Blue Sage, but with Covid running rampant, nothing was too weird. Everything was up for grabs. Blue Sage lives in a commune in Colorado, where she has spent years perfecting the art of the homemade “gummy” edible. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear from me or dismayed by my request.
“Just Cash App me,” she said. Et voilà: I’m feeling better already.
Hilary Stunda is a Tucson transplant from Colorado. An editor and writer who longs for adventure and relishes hyperbole over facts, when she’s not concocting schemes and getaway fantasies, she’s mother to two teen boys, partner to a photographer, and a lusty epicurean.
We wanted to depict people slowly growing mad in their houses as the distractions failed to distract, the Catalina Mountains continued burning, and the walls inched ever closer together…
Fish Karma is a musician and artist, among whose compositions are the immortal tunes “God Is a Groovy Guy” and “Swap Meet Women.” Kay Sather is an artist and urban pioneer whose handmade house should make any homesteader jealous.
This isn’t how I envisioned spending my retirement. It’s been six months since I shook the hand of a stranger or hugged a friend, ventured far out of my zip code, pulled up a chair in my favorite restaurant, or worked up a sweat at the gym. My hair is longer than it was in my college days during the late Sixties, travel plans are on indefinite hold, shaving is a whimsical experience, and my wardrobe has shrunk to torn jeans and a handful of thread-bare tee shirts. My proudest accomplishment rests on the dining room table—a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Salvador Dali’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. It took me nearly a month to assemble.
But I’m okay. Because my mother taught me to look for silver linings, and perhaps because I was raised in the rural Midwest where social distancing was a fact of life, I believe that I’ve discovered a few worthwhile things in the midst of this pandemic. Without places to go and deadlines to meet, my life seems to have settled into a comfortable rhythm free of urgency and distractions. Traffic noise and air pollution miraculously evaporated during the early days of sheltering in place, exposing—if only for a moment—a world I thought was gone forever. Suddenly, I have time to sip a leisurely cup of home-brewed (no Starbucks) coffee and watch nature come alive in the wash behind the house. Ground squirrels, rabbits, quail, lizards, snakes, and coyotes prowl for food, while finches, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, owls, cardinals, vermilion flycatchers, and hawks alight on the branches of a dead tree or cluster around our backyard feeders. I take my cues from our dog Monty, a lovably manipulative Swedish Vallhund, who sets out on his morning walks convinced that every day offers unlimited opportunities for a grand adventure. Friendly greetings from pedestrians and cyclists I pass during my rides along The Loop are a welcome antidote for the barrage of craziness coming from cable news. Even the Catalinas in flames seem to speak of resilience and recovery.
And, surprisingly, the pandemic has brought me closer to family members dealing with their own isolation and boredom. What had been occasional emails and phone calls have become almost daily updates on what is going on (or not) in our lives, book recommendations, and occasional rants about the sorry state of our country and world. Photos and videos of grandnieces and a grandnephew lift my spirits and make me optimistic for a better future. Recently, my siblings and I recalled that our parents and grandparents survived the 1918 flu epidemic, and yet none of us can remember any of them talking about it. One of my sisters certainly got it right when she reminded us that they were “a generation of few words who never really talked about the past much or about personal hardships.” She also pointed out that “history never stops giving us wake-up calls.” I’m a historian, so I have to wonder if we’ll pay attention this time and how we will remember these somber days. But for now I’m hunkered down, making the best of a time I hope we’ll never see again.
Bruce Dinges is former editor of the Journal of Arizona History and coeditor, with Bill Broyles, of America’s Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden.
I began writing this in a hotel room in Kalispell, Montana, while my wife, Vonnie, and I were on a two-week road trip through Utah, Washington, Montana, and Colorado. I needed this trip, and we needed this vacation. We realize that traveling from Arizona through these states might be ill advised, given Arizona’s surging coronavirus status. But after much consideration, we felt that traveling in the sealed capsule of a car on the open road was an effective method of physical distancing. In the 14 days we were gone, we’d eaten indoors in only two restaurants. We had breakfast at Stella’s in Billings, Montana, and were pleased to see that Stella and her crew had distanced the tables and that all staff were wearing masks. We did not expect this, but to be honest, we didn’t know what to expect. Customers even wore masks until they were seated. I was proud of Billings. In Bonners Ferry, Idaho, we stopped for gas and not a soul was wearing a mask.
I have a personal stake in masking, social distancing, and all the rest of the measures responsible people are taking to combat the coronavirus. On March 25 and 26 of this year I was exposed to COVID-19 via a patient I cared for as an RN on the telemetry unit at a Tucson hospital. In the last few hours of my shift on the 26, I started sneezing and experiencing a runny nose. I thought little of it since Tucson had recently had some rain and the wildflowers were showing up in force. Every year, I seem to have an initial allergic reaction to the pollen in the air and this seemed no different. On March 27, I felt a little worse, so that evening I called in sick for the next day. Over the next few days, both Vonnie and I experienced some symptoms of Covid-19, but I didn’t immediately think that we had it until I was notified by my hospital that the patient had tested positive. Before I got this news, when Vonnie had brought up the possibility that we may have “it,” I promptly shot down the idea, because as a clinical nurse, I felt that a temperature of less than 101 was unremarkable. Body temperature fluctuates throughout the day. We were taking our temperature every two or three hours, and only twice did I have a temperature greater than 100. Vonnie never had a high temperature.
My symptoms seemed to be more severe than Vonnie’s, and while during my illness I never felt that I was going to die or that I couldn’t breathe, I was unable to talk without immediately coughing. Those coughing fits seemed to have no end. One was so severe that it caused me to throw up. Other symptoms included night sweats and a pounding headache in the morning, for about a week. Vonnie’s symptoms were noticeably less severe, but they were still significant. My primary doctor, through a teleconference, abruptly shot down my suggestion that we might be positive when I told him what our temperatures were. But I was in contact with my supervisor and my hospital’s occupational health department, and on April 1, after describing my symptoms to occupational health, and requesting to be tested, they swabbed me in the tent. Upon returning from being swabbed, I received a call from my supervisor notifying me that I had been exposed, and two days later I received the positive result.
After three weeks I was on the mend and was eager to get back to work. I had heard that several of my coworkers had been exposed and were out of commission. Despite my desire to return to work, my primary doctor would not release me to work until I had two negative swabs that were collected greater than 24 hours apart, per CDC guidelines. It took a few days before I was able to get authorization for two COVID tests due to the statewide shortage. After a few more days and two negative tests, I returned to work and was happy to be back.
Since the day that I was first exposed, visitors have not been allowed in the hospital. Over the last 12-plus years that I’ve been a nurse, I have grown to understand the importance of having a family member at the patient’s bedside. I often tell them that it is the single most important factor in ensuring effective care. The nurse often has three to four other patients to care for and the family member at the bedside is only focused on their loved one. They also know the patient’s baseline behavior and demeanor and are more likely to pick up on subtle behavioral cues or changes. They are an extra set of eyes and ears for the nurses and I greatly appreciate their presence, and I let them know it.
Family members can sometimes be a hindrance to delivering care, true. But the comfort for the patient far outweighs any minor annoyance. This pandemic has made this strikingly clear, and I feel for my patients. Being in the hospital is isolating enough without having your friends and family barred. Wearing a mask for 12–13 hours at a time with only a few breaks here and there has not been easy, and I can tell that it impacts how I deliver care. When I perform my initial physical assessment on my patients, I often slip in a joke to lighten things up, but with the mask on they are unable to see me smile. The mask restricts the visual warmth I wish to convey with a smile, and it casts a thin layer of sterility throughout the room—and not the good kind of sterility.
At the beginning of our trip, leaving Flagstaff early in the morning, we went through a fast food drive-through. In front of us was a man standing in front of the drive through window trying to order. He kept tapping on the window until someone finally opened it. We could see that he was trying to negotiate an order, but they would not let him, because, and I’m guessing here, he was a pedestrian standing in the drive through lane. After watching this scene and seeing the man walk back to his commercial transport truck, we realized that the size of his truck had prevented him from using the drive through lane. We felt for this guy and as we approached the window, we asked if they could add to our order what the gentleman had wanted. We would then surprise him with it. They couldn’t recall what he had wanted so we drove around to the driver, sitting in his truck, and told him we would buy it for him. We returned to the drive through lane and doubled his order. When we brought it to him, he expressed sincere gratitude. As we pulled onto AZ 89 heading north, we felt grateful to be in a position to carry out this small act of kindness. It was a sweet beginning to our trip.
These are strange times for all of us, and what I have learned in the last few months is that now, more than ever, small gestures, acts of kindness, and thoughtful consideration should be on everyone’s mind. I try to remind myself of this every day.
I have chosen to spend my time in isolation to become an antiracist activist. Since I am a teacher, I feel I can help most by reimagining traditional early-childhood, whitewashed social-studies themes to incorporate a global perspective and engage children in that activism. I am doing this through play-based weekly themes that help children learn about our world and appreciate its diversity and beauty, but also to recognize inequity and make a plan for change. For example, traditionally children learn about the “Great Masters” of the art world as a group of white men from Europe. Instead, I did an art week where we learned about great art contributions from men and women from around the world, from Frida Kahlo to the Kenyan Masai people to Yayoi Kusama of Japan. We looked at a bunch of coffee-table art books and discussed the overrepresentation of white male artists. We also had a ton of fun making art, and we culminated the week with a gallery opening where we sold our art and are donating the money to a BLM charity. We can all make a difference if we choose.
Amy Acuña
Amy Acuña is an elementary school-teaching, volleyball-playing, Chihuahua-loving, wine-drinking, Spanish-speaking, happily married mama of two.
These are all songs that have touched me since the outbreak. I’ll admit there have been many days when no music has been played in my home. Then there have been days devoted to nature sounds/Eno ambient works/Satie YouTube channel marathons/Ravi Shankar/Miles Davis/J.S. Bach, etc.
David La Russa is host of “Random Axis,” aired Friday mornings on KXCI-FM. Find more of his playlists at dlarussa on Spotify.
I’ve spent most of the pandemic pedaling up and down the Santa Cruz River bike path, shuttling between a 1972 Winnebago in El Hoyo and an ancient casita I’m renovating just south of Ajo Way. Outside of a few years working for a paint contractor, I have no experience in construction. The idea was to raise one wall with new courses of block, turning it into a big ass lean-to with a shiny metal roof. Given my limited knowledge, the only thing that compares is making a record, also a collaborative effort that utilizes folks with different skill sets. While thrilling at times, I can’t say it’s been fun, but it has been a great diversion from the awful reality of this novel virus that wears one down day by day. As with the pandemic, I’ve had to learn some new lingo, and I can now give dubious opinions on the Infection Fatality Rate or Oriented Strand Board with equal ignorance. But the main thing I’ve learned (for the umpteenth time) is to trust the process, something a very wise Memphis producer tried to teach me a lifetime ago. Still, and just like this new house of mine, it would’ve been better to approach the pandemic with a more cohesive plan. Unfortunately at this point, we must simply learn from our mistakes, and try not to repeat them in the future. Vote!
Dan Stuart is a musician and writer who calls Tucson home every few decades. You can find him at https://marlowebillings.com/
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