1
250
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https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/dd30cea0345e5d4a2a22fe6b986a149f.MP3
caac3247177948650860cb39e304a537
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
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Original Format
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Sound recordings
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00:17:24
Transcription
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INDEX<br />[00:00:04] Introduction<br />[00:00:43] Describe what the past couple of weeks have looked like for you<br />[00:03:05] How are you handling your childcare situation<br />[00:04:50] How is your little girl doing?<br />[00:05:38] What is it like being at a hospital right now?<br />[00:07:41] Are there specific areas that are only for COVID patients?<br />[00:08:25] Impressions of how the public is handling this?<br />[00:09:39] Particular moments or stories that stand out?<br />[00:11:42] What does your neighborhood look like at this time<br />[00:12:37] What worries do you have at this time<br />[00:14:02] Reintegration and what that will look like<br />[00:14:54] What opportunities to you see at this time<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />[00:00:04]<br />Interviewer: All right. This is Laura Damon-Moore. Today is Tuesday, March 31st, 2020. I am here with the Living History Project. I'm going to have our narrator introduce himself in just a moment. And narrator, would you tell us your first and last name and who you are, please?<br /><br />David Hunt: Hi. My name is David Hunt. I'm a security monitor for Central Library in downtown Madison. And I also work in support services for a large hospital in the area.<br /><br />[00:00:43]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much, David. And thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. David, could you describe what the past couple of weeks have looked like for you in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the safer-at-home directive? <br /><br />David Hunt: Sure. I guess I would first describe -- my working situation is a lot of shuffle and just, changes. At the large hospital I work for I've been redeployed, I’ve had to report to assignments where there has been COVID testing. And with the library, trying to just be situated at home to do some other support services from my own computer in my own living room or whatever I can make as a makeshift office because I don't have a lot of space or anything set up for that. And as you can imagine being on the front lines at the city with the whole COVID-19, just, experience, I would say that it affects me personally at home because my girlfriend is also a medical professional. She is a medical professional and I do support services and -- but she also works for another large hospital in the area. And it's a lot of stress relating to, you know—if one of us gets sick, childcare. Our job situation was already pretty stressful so, yeah. It has been a lot of changes in a short amount of time.<br /><br />[00:03:05]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much. So how are you handling your childcare situation. What does that look like for you?<br /><br />David Hunt: Okay. So I’ve had a very stressful situation even before all this started because my girlfriend worked two days in Madison and three days in Janesville. And I'm working two jobs so the idea was that I would pick up our child in day care in-between the two jobs. Mine work back-to-back. <br /><br />Thankfully the daycare that my little five month old goes to, she's still accepted there and they're still operating. It's very minimal though luckily we, with the medical— We have priority so we don't have to worry as long they stay open and they have some other things set up with both of our hospitals, like my girlfriend's place of employment. I would say that the good thing with all the changes has been working from home with the library so that I can spend a little more time with my daughter. So I can pick her up from daycare and continue to do things at home. Or sometimes, you know, when I don't have to report to the hospital, I'm able to spend more time with her at the house.<br /><br />[00:04:50]<br />Interviewer: Nice. Thank you so much. How is your little girl doing?<br /><br />David Hunt: She's fine. She’s growing. We worry about her health. You know, we don't want either of us to pick up anything in the medical environment and spread it [to] her but right now, you know, things have been good. I think she just sees it as another day, just more time with daddy and that helps because I am getting things done around the house and also do some with her, what they call Telenet interaction with patients from homes.<br /><br />[00:05:38]<br />Interviewer: Got you.<br /><br />(Inaudible)<br /><br />Yeah. Got you. Thanks. So, David, what is it like—can you tell us about being at a hospital right now, in this moment? What is the mood like there? What are your feelings about how things are being approached there? Does it feel really different from the way it did before? <br /><br />David Hunt: Well, I definitely feel like there is a general mood change with all visitors and patients that come through the hospital. That's for sure. I would say as far as the staff in general, there isn't a lot of changes for a lot of people. And, you know, I can kind of compare what I hear on the news. I feel like Madison—the health organizations here in Madison do a great job at trying to get ahead. It's just that at the very top levels, you know, you hear about CDC and all the politicized things that are going on in the news about what to do—testing, all that, that is affecting, excuse me, that is affecting, obviously the hospitals [as] they have to allow the changes. <br /><br />So I'm sure everyone is a little bit more, I wouldn’t say on edge— You know, as medical professionals, [navigating] all these changes and some of those changes affect you personally. Or if you work in support services, like myself, you definitely feel like—okay. Am I okay? So there is always this sense of, kind of like worry and dread in the background. But, you know, we just do what we can. And hopefully because Madison had a smaller population than some of the other large cities, that we're ahead of the curve and not behind it.<br /><br />[00:07:41]<br />Interviewer: At the hospital where you work and where your partner works, are there specific areas that have been designated COVID-19 wards or physical spaces at the moment?<br /><br />David Hunt: For sure. For sure. Yeah. Definitely. Like I said, the hospitals in Madison are doing a great job of trying to get ahead of whatever is going to eventually [inaudible] come through the doors or, you know, however the sickness afflicts people here or the virus afflicts people here.<br /><br />[00:08:25]<br />Interviewer: Got you. What is your impression of how the public is handling this, like especially in a hospital environment or a hospital setting? Do people seem really nervous? <br /><br />David Hunt: Well, you know, that perception will change because just like the public's information has changed. I would say at first it was definitely a sense of fear and a lot of that was based on ignorance. So, you know, things like people taking too many masks, not understanding what the mask was for. Things of that nature. Now it's more like—I think a lot of people try to avoid the hospitals in this area, which seems to be a good strategy, I would say, because you don't know. That's where people are coming who have tested positive for [COVID] or are showing signs. This is where they show up. So if you don't have to be there, I think before getting that message, you know, just don't go there so—<br /><br />[00:09:39]<br />Interviewer: Got you. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. In terms of your work either at the library or at the hospital, however you want to answer, are there particular stories or moments from this time period that have really stood out to you?<br /><br />David Hunt: Sure. Off the top of my head, well, something that's very interesting to me, that me my girlfriend as we, kind of like, deal with our personal life and we're very obviously invested in information about what's happening, you know, locally. What's happening nationally with this outbreak, the virus, is that we've just been having this kind of thing where we're trying to stay away from spending too much time with the television and really going outside to get away from it all because, you know, we definitely feel like we're getting want and after seeing so many changes firsthand. We definitely feel like we should stay abreast on, you know, all the information that's out there but in the background from political statements to just the news capturing what’s constantly going on. And things are online so we just try to shut it all off and avoid our house becoming just this like paranoia zone. Step outside and get away, get away from that and that is something that has been really big in our own heads here recently.<br /><br />[00:11:42]<br />Interviewer: Just to kind of segue from that, when you are able to get out and about, what does your neighborhood look like at this time? Is it busier than usual? Is it quieter? Yeah. Are there favorite places that you like to go in your neighborhood right now to kind of find that grounding space?<br /><br />David Hunt: Yes. So definitely we walk trails. We're lucky where we live here in Fitchburg there are trails. And they seem to be well used right now, just a lot of people out on bikes, and trying to do the same thing, just out walking. We try to walk our baby when we can, get outside. So, yeah, so there's definitely a very large presence of people just being out of the house and people just on the trails.<br /><br />[00:12:37]<br />Interviewer: So you kind of touched on this already but are there -- like what worries do you have at this moment, knowing what you know and looking just slightly ahead? Like what are you concerned about right now?<br /><br />David Hunt: That's a really good question. I would think—there are two worries. It's obviously the worry of how bad can things really get? That's I think on everyone’s mind. And that I have this other worry about, like I may be way ahead of the curve but this, but just like reintegration when things get better. Like, what is that going to look like? Like how is everything going to go back to normal? If we stay out for, you know, like another month or two, just going out because things have changed so drastically? You know, from being away from the routines for so long? I actually kid when we're out and see everyone walking outside, it's like a lot of people are going like, yeah. I want to come back to my office. I kind of want to stay doing the [Safer at Home].<br /><br />Interviewer: Yeah.<br /><br />David Hunt: Just being out and like working from home so I kind of see that going.<br /><br />[00:14:02]<br />Interviewer: Yeah. It will be interesting to, yeah, reintegration is a good way to put it. It's, yeah, it will be interesting to see how all of that goes.<br /><br />David Hunt: Yeah. And with my jobs too. Like obviously the hospital, the hospital has done a whole lot of changes to, you know, to accommodate everyone with a sickness and the virus and the people who are afflicted by it. So, you know, that'll be very interesting to see what types of changes stay permanent until we find some really good solutions because of this. So there is a lot of things going into the future—I’m thinking if this does, you know, keep us out like a month or two then things will be very different, going back.<br /><br />[00:14:54]<br />Interviewer: For sure. Yeah. Thank you. And, you know, on the flip side of that question, what opportunities do you see at this point?<br /><br />David Hunt: Opportunities as far as—<br /><br />Interviewer: Like maybe opportunities for growth or like good things or positive things that are either happening or could happen as a result of this experience.<br /><br />David Hunt: Sure. I definitely feel there is this very touching aspect to what's happened even to me personally. Like I said, I spend more time with my daughter just at home here. And I try not to take that time for granted. You know, it's like I said, we are on the front lines. You never know what could happen. There are reports of people who get sick and they become isolated and can't see their families for the duration of their sickness. And then knowing that the hospitals, from working at hospitals I know firsthand that, obviously visitation is limited at this time. So I think there's a lot of heartwarming stories, all types in the news as well. Taking the personal time with my daughter and not taking it for granted. So I feel like -- for a lot of people there is just going to be opportunities coming out of it to look back and just think about, okay, well, what did I do and how did I appreciate the time that I was given? So I'm hoping that kind of resonates too as we get past this, you know, [inaudible] coming together in the spirit of just being supportive and helpful and appreciative.<br /><br />Interviewer: Sure. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we have not talked about that you want to make sure to mention today?<br /><br />David Hunt: Just make sure that everyone stays safe. And like I said, I hope just, you know, we come out of this on top and we learn to come together [inaudible].<br /><br />Interviewer: Thank you so much, David.<br /><br />David Hunt: Thank you.<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]<br />
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by David Hunt, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Hospitals
Rights
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Copyright 2020,David Hunt and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hunt, David
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Damon-Moore, Laura
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-03-31
Description
An account of the resource
David Hunt, who works as support staff for a hospital in Madison, describes his work and home life since mid-March as confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Dane County rose and as the Safer at Home order went into place.
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-004
cat-family
cat-medical
covid19
covid19-004
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/3f2db19eba64e2df0b9de9353b177c10.mp3
aca056fb4ef1713edadb7b29c39b958b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Duration
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00:04:19
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-002<br />Narrator Name: Brendon Panke<br />Interviewer Name: <br />Date of interview: 4/1/2020<br /><br />I, very awkwardly, asked my wife to marry me. And then we set the date for a year after, about a year after, so we were sure to have time to finish school, and time to get everything planned and set. And it turns out we’d also have plenty of time to have conversations with my family members about why we weren’t getting married in the Catholic Church. Why we were going to have it outside. And why we were going to have our friend officiate, our recently divorced friend officiate. We even had to convince him why he was going to do it for us, but we won out in the end. <br /><br />But we still had to have a lot of awkward conversations with my mom, which I was surprised about, because we weren’t consistent churchgoers. And also with my grandma, her mom. I think that’s, maybe, the most conversations I’ve ever had with my grandma in a short period of time. And it was painful. It was every event, every holiday, and I just got tired of talking to my grandma. She even learned how to email, and she would email me, and at the end she would say things like “well, and I’ll pray for you two, if that’s ok.” (laughs) And I was like “sure grandma, passive aggressive prayer is fine by me.” (laughs) It’s the only kind really, I think, the only kind. <br /><br />So, I found out later though, that maybe this all wasn’t my grandma, see, I didn’t talk to my grandpa about it because he was very difficult to talk to at that time because he had Parkinson’s Disease. He was dying of it, and he couldn’t really talk very loudly at all. And so, I think my grandma was kind of like getting his message out to the world. And she felt this obligation to get that out there, and take care of him however she could, because it was getting hard. He was falling down a lot and she couldn’t pick him up.<br /><br />And then, about a week before the wedding, I guess, my grandpa said he wasn’t going to go. It wasn’t right, the way we were getting married. And my grandma said “Howard, you ass! Of course you are going to go.” (laughs) And then my grandpa died. And my grandma didn’t have to take care of him anymore. And I got to know my grandma all over again. And I got to have a lot of fun with my grandma. And I’m really glad I got to have that time with her, and get to know her again. And I think she got to know herself again. Her life was very different. And now she’s ninety-six. And she’s in hospice, and all she wants to do all day is drink chocolate wine and watch the Hallmark Channel. I don’t know what chocolate wine is, but I’m pretty sure it’s the wine equivalent of the Hallmark Channel. <br /><br />And I got to see her a couple weeks ago, and we talked with her a little bit. My son played her the violin. And she just was cute and snuggled down in her blankets, where she is most of the time. She doesn’t really get out of bed. She has to get lifted up by two people. But that’s ok, she’s ninety-six, and gets to pick how she spends her time. She is an adult, at this point. I’m pretty sure once you’re ninety-six you’re an adult. <br /><br />But now her nursing home is on lockdown. And, even though she’s in hospice, she’s not sick enough for us to visit her. So no one can visit her. My mom, and her sisters, and her brothers had been visiting her pretty much everyday, somebody had been hanging out with her. And now she’s just, just lonely, I think. I don’t know. I don’t really talk to her. There’s no way to connect to her.<br /><br />So I’m glad I got the time to know my grandma when I did, and I hope I’ll see her again.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Brendon Panke, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Family relationships
Weddings
Pandemics
Social distance
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Brendon Panke. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Panke, Brendon
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-04
Description
An account of the resource
Brendon Panke shares a story about family relationships and his wedding celebration. Brendon shares the impact the social distancing measures in effect in Wisconsin have had on his in-person relationship with his grandmother. <br /><br />This story was originally recorded and shared as part of an episode of the Madison podcast Inside Stories. Listen to that episode and subscribe to the podcast here: <a href="https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-1">https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-1</a>
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-022
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Propheter
cat-family
cat-inside_stories
cat-older_adults
covid19
covid19-022
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/a111daa08d66ad263b569f0147ee8f3f.mp3
f71274e1e0d3d845ef0d027d2327f6fb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound recordings
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:16:09
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Index<br />[00:00:47] - Talk about your Covid-19 Safer at Home story<br />[00:07:55] - The landscape of information is changing on a daily basis<br />[00:09:51] - How has your job changed since moving to working from home<br />[00:12:19] - Everyone is getting intimate knowledge of the neighborhood they live in<br />[00:12:55] - It really opens your eyes to a lot of things right in front of your face<br />[00:14:29] - Is there anything else you want to talk about<br />[00:15:22] - Happy to hear your family is doing well<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br /><br />[00:00:01]<br />INTERVIEWER: Hello. My name is Andres Torres. I'm here with the Stories From a Distance, which is part of the Living History Project. Today is Friday, April 24, 2020. And now I'll let the narrator introduce themselves.<br /><br />[00:00:19]<br />NARRATOR: This is Martín Alvarado. I work for the Madison Public Library. I've been a resident of Madison for about, uh, about 23 years now. I was originally born in Mexico City and lived there until I was about 20, so at this point I feel like I'm more from Madison than anywhere else, just because I've spent so much time here, and that I really still embrace a lot of my heritage that I think I've definitely become from around here.<br /><br />[00:00:47]<br />INTERVIEWER: Awesome. Well, thank you for being with us here today, Martin. And really what you're here to do today is talk about your Covid-19 Safer at Home story, so if you'd like to start with that.<br /><br />[00:01:00]<br />NARRATOR: Sure, sure, I guess I'll start. I was probably one of the last people to leave the Central Library on the last day of operations before the library closed and I think I just—now that I have time to reflect—I remember just how concerned when we saw the first cases coming along, and I think we all started mentally preparing that something was going to change, but I think it was just really disconcerting how quickly it happened because it seemed like it was something very distant and all of a sudden once it happened things moved really quickly. I remember that last Monday—I think it was the 17th or 18th, I don't remember exactly—the library couldn't close until there was a formal a formal act or order from the mayor so we kept operations that day and then that day we just saw some libraries weren't staffed so we were operating at a little bit of capacity and then there was this, like, avalanche of different libraries that closed during that day and at Central we continued to work until 9 o'clock that day. We did have a number of coworkers who had to leave; some were older adults who just wanted to get home and there was not enough things to do to justify having them there and then we also had a coworker whose parents both had Covid symptoms and likely were being affected by it with, like, everything just medically feeling like they had [Covid]. So I think for me it was just amazing how quickly it went to—how difficult it was even to come up with guidelines to figure out how to do your work. We tried our best to try to enforce six feet distance even though, yeah, I don't think we had a procedure then, but we tried as best as we could and then we left the building and haven't come back since. <br /><br />So it's been interesting to try to readjust after that. But I'm really glad that things are where they are. I know that there's a lot of different hardships that people are coming through and I see that with my neighbors and some members of my family that are really in a tight spot so I guess, yeah, feeling all those just conflicted feelings about the situation. It's not an easy [place] to be in. <br /><br />So, one of the very unique things that happened to me is that for about the first four weeks, almost the first full month since my job closed, and I was working from home, was that my family was away for that long. My daughter was up north with her cousin and aunt and uncle for about four weeks because they got laid off so they stayed up there, and so I was here on my own. I was doing a lot of video chatting; I was catching up with them; I was happy to have a cat and chickens to keep me company. Had the sad thing where I guess I wasn't smart enough and hadn't been trained enough to take care of my daughter's pet fish, pet beta [fish], and I had to break the news to her as soon as she came home that Cookie had died, so it was—yeah, I guess when you are part of this whole family unit and everyone has functions and then you end up being one of the people who does a lot of things outside the home, when you have responsibility with the home you're not prepared, so I think I've been really trying to up my game in taking care of plants. I've definitely cooked much more than I had, like, in the past twenty years or so, so I guess something good is coming out of that. <br /><br />But, yeah, then the other part of my family which would be my—my daughter's now here with me, which has been just a tremendous relief and great for my mood and everything, but the other part of my family—my wife, my son, and my brother-in-law—are in Mississippi because my brother-in-law is medically fragile and has a suppressed immune system and was going there before anything of this happened. He already had a scheduled medical appointment, so they have been down there trying to get all these interventions and medical stuff figured out. But what I was—I think that's relevant for us because for about the last two years we have been practicing all these protocols that now people are adopting, so we didn't have that much emphasis on not touching our faces but every time we came into the house or did anything we sanitized our hands, we washed our hands, we sanitized surfaces just because we were very aware that my brother-in-law could suffer because of those things so we were being extra careful. <br /><br />So I think this mindset it's—we're kind of in that mindset but now it's, like, maybe, ten times more of the precautions and the care that you take when you go out into the world and come back into the house that feel also like, it's been a bit of a challenge sort of rightsizing, what the amount of precautions were. I think at the beginning I was just almost like sanitizing every single thing from the grocery store and really putting a lot of time—and at that point I had a lot of time—but I think over time we start to develop more nuanced approaches. We still are very careful but maybe we're not, like, doing things—I guess we were very limited in what we thought we could do so we really put ourselves into doing those measures as thoroughly as we could. <br /><br />And, yeah, the other part of that is my parents live in town, but I haven't been able to—I've been able to see them, but I've been able to see them through their window because they're both in their seventies and they have some health problems. I was really relieved when my father, who was having some symptoms, was able to get a Covid test and tested negative, and that was a huge relief, and I guess I was really grateful that they had access to medical services where they were able to do that, but I know of other people who have just had just positive tests, and just that has really drowned their whole life into, like, just chaos and so, anyway, I have been coming over to my parents' windows. I will leave things for them on the table that's in front of their house, my mother signed my vote for the last election and sort of came in with her own pen, touched it, then washed her hands, and I took the ballot and I think, I guess the one thing that I'm really curious about is how many people already have had the coronavirus, like what is the prevalence in our society, and I hope that we're able to get more testing to figure out where we are because I think eventually we're going to have to continue doing things and the sooner we have the information, the better.<br /><br />[00:07:55] <br />INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things is just, you know, how on seemingly a daily basis we're getting new information or information that we've heard is changing and that kind of goes along with the precautions you were taking, you know, like what surfaces does the virus live on the longest or which surfaces transmit the virus more easily, but then now we're hearing about the percentages of people who've had the Covid virus and not shown any symptoms whatsoever, so it's—the landscape of information is changing on a daily basis.<br /><br />[00:08:39]<br />NARRATOR: I think even us as librarians we're used to dealing with information overload, but this has been an overload that's been way beyond any other thing we've had to deal with so even trying to sort out and even—I think we've maybe have found each of us like a few trusted sources that we've followed that digest this information for us but even staying on top of that, as you said, the guidance has changed from day to day or like something is discovered about a new transmission, or like another group of people that is affected so it's just like, I think, just probably one of the conflicting relationships I have with the information is that I feel sort of—like really maybe I shouldn't be like looking for stuff all the time but I feel like knowing more gives me a sense of control even though at the same time it's probably something that also worries me, but I feel like this sort of search for constant information just sort of has this double-sided aspect of it. At the same time it's a little bit distressing, but it also provides some, I think understanding terrible things helps you process them a little bit better?<br /><br />[00:09:51]<br />INTERVIEWER: Definitely. Could you talk a little bit, Martín, about the way your job has changed since moving to working from home?<br /><br />[00:10:03]<br />NARRATOR: Yeah, so I guess a lot of have been through video conferences which has become a big thing. We're also doing much more email than we ever did, and I have been working primarily in two other aspects of city operations. One has been doing research for the mayor's office and the city government to figure out, just looking at what other cities are doing to see if any of those ideas can be brought here and just researching specific aspects like unemployment and testing so that that information is available for people who need to make decisions. And the other one has been translating into Spanish so that a lot of this information that's made available in English is also available. I've also seen that there's translation into Hmong, translation into Mandarin, so I feel like it's good, there's been a number of different people throughout the city who have been able to, like, lend these skills to complement and to be, I think, more effective in reaching people and, yeah, I guess we still need to just keep going and making sure everyone has access to information that's supported because I think what this pandemic has taught is that if anyone is not secure in everything it just has a consequence on the rest of society. And, I mean, a lot of us would like to think that we want to have a regard for everyone regardless of whether there's a pandemic or not but a lot of times the pandemic has just moved people toward these values that a lot of us already held. <br /><br />And then just, I guess, yeah, for work that's a big aspect but also been trying to do something to get me out of the house, and that's been riding my bicycle and that's been exploring parks, exploring side streets, trying to stay away from other people, going out with my daughter and learning new things and looking at some of the wildlife around Warner Park has been fun. And we tried flying a kite the other day but there wasn't enough wind, but at least it got us out of the house. And today we're going to go to one of our neighbor's houses. Well, we're not even going to go to the neighbor's house, we're going to stand on the curb; they live across the street, and we're going to sing happy birthday from our side of the street.<br /><br />[00:12:19]<br />INTERVIEWER: That’s great. I think everybody is starting to get very intimate knowledge of the neighborhoods that they live in during this time.<br /><br />[00:12:29]<br />NARRATOR: And I think you notice, like, Oh, like, I never noticed that this house has, like, a carving that's very unique and then you notice, like, Oh, like, and that step over there has, like, a little number or something, so you—it's sort of—I think we're so limited in what we're able to do that we are really taking in all the details that, like, normally we'd just walk by or even drive by or bike by and not even notice.<br /><br />[00:12:55]<br />INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's interesting. Our lives are so big in the scope of the area we cover on a daily basis, you know, even if you're just working—going to work on a daily basis, that when you're kind of confined to your neighborhood it really opens your eyes to a lot of the things right in front of your face.<br /><br />[00:13:14]<br />NARRATOR: I think the other part of this, sort of, this thirst, whereas before I would have tried to consume as much as I can on this screen as an escape, right now I just try to experience as much as I can of the outside world just as a way of keeping my sanity and my mood by just really relishing the fact that I, yeah, can still go outside. It's still, I think, relatively safe in the Madison area but I think the other part is, yeah, we don't know how this is going to play out in a few weeks [or] months from now, so it's always, I think, having that uncertainty in the back of your head that it just makes it difficult and sort of like, yeah—I think a lot of times it’s I think we tend to hold on a lot of stress and for me, like, music has been able—has been a way of really processing a lot of difficult emotions more than anything else. Especially when I was alone it's like, hey, so where do I find refuge—in music and, and just words and things that either people who had gone through hardships or, yeah, just things that are sort of like the old with this sort of mood or uncertainty and crisis.<br /><br />[00:14:29]<br />INTERVIEWER: Yeah, definitely I think it's important for all of us to have those kind of ways we can find refuge in this time to kind of retreat to our own little worlds and experience a little bit of joy away from the anxiety of what's going on. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about before we finish the interview?<br /><br />[00:14:53]<br />NARRATOR: You know, I think I pretty much touched on everything; I can't really think of anything else, but, yeah, it's been a great opportunity to have some time to step back and actually sort of collect my thoughts about a lot of that has been happening because a lot of times you don't really express it to the people that are right next to you, but it's always such a great service when people do this sort of thing to really let you think about and reflect.<br /><br />[00:15:22]<br />INTERVIEWER: Yeah, and I'm happy to hear that your family is doing well and that your father tested negative for corona. That must have definitely been a stressful situation, I imagine.<br /><br />[00:15:36]<br />NARRATOR: Yes.<br /><br />[00:15:37]<br />INTERVIEWER: And I'd just like to thank you for sharing your story, Martín, and just kind of giving us a peek into your experience during this Safer at Home order here in Madison, so, thank you very much.<br /><br />[00:15:51]<br />NARRATOR: And I look forward to learning more about what other people were doing, so I'm really happy that this project's going on, and I thank you and all the people involved for making this happen.<br /><br />[00:16:01]<br />INTERVIEWER: Of course, you're welcome. I'm happy to be a part of it myself; so, alright, thanks a lot.<br /><br />[00:16:07]<br />NARRATOR: Take care.<br /><br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Martín Alvarado, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Pandemics
Public libraries
Family relationships
Municipal government
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Martín Alvarado and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Alvarado, Martín
Contributor
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Torres, Andres
Witkins, Romelle
Kemnetz, Victoria
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-04-24
Description
An account of the resource
Martín Alvarado shares his experience during the Safer at Home social distancing measures in Madison, Wisconsin. Martín describes his family relationships during social distancing, the work he is doing for the City of Madison and Madison Public Library, and what his neighborhood on the north side of Madison is like during this time.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-022
cat-family
cat-neighborhoods
cat-older_adults
covid19
covid19-023
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/277a4ef2814e778b18ceb1e3dc5f109a.mp3
7bd0c09209d9d99a2a3ddb03608799d7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound recordings
Duration
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0:04:37
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
covid19-027<br />Narrator Name: Ann Garvin<br />Interviewer Name: N/A<br />Date of interview: 04/10/2020<br /><br />The title of this story is : “Worry Is What You Do”<br /><br />My daughter called yesterday “Mom!” she said, “They’re running out of gloves and masks.” She’s twenty-three and still in orientation as a brand new ICU nurse. “We have that guy in a coma. He’s so young. Only thirty-five. And he has a fifty fifty chance of living. I’m worried, mom.” And she cried into the phone. “What if they run out of supplies?”<br /><br />When I was a new nurse in 1986 I remember hearing about a disease affecting, we thought, only gay men, and it was killing them. I worked at the VA hospital, and I was pretty sure we wouldn't see any homosexuals there. (laughs) I was twenty-four and I wanted to be a good nurse more than anything, even though I knew absolutely nothing.<br /><br />It was a typical day, and we were getting a new admission, and he was being put into one of our private rooms. We only had two. He needed a new IV, and I was handed a pair of vinyl gloves. I was so eager to prove myself. The guy looked miserable. So thin and dehydrated. It was a muggy, hot Wisconsin summer day, and the VA didn’t have air conditioning at that time. (laughs) And I was sweating. God! And so was he. The vinyl gloves I wore were loose and sticky on my hands as I tried to find a good vein. I didn’t like wearing gloves during procedures. They weren’t required, if you can believe it, and I often went commando. So, I just slipped them off. I remember feeling the pop of the vein and watching the blood rush into the tubing. I got blood on my unprotected hands. “Got it,” I said, and the man sighed, I remember, with such relief. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for not hurting me.” I felt pride and relief, but what I didn’t feel was fear. That’s what I should have felt. I did not feel the emergent rush to wash the blood off my hands.<br /><br />Hospital mandates change quickly, you know, as we learned more about the blood borne contagion. We were required to wear gloves during all procedures after a while. The leaky vinyl ones that we started with were traded out for latex ones, and I had heard that factories had to<br />be built quickly due to the high demand of them. Our vinyl ones were porous, they said, and they could let just about anything in.<br /><br />I soon understood the viral fear of worrying and waiting in line to be tested for HIV, as I had been exposed more than once in those early days.I remember I called my mom too. And she talked to me about when she was a new nurse in the height of the polio epidemic. How they knew nothing. I asked how she got through it. How did she manage her fear? And she said her mother told her about the Spanish flu. And her mother had told her this: “Worry is what you do when nothing can be done. It is a waste of time”<br /><br />So, on the phone with my daughter I listened to her cry. I felt anxious and helpless. But I knew a few things this time around. “Sweetie,” I said, “shut off the news. Stop listening. Follow the hospital procedure. Be a little bit afraid. Be sure to take care of yourself first, so you can take care of your patients. And remember, remember this, try not to worry. Worry is what you do when nothing can be done. It’s a waste of your time.”
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Ann Garvin, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Nursing
Medical personnel
Pandemics
Family relationships
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Ann Garvin. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Garvin, Ann
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
ca. 2020-04
Description
An account of the resource
Ann Garvin shares her family's story of four generations of nurses and the advice she gives to her daughter, a brand new ICU nurse. <br /><br /><em>This story was originally recorded and shared as part of an episode of the Madison podcast Inside Stories. Listen to that episode and subscribe to the podcast here:<a href="https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-2">https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-2</a></em>
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-027
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Propheter
cat-family
cat-medical
covid19
covid19-027
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/97db986769af247aea6fb4261f537746.mp3
2030bd65c57867ce31218dde6e1bd9f8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound recordings
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-040<br />Narrator Name: Brittany Rusch<br />Interviewer Name: Danny Atwater<br />Date of interview: 4/21/2020<br /><br />Index<br />[00:00:31] - What have the last few weeks been like for you?<br />[00:01:44] - Have you developed a routine?<br />[00:02:51] - Is your husband working full-time?<br />[00:03:19] - What is it like being a teacher now?<br />[00:04:22] - Can your younger children participate in the kindergarten program?<br />[00:05:05] - What is your neighborhood like now?<br />[00:05:43] - How did you explain the changes to your children?<br />[00:07:04] - Have your children asked many questions?<br />[00:07:27] - How are things for your friends and family?<br />[00:08:13] - What are things that worry you right now?<br />[00:08:34] - Are there good things right now? Or things that you imagine will result in good?<br />[00:09:38] - Is there anything else you want to talk about?<br />[00:10:20] - Thanks for sharing your story.<br /><br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />[00:00:01]<br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater, and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project, Stories from a Distance series. Today’s date is Tuesday, April 21, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the video conferencing software Zoom. So, let’s begin. Tell us your first and last name, and what your connection to Madison is.<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: My name is Brittany Rusch, and I am a Madison city employee.<br /><br />Interviewer: Very good, Brittany. Thank you for joining us today. What have the last few weeks looked like for you?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: The last few weeks have been very interesting (laughs); very, very interesting. I have taken on this new role of doing everything from my house, including things that I didn’t do before. So I’m trying to teach my six-year-old, who’s in kindergarten, so—help him do virtual learning, which is very tricky with a six-year-old because, while they use technology, they’re still learning how to use it. Even things like using a laptop, he hasn’t quite gotten to in school, so virtual learning is especially tricky, I feel like, for that age, because they just need a lot of assistance. At the same time I’m trying to keep my two younger kids entertained, while I can try and teach my bigger kid, and keep everyone quiet so my husband can work, and try and keep everyone fed and clean and (laughs) my house in order, and somehow get a few hours of work in myself, so it’s been chaotic.<br /><br />[00:01:44]<br />Interviewer: How have you managed to do that? Have you been able to develop any sort of routine, or is it really just moment by moment?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: I would really like to say, when this all started, I thought I would be that proactive person that would go into this and have a schedule. Everything I read from parenting blogs, or just online, from healthcare professionals, or mental health people was like, “It really helps if you get up and have a routine,” and I am finding that very hard to do. Partially because I feel like there are times, like, if I would have a routine, or I try and stick to a routine, my kids are very content doing something, and to pull them out of that contentedness would just create a whole bunch of issues (laughs) I don’t want to deal with. Or just the fact that there are certain things that are scheduled throughout the day that you can’t change; you know, you still have work meetings, and you still have appointments, even though they’re virtual, so trying to stick to a schedule is just becoming impossible and I just can’t do it. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:02:51]<br />Interviewer: You said that your husband is able to work from home; is he full time?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: He is full time, yeah. So typically what we do right now is he works probably seven to four, and then I try and do some work after he’s done, which gets tricky because there’s, well, obviously dinnertime and bedtime in there, so what really ends up happening is I don’t really start working until like 8 pm when my kids are asleep.<br /><br />[00:03:19]<br />Interviewer: What is it like being a teacher now? Is that—<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: (interrupts) Oh, my gosh.<br /><br />[00:03:25]<br />Interviewer: —something that you have experience with?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: I have so, so, so much respect for teachers. I mean, not that I didn’t before, but what they do is amazing, because I cannot get one kid to sit down (laughs) and want to be enthusiastic; I just don’t have that motivation, and when I see him interact with his teacher via Zoom, or his class—it’s the cutest thing ever to see an entire kindergartener class Zoom together; it’s super adorable (laughs). But when I see their interaction and the way she just gets them excited and can keep them engaged, I just, I am failing at doing that myself, and I have so much respect for what they do. Their ability to adapt, to be able to do it in a whole different environment than they’re used to is incredible. I really think they are one of the heroes of this whole epidemic.<br /><br />[00:04:22]<br />Interviewer: Your two younger kids, are they able to participate in the kindergartener learning, or are they too young for it?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: So my two-year-old is too young for it. My four-year-old is in preschool, so they have kind of like a shortened—their teacher made them all little—actually she’s pretty amazing too, she made them all these little craft kits with different activities to do, and then she posts stories, and different videos of yoga poses, and things to do with them. So they still get to kind of see her, and same thing, whenever she sees her, she just absolutely lights up that she gets to still see her teacher and her friends. Because that’s, I think, the hardest thing for them, is they just miss their friends.<br /><br />[00:05:05]<br />Interviewer: What does your neighborhood look like right now?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: You know, I feel less isolated because of my neighborhood, because I feel like it’s been more people outside, and while we socialize from a distance, and kind of yell across people’s yards (laughs) and kind of stand on each side of the lot line, I feel like that’s one way that we’re all still connecting, is you can take a walk around your block, and you can say hi to people from the sidewalk. I feel like that’s something that I’m really grateful for right now, is to have that outdoor space to connect with people.<br /><br />[00:05:43]<br />Interviewer: It’s obviously a change for your kids; how did you explain this to them?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: Yeah, so that’s been tricky, because I feel like I want them to know, but I also want to shelter them from how—specifically, I want to shelter them from images. I don’t want them to see newscasts of hospital rooms, or, you know, people going in an ambulance to a hospital or something like that. But we’ve been talking about it, and they know that there’s a sickness. For some reason I can’t get ‘coronavirus’ to stick in their heads, so they just refer to it as ‘the sickness,’ (laughs) which I think is kind of funny. But they know that we can’t get together because we could spread it to each other. My six-year-old is very good at knowing six feet away; “You need to be six feet away from someone!” (laughs) So we’re just kind of talking about, that’s why we can’t be going to school; that’s why we’re not going to the grocery store; that’s why I can’t take you with me when I run to the bank drive-through; that’s why we have to be separate, and they know that it can make people really sick and that they have a hard time breathing. But beyond that, I’m trying not to go into much detail about what can happen.<br /><br />[00:07:04]<br />Interviewer: Have they asked many questions about it?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: Not too much. They know that it can make you really sick, and they say, “What happens if you get it?” They know that it can make you really sick, and I tell them that you’d have to go to the hospital, and they’d have to help, maybe get you on a machine that could help you breathe, but that’s kind of been the extent of what we’ve talked about.<br /><br />[00:07:27]<br />Interviewer: How are things going for friends and family right now?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: You know, it’s hard, speaking to friends and family because, one, I feel like everyone’s got their own strategies on how to deal with it, and everybody’s taking a different amount of precautions, which can sometimes lead to some awkwardness, which is kind of challenging when people don’t always see eye to eye on how to handle it. My dad doesn’t think it’s a big deal; my mom thinks it’s a super-big deal. There’s just some difference of opinion there that gets challenging to navigate. It’s also hard knowing what to say to people who are losing their jobs, or getting their hours cut, and it’s just hard to comfort people when you can’t be with them.<br /><br />[00:08:13]<br />Interviewer: What are things that worry you right now?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: You know, I think the biggest worry, and I think this of any parent, is the biggest worry is that you’re not going to be there for your kids. I mean, that’s my greatest worry, so I think my greatest worry would be getting it and having something terrible happen, and not being able to be there for them.<br /><br />[00:08:34]<br />Interviewer: Are there good things that you see happening right now? Or things that you can imagine will result in a good way at the end of all this?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: Yeah, I think personally, at home, I am really grateful for this time; I really see my kids connecting in a way they didn’t really get to before. I mean, not that they’re not together, but life is busy; you go in a bazillion different directions, and everyone’s got things going on, and it’s kind of nice to just slow down, and not have anywhere to be, and just really get to hang out together. It also can get very long (laughs) and problematic, and cause problems, and people fight, but there are these moments that are just great, you know, where everyone can be outside together in the yard running around, and they’re just playing, and I almost feel like in a way it gives them a little bit extra of their childhood, or something it just seems more pure. There’s nothing else to do but for them to play with each other. So it’s kind of cool to see that bonding happening.<br /><br />[00:09:38]<br />Interviewer: Is there anything else that you want to talk about that we didn’t touch on?<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: I just would really like to say that I am so proud of parents, because this is very difficult, and I have so much respect for how people are trying to make it work and maintaining a positive attitude. Everyone I talk to is trying to be very positive and isn’t complaining, even though—well, that’s not true. We’re complaining, but we’re not doing it in a way (laughs), in a way that is meant to be super negative, or just being depressed about it all of the time. I think people are doing the best with what they have, and they’re trying to always find the good in it.<br /><br />[00:10:20]<br />Interviewer: Brittany, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you sharing your story.<br /><br />Brittany Rusch: Thank you.<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Brittany Rusch, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Parenthood
Home schooling
Public libraries
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Brittany Rusch and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rusch, Brittany
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Atwater, Daniel
Glaeser, Colleen
Bergmann, Frances
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-04-21
Description
An account of the resource
Brittany Rusch talks about her and her family's experience since the social distancing measures were put into place in Wisconsin in spring 2020. Brittany discusses what it's like working for Madison Public Library from home, and navigating homeschooling her children while the entire family is staying home.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-040
cat-family
cat-work
covid19
covid19-040
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/8e3237db8ac7d8039bb16939a1a82984.mp3
15ff214facf975def9d9867a88716f9b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound recordings
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:03:12
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-029<br />Narrator Name: Jasmine Banks<br />Interviewer Name: n/a<br />Date of interview: 4/1/2020<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />Jasmine Banks: I remember having a conversation with my dad when I was a teenager: “Why Madison? Why didn’t you ever leave? Why this house? Why this side of town?” To which my dad simply replied, Madison was his home. He loved it here. It was beautiful to him. Through my teenage eyes, I couldn’t understand. As I grew older, I never could really see the beauty in this city, but I did see the beauty in the people. People are my passion, so of course they’re beautiful.<br /><br />My family’s been in Madison for five generations. They migrated from the South around 1925. My dad was born at Madison General Hospital. My grandpa, like most others, worked at Oscar Mayer—the same as my dad and, later on, the same as me.<br /><br />Most recently, as we all know, Governor Evers ordered Safe at Home. That order has provided me the opportunity to work from home, something that I’ve always wanted to do. Every morning I start my day off with a walk. I’ve walked from Lake Mendota, to Lake Monona, to the Capitol Square, to Olbrich Gardens, down East Washington, Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard. I’ve walked through residential neighborhoods to see the beautiful old buildings, the architecture next door to these new high rises and buildings. I find it so interesting as I inhale all that surrounds me. I appreciate the sounds of the birds, the water as it flows, the sun as it shines. All the things that my dad knew when I asked him that question as a teenager, why he stayed. And he said because Madison was his home, and he found it beautiful—something that it took a pandemic for me to see.<br /><br />I’ll leave you with this: my hope is we all come on the other side of this pandemic seeing the beauty in things that we never thought were there before. <br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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COVID-19 story by Jasmine Banks, 2020
Subject
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Social distance
Walking
Cities and towns
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Jasmine Banks. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Banks, Jasmine
Date
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ca. 2020-04
Description
An account of the resource
Jasmine Banks shares her story of being part of a 5 generation family in Madison and how through her daily walks during social distancing she is rediscovering Madison.<br /><br /><em>This story was originally recorded and shared as part of an episode of the Madison podcast Inside Stories. Listen to that episode and subscribe to the podcast here: <a href="https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-3">https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-stories-3</a></em>
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-029
Contributor
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Propheter, Nicholas
Glaeser, Colleen
cat-family
cat-inside_stories
cat-neighborhoods
covid19
covid19-029
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/769ac976fec8c24f88208c60e7900ff9.jpeg
1d0df6a1e5244205a86a23e4bdc2e7a1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recollection Wisconsin
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Photographs
Dublin Core
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Title
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Third grade pen pals, 2020
Subject
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Postcards
Youth
Social distance
Rights
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Copyright 2020, H. Krueger and Robin Krueger. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Krueger, H.
Contributor
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Krueger, Robin
Date
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2020-04-22
Description
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Written response about this image: Seeing my children write letters and postcards to family and friends has been an unexpected blessing during this time. They cut right to the chase: I hate not seeing you. I can’t wait to hug you. I miss getting licorice from you. I hope these days pass soon. --Robin Krueger, April 2020
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-image001
cat-arts
cat-family
covid19
covid19-image001
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/498ec3cf7c6411cdfea8d9d1e6656a5e.mp3
9cb997e21f738828416eef4f23735507
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
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Original Format
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00:06:09
Transcription
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Identifier: covid19-033<br />Narrator Name: Danielle Hairston-Green<br />Interviewer Name: <br />Date of interview: 5/4/2020<br /><br /><br />So, I showed up. Yes, I did. I showed up on the doorstep of my ex’s home. I couldn’t take one more day social distancing, and isolated away from all of my family one thousand miles away. So, I woke up one morning, booked a flight, grabbed my bookbag and laptops, and landed on my ex’s front step, unannounced. His reaction, “Did you lose your job?” My response, “Of course not. I’ve decided to social distance here with you, my fam, and our daughter.” Who, by the way, was social distancing there after leaving her campus. Not taking his eyes off of me, he watched me, as I stepped over the threshold, and ducked under his arm, and headed up to his second floor apartment, and then made myself comfortable. <br /><br />Senior, that’s what I call him, and I met in 1987 at McDonald’s where we both were employed. We were friends for a while, and then began dating two years later. We were teenagers.The journey of our lives is definitely book-worthy. We experienced every obstacle, pitfall, and milestone imaginable as teen parents. Despite the journey, and our love for one another, we eventually separated twenty years ago, and continued to co-parent our children. <br /><br />In the beginning it was difficult trying to co-parent, mainly because I wanted him to co-parent the way I wanted him to co-parent, and, of course, he wanted to co-parent the way he wanted to. Eventually I decided to allow him to do what he believed was best for him and the children. We have three children. I realized at some point that the battle just wasn’t worth the scars. And I needed to control what I could, and that is my reaction to it all. We did the best we could. We respected each other’s role in our childrens’ life, and protected our friendship.<br /><br />Here we are, great friends and social distancing together. The first week he checked on me every day, sarcastically wondering “How long is this really, really going to last?” I like to cook, and so everyday I was chopping up veggies, or sauteing something, or baking something fabulous, or cooking up the shrimp in his freezer, and rearranging his cabinets so I could find what I needed. To him that was simply too much activity in his kitchen. He would say “Why are you chopping up stuff all the time and messing up my kitchen?” Or, “I’ve never even used that pot.” Or he’ll say, “What do you mean do I have heavy cream? What is that?” Or, “Let’s order pizza, it’s quicker.” He’s a bachelor, and an introvert. So two extra humans in his home, and females, is just way too much for him. <br /><br />Anyway, I made myself comfy in his man cave, and set up my computer, getting ready for a week of Zooming. While sitting in his man cave I saw a spider, and I called out to say, “Oh my god, there’s a spider in here!” And he came rushing in quickly, you would have thought I’d said we were being robbed. He completely murdered that spider. And I said, “Wow, see, you are my hero.You really didn’t want me to get bit, huh?” His response, “Of course not. I don’t need anything to prolong your short stay.” And he emphasized the word short. I rolled my eyes, as I always do, and continued to set up my new, temporary office space, as he walks away shaking his head. <br /><br />The next morning was Easter. I got up and dressed and head out the door to pick up something from the pharmacy. And boom, down the concrete step I went, miscalculating my footing, with a handful of items, and a mask on my face that was actually blinding me because I was wearing glasses and breathing, and my lenses were fogging up. I guess you can’t do those two things at the same time when you have glasses on. Breathe and wear a mask, that is.The fall knocked the air out of me, and I ended up with two sprained ankles. Senior had to come home and carry me to his car, literally pick me up and carry me, so I could get to the urgent care. I know he was probably thinking, This was not on my agenda. I left out of the urgent car with crutches and a leg brace. I smiled at Senior, “Well, I guess I’ll be staying.” He didn’t even look at me, or respond. He just looked at the nurse and asked, “Excuse me, how can I assist in her speedy recovery?” He emphasized the word speedy.<br /><br />Everyday after work he sneaks into his man cave to see if I’m still in there. He whispers, “Let me know if you need a ride to the airport. I mean, no rush! I just want to make sure you have a safe ride.” (laughs) Whatever. After thirty days he caught a glimpse of me walking across the room without crutches, and under his breathe I hear him say, “Yes!” I roll my eyes again.<br /><br />But, yet, everyday he checks on me. He brings me lunch on his lunch break. He runs errands for me. Every now and again he steps into his former man cave and spends hours chatting about life with me. And just life in general. I may have started off as a house invader, but I can tell there’s a little something deep down inside of him that is glad I chose to social distance at his bachelor pad with our daughter. He’s my friend. He’s my co-pilot in parenting. And he’s my family.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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COVID-19 story by Danielle Y. Hairston-Green, 2020
Subject
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Epidemics
Social distance
Family relationships
Man-woman relationships
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Danielle Y. Hairston-Green. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Hairston-Green, Danielle Y.
Date
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2020-05-04
Description
An account of the resource
Danielle Y. Hairston-Green recounts an extended visit to her ex-partner's home during social distance measures. This story was recorded for an episode of the Madison podcast Inside Stories. <em>To hear the full episode and subscribe to the podcast, click here: <a href="https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-5">https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-5</a></em>
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-033
Contributor
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Nick Propheter
cat-family
cat-inside_stories
covid19
covid19-033
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/263542c39fb78920851892816480149b.mp3
69b1ca2a227374909e11c55e16012aeb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound recordings
Duration
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00:18:46
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-038<br />Narrator Name: Tina Marie Maes<br />Interviewer Name: Danny Atwater<br />Date of interview: 5/9/2020<br /><br />Index<br />[00:00:00] - Talk about your Covid-19 Safer at Home story<br />[00:00:51] - How are you at present?<br />[00:01:28] - What have the past few weeks been like?<br />[00:03:45] - Tell us about work Zoom meetings.<br />[00:06:20] - How do you think work will be different when you can go back?<br />[00:09:51] - How are your family and friends?<br />[00:12:54] - Are there some things that worry you right now?<br />[00:14:44] - What positive changes do you hope for when this is over?<br />[00:15:56] - Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?<br />[00:18:16] - Thanks for sharing your story.<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br /><br />[00:00:00]<br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater, and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project Stories from a Distance series. Today’s date is Saturday, May 9, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the video conferencing software Zoom. I’ll have our storyteller introduce themselves; please tell us your first and last name and what your connection to Madison is.<br /><br />[00:00:26]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Hi, my name is Tina Marie Maes. I have been living in Madison for twenty years. I went to undergrad here, and then I went to grad school, and then I decided to never leave. I currently work at the City of Madison and have been doing so for about the last ten years. Currently, I’m the lead cataloging librarian at the City of Madison technical services; so we deal with getting materials out to people.<br /><br />[00:00:51]<br />Interviewer: We’ll definitely get into your job a bit, but right now I’d like you to describe where you are right now and how you’re feeling in the moment.<br /><br />[00:01:00]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Currently I’m sitting in my living room, slash office, slash the place I sit most of the day, talking to you on my laptop—on the city’s laptop, actually—and I’m staring out at Warner Park, because that’s right outside my door. Physically I’m great; there’s just been a low-level anxiety for the last, I don’t know how many weeks. But mostly I’m doing pretty good; I’m hopeful for the future and, you know, getting through it all.<br /><br />[00:01:28]<br />Interviewer: What have the past few weeks looked like for you in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Safer at Home order from the governor?<br /><br />[00:01:38]<br />Tina Marie Maes: I have to think about what my life was like beforehand before I actually go into now. So beforehand, the week before, I was going to meetings, going into work every day, busing in to work and then sitting in meetings and getting stuff out to people, and I had meetings outside of that, and I’d gone to Wicked the week before, and it was awesome, full house and everything, and then the next week happened. Actually I started staying home, like, a week before the Safer at Home rules were in place because I have underlying conditions; I have asthma and I had part of my lung removed when I was ten. Whole different story. I started staying home, and I thought, It’s fine; I’ve worked from home before, it’ll just be like work but from home, I’ve done this before. And then it kept continuing. You have to stay at home; you have to stay at home, and it just—it’s been a giant change, and part of me just doesn’t understand what it was like when I went into work every week and when I saw people because I haven’t done that in—two months? Don’t ask me; I’m not good at that. So it’s just—it’s been a giant change. The entire department has actually been working from home, and we’ve been working on trying to do completely different things; most of my department has to deal with items in hand one way or another. Our catalogers can actually catalog from a distance because we’ve been doing it via an Excel report which is totally against cataloging rules, but we do what we can, and we’ve been doing that for decades and we have a pretty good system in place. But for everyone else, they usually are sitting there linking materials and receiving them and just touching things in hand and dealing with getting them out, and they haven’t been able to do that for two months, so it’s been—that’s been a big change and all of the zoom meetings have been a big change.<br /><br />[00:03:45]<br />Interviewer: Tell us more about some of those Zoom meetings as part of work.<br /><br />[00:03:50]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Well, there’s been all sorts of meetings. We do a weekly TS meeting that kind of gets all the department together so people can ask questions; We also—I’ve also had meetings on—I also work with the entire system and we talk about how things go for the system and how cataloging goes. A lot of my life is about cataloging and also the discovery interface, so the LINKcat version of our system as well, so we talk about how things are looking there. And the other meetings that I’ve been doing are—I mean I’ve just been doing related meetings. <br /><br />Oh! Backing up. One of the cool things that our department has been working on is actually something that’s been bugging me for years, but we’ve finally been able to do it. When we started—a million years ago there weren’t DVDs! And then there were DVDs (laughs), and then we started cataloging them, and when we first started putting them in the system, they were just in, like, everything was in nonfiction, or they all had Dewey numbers. And then ten years ago or so we pulled them out of the nonfiction, and we put them in a TV collection, but when we did that, for reasons that I don’t actually know, we only put a call number that was three letters long, so if you had something called Dollhouse, the call number would be D-o-l, season 1, disc whatever. Which is fine if every TV show has a different title. They don’t. And so things like CSI, CSI New York, CSI Las Veg— there’s like, the regular CSI, CSI New York, CSI Miami, which were all under CSI. Nobody knew what they were looking at. And then there’s a bunch of Star Trek, and then there’s reboots of Twin Peaks and Outer Limits, and it’s just like, nobody knows what they’re doing, they always have to look at the barcode, which is fine for a small collection but we have several long shelves of DVDs. It’s a big collection. So we’ve been actually able to go into all the items that we own from all the nine locations around Madison and update those with a full title, which has been great. I think it’ll be helpful for pick-list staff and for patrons, so I’ve been really happy about that part of it.<br /><br />[00:06:20]<br />Interviewer: When you’re able to get back into work, how do you think work might be different compared to how it has been?<br /><br />[00:06:28]<br />Tina Marie Maes: I have been literally working on that project right now because the first thing we want to do is to keep social distancing. We want to make sure that people have enough space around them that the likelihood of them getting sick is very small. And everyone will have their masks and all that. So we have two shared rooms for the two different parts of TS, because that’s how the new library—we were in the Central library; I should also point that out, and there are two different parts of TS. Since we have a shared office, there’s no separate cubicles, and we have people pretty close together, so in the beginning, when we are relaxing the safer at home, we’re trying to figure out a way to actually get people in there where they can be safe in their space, but also away from other people enough that there won’t be any transmission of this disease, or hopefully any others, and make sure that the work gets done, and make sure that the work gets done in the order it’s supposed to get done. Like, you can’t have somebody who’s doing materials prep if the item hasn’t been cataloged; there’s a process that we have developed, which has been great until we get to this point where not everyone can be in the office and there’s a process that needs to happen. So I think at first we’ll have to figure that out, if everyone’s going in at the same time, and if everyone’s not, what are they doing, when are they going in, how late are they going in, how early are they going in; some people in our department enjoy going in at five thirty in the morning. That is not me. I’d rather be there till 9 o’clock p.m. because I am a night owl. So there might be some schedule shifts like that, and even after the safer at home ends, I think we’ll still probably do some more schedule relaxing—not relaxing, but it’ll just be a different look for when people are in and where they are in the building. <br /><br />I don’t have a lot to do with the public side of this, but I think it’ll also extend to what the public side looks like. Yeah, it’ll be very interesting. I’m hoping it’ll all work out really well, but I have no idea, because it’s going to be a very big shift, because we’re even thinking, when people have questions, because people will always have questions; nothing is ever perfect the first time, and someone’s going to be like, “Hey, this is missing something,” “I don’t understand this note,” whatever; usually you’d go over to somebody’s desk and say, “Hey, I have a question.” Now, we don’t really want to do that, because we do want to maintain that social distance, and even if everyone’s wearing a mask, the virus is the virus and it will do what it will, and it wants to infect people. So we’re trying to figure out how do we actually make that happen. I’m really happy now that we actually have a lot of technology around us, in that we do have phones and computers and chat and all that, but not every person in our department has city issued or their own—not everyone even has a smartphone, so if there’s a question which requires a picture, if you don’t have a smartphone you can’t take a picture. So we’re trying to figure out the logistics of that.<br /><br />[00:09:51]<br />Interviewer: How have things been going for family and friends during this time?<br /><br />[00:09:55]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Most of my family—I have a lot of family who live up north, and thankfully, there have not been a lot of cases; Madison and Milwaukee have had far more cases than they have had up north. However, they all are essential employees, so they’ve been going to work. Part of me felt very jealous about that, but then part of me was just really nervous because they’re going into work, they’re having to talk to other people, they’ve got other people who are in their spaces and they can’t control the same social distancing and the same contacts as they can, so I’m nervous that they’re going to get sick, and I even have—one of my family members just wants to get the virus and get it over with, and I don’t know how to explain to that person that, like, you could die! Other people could die, and it could come back; you don’t really want to get this; this isn’t like the lottery, you’re not going to win money, you’re going to maybe be very sick, maybe be slightly sick, maybe give it to other people. But I think it’s just it’s a really different—I’m realizing how very different the culture is around Madison versus up north, where they haven’t had a lot of cases, and so it’s just, they’re more used to a different way of life and I think it’s harder to change that, especially when you have a lot of people who are in a service industry, in a health care industry, in an essential store, and they have to go to work and drive and everything.<br /><br />The other thing is that my dad had carpal tunnel surgery, like, February? And it’s—so thankfully he had the surgery, he was doing okay, but then he got tendinitis after that, and so he’s been trying to talk to his doctor about doing physical therapy, but he couldn’t go in because the hospitals were like no we’re not letting anyone in, so it’s weird when you have to actually go to a doctor to do anything and you can’t go in, so, yeah, it’s just been very, very different between all of them. So the other thing is, I have friends in Madison who work in the health care department, and who work in other jobs that they can’t stop. A lot of them have been able to work from home, but one of them sets up telephone networks, so she’s been inundated because there’s work happening all across the country, and then she can’t really stop, but she’s trying to work from home; and then I have two friends who work in the hospitals, and they’re going in every day—or every day they work—and wearing masks, and, you know, I worry about them because it’s a worrying situation.<br /><br />[00:12:54] <br />Interviewer: Are there some things that worry you right now?<br /><br />[00:12:57] <br />Tina Marie Maes: I try not to worry about the people who are going to get sick. I mean, that is always the worry that I have, but I also am worrying about the economy, which is not a thing I’ve ever done. I worry about businesses not being around or people—they don’t have jobs, and so they don’t have money for food or for rent, and then I worry that it’s going to change us fundamentally as how we interact with each other. When this first started I started doing daily walks around Warner Park, and it was great to be outside, but I also have noticed that every day, people are, like, you can see fear in their eyes and they definitely are doing the walking away from each other, but I also don’t want it to be like a “I’m scared of other people,” and I think that it’s just going to—it has already changed the way we interact with each other, and it’s sometimes even worse for people who are not in communities that are in power, so there’s been hate crimes against people who are Asian because this is supposedly an Asian virus, although it doesn’t mean that those people actually came from that community recently anyway, like, they grew up—they look like a South Korean because their family was, but they’ve been in the United States for twenty years, or thirty years, or forty years, or their entire life, so it’s just (sighs), I worry about just what can it do in a small way; it’s changing everything, but also what it’s doing to us and showing off fears that I really wish weren’t there. Yeah.<br /><br />[00:14:44]<br />Interviewer: At some point, this will be behind us, and when that happens, what good or what positive changes do you hope will come from it?<br /><br />[00:14:56]<br />Tina Marie Maes: I know that the city of Madison we’ve been working on doing our professional development for our employees and thinking about bigger questions in ways that we never really had time to when our day-to-day is just getting materials in patrons’ hands. And getting information in their heads, too, with the Bubbler and all that, but I hope that we can actually go forward and continue those questions and those lofty goals of making equality and equity a thing that happens for all communities in Madison. And also, I just want it to show people that everyone is dealing with the same stuff that you are, no matter what they look like or what they’re—what they’re dealing with. I hope we can find a way to actually make this more of a positive experience. (sighs) That’s my hope. That’s my hope every day.<br /><br />[00:15:56]<br />Interviewer: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we didn’t mention in the interview?<br /><br />[00:16:01]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Yeah. I’ve been working with a workgroup trying to develop a policy for employees in the city of Madison who are gender nonconforming, gender fluid, transgender, anything in that umbrella, to make sure that they have rights and that they have the same rights and privileges as people who aren’t. And even before I joined the group—I actually joined the group because I’d been questioning and trying to figure out who I really was and what gender I really felt was mine, and this is, we’ve been continuing to work on that, which is great because a lot of the city’s jobs and goals have kind of stopped in the meantime, but it’s also like, I have entirely too much time to think, and it’s made me realize that I really need to figure out what I am and be proud of it and get to a point—and so I saw somebody recently who was like, “I just really want a haircut!” And part of me was like, “Is your hair worth more than other people’s lives?” But the other part of me was like, yes, I’d really like a haircut because I want to be able to present myself in a way that makes more sense for me, and that’s kind of affirming and kind of scary, but also, I want to do the thing that makes my gender expression better. I’ve been dealing with this question for about, I don’t know, at least ten years if not more, and this is a hard time to actually try and figure out what gender means and how to present oneself when you can’t do anything and when you also don’t have support from other people who can say, “Hey, you’re doing fine; this is my struggle, this is your struggle”—especially—especially if you’re just starting out in the journey. So that’s been an interesting thing. I’m really happy with what the city is doing to make sure that that policy goes forward and it becomes a real policy, but yeah. It’s not an easy journey to take alone.<br /><br />[00:18:16]<br />Interviewer: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us today.<br /><br />[00:18:21]<br />Tina Marie Maes: Yeah, I hope, I hope people can find it—I just want people to understand that it’s hard, but it’s also maybe clarifying, and I hope people can find hope out of it. So that’s my goal.<br /><br />[00:18:36]<br />Interviewer: Thank you.<br /><br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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COVID-19 story by Tina Marie Maes, 2020
Subject
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Public libraries
Family relationships
Social distance
Technical services (Libraries)
Epidemics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Tina Marie Maes and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Maes, Tina Marie
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Atwater, Daniel
Glaeser, Colleen
Bergmann, Frances
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-09
Description
An account of the resource
Tina Marie Maes describes what library work in cataloging and technical services has looked like during the social distance measures put in place in Madison in spring 2020. Tina discusses tentative plans for what the workplace in the Central Library will look like as the Safer at Home order is phased out.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-038
cat-family
cat-work
covid19
covid19-038
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/4fa580692b487b152cf50b0e80bee397.mp3
7e9fa085db0b7ddc16f8a795d97e637a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound recordings
Duration
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00:07:12
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-042<br />Narrator Name: Brian Lee Huynh<br />Interviewer Name: N/A<br />Date of Interview: Spring 2020<br /><br />Brian Lee Huynh: What was once mundane is now exciting to me, was once normal is now a distant memory from a time I might never return to. Since the start of spring break, I’ve been at home in Milwaukee, roughly eighty miles away from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I expected to finish off the remainder of my sophomore year. Of course, that didn’t happen (sighs). <br /><br />Instead of roaming around campus trying to find a quiet place to cram for finals, inevitably ending up in either Memorial Library or some hidden cove in one of the unions, I struggled to find the motivation to study for open-book online exams in my parents’ basement. Finals week didn’t feel like finals week. Clicking “Submit” on my last exam wasn’t as satisfying or as stressful as scrambling to jot down my final thoughts in a lecture hall packed with people who I’d seen all semester, and those who only showed up when their grades depended on it.<br /><br />I’ve come to find that it’s these little details that have made my college experience memorable thus far. And though I was reluctant to admit it at first, the more I think about it, my memories of Madison always bring me back to people, for better or worse. And it’s funny in its way, because I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’m an introvert with enough social anxiety to make large crowds feel like war zones where it’s me against the world. And yet, the thing I miss the most about school and the way things used to be is the people.<br /><br />Now don’t get me wrong—the first week or so of online learning was great. I could sleep at 4 a.m. and wake up at one in the afternoon without being late. I could learn at my own pace without dealing with obnoxious people interrupting class. But after a while, the monotony kicked in, and I would have given anything to have someone enter halfway through a lecture and choose the most inconvenient seat possible, just to remind me that I wasn’t alone, sitting behind the screen during a pandemic.<br /><br />I never thought I would say this, but social distancing is hard, even for introverts. For me, being on the periphery of campus life was mostly a choice, and I enjoyed people watching, looking from afar at strangers I might meet someday and those with paths that would never intersect with mine. It made me feel like I was a part of something, that I wasn’t the only small fish in a gigantic pond of other college students trying to figure out what it all means. The greatest realization that I’ve come to in this time away from others is that technology is not advanced enough, nor will it ever be, to replace human interaction. <br /><br />My most memorable learning experiences involve people in one way or another. Even an introvert like myself is forced to admit that I miss the hustle and bustle of campus life. I miss laughing with people in crowded spaces, I miss trying to stay awake in lecture halls that are always either too hot or too cold, regardless of the time of year. I miss the communal feeling of exhaustion that fills the air during finals season, as well as the shared feeling of relief upon turning in semester-long projects. Isn’t it horrible how we learn to miss things only when they’re gone? I heard somewhere that you can’t miss someone if they won’t go away, and I think I had to learn that one the hard way.<br /><br />My older sister, Linda, graduated from Madison this year, and she also came home to isolate with our parents. You can imagine how little time we’ve spent with them in the last few years, with us both going to college in a different city. I was there when my mom unsuccessfully fought back tears in the long car ride home after leaving Linda in her dorm four years ago. I remember her calling me every day during my freshman year to make sure I was taking my vitamins and wasn’t being too stupid. I owe my mom and dad an apology for every call I never picked up, every message I left unread for weeks. Out of all of the foolish decisions I’ve made in the last two years, the dumbest thing I’ve done in my college career is think I was too busy for my family. We drifted apart. Even back then, technology was not enough to replace human interaction.<br /><br />This time at home has given us a chance to rediscover who we are and to rebuild the bonds that were wearing thin. So, while the coronavirus may have distanced the world, it’s also brought my family back together. We don’t argue as much as we used to. We laugh more often than not, and it kind of feels like we’re kids again. I bother my sister until she punches me while my mom and dad tell jokes and make sure we never go hungry.<br /><br />And while technology is still an incredibly fickle thing, I have to give it credit. It’s also brought the rest of my family closer together. Every day the silence is broken by group calls with family from across the globe, so the house is always buzzing with laughter and new family gossip. Even family we rarely hear from are calling to see how we’re doing.<br /><br />My mom always seems to be the one orchestrating these video calls, which is rather fitting, seeing as she’s always been the one trying to hold things together. She’s always been the type to shoulder every burden without complaining, to go to work before the sun rises and come back just before midnight and still find a way to make dinner. It never occurred to me that my mother is just a human being. Her face is finally starting to show the wrinkles of time that mark the passing of countless birthdays. Bags under her eyes tell the story of her restlessness, most likely from worrying about Linda and me over the years. When she smiles, I can see the creases from the decades of laughter and struggle that have come before. I had to acknowledge for the first time that she’s not getting any younger, and neither are we. Linda’s twenty-three. I’m turning twenty in June. My dad’s hair count is nearing the single digits. <br /><br />The pandemic has made me address truths that I’ve been too afraid or too oblivious to face. In this time away from the countless distractions of the world, I’ve been forced to stand at the periphery of my own life and look inward, at the past, present, and what it means for the future. And I can’t help but worry. When this eventually ends and we start to reclaim bits and pieces of what once was our normal lives, will I fall back into my old ways? Will we drift apart once more? And will it take another earth-shattering loss for me to appreciate what I have? (Sighs.) As with everything these days, I don’t know.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Brian Lee Huynh, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
College students
Epidemics
College campuses
Social distance
Family relationships
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Brian Lee Huynh. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Huynh, Brian Lee
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-06
Description
An account of the resource
Brian Lee Huynh shares a story about his experience finishing the 2020 academic year at home, due to social distance measures in place in Wisconsin. Brian reflects on how being at home with his family has helped them reconnect and become closer at this time.<br /><br />This story was recorded for the Madison podcast, <em>Inside Stories</em>. To hear the full episode and to subscribe to the podcast, click here: <a href="https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-6">https://inside-stories.simplecast.com/episodes/inside-stories-covid-19-6</a>
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-042
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jane Wolff
cat-education
cat-family
cat-inside_stories
covid19
covid19-042
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/c73ad4a1980ca48be6a434d6701dd381.mp3
710d73ec7adfdb6ec356e0492f18b81e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound recordings
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:17:43
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br /><br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater, and I am a Library Assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project “Stories from a Distance” series. Today’s date is Friday, May 8, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the videoconferencing software Zoom. I’ll have our storyteller introduce themselves. Please tell us your first and last name and describe your connection to Madison.<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: Hello, my name is Victor Crentsil. I’ve lived in Madison for almost twelve years now, so this is very much home. That’s my connection to Madison. I’m a resident.<br /><br />Interviewer: Thanks for joining us, Victor, and sharing your story. Would you tell me where you are right now, so our listener can get a sense, and describe how you’re feeling in this moment?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: I am at my house, which is on the near west side of Madison. I don’t know a hundred years from now if we can identify roads and what-not (laughs), but very close to the Whole Foods and Target, and Hilldale—that’s where I live. At this very moment I’m feeling pretty refreshed. I just went on a long walk; that’s pretty characteristic of my days right now, during the pandemic.<br /><br />Interviewer: What have things been like for you in the last few weeks, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Safer at Home order?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: I think it’s been pretty uneventful, I would say, which is good in a lot of respects. I have adjusted to a routine of looking at the news, keeping it to a maximum of—in the morning of looking at the numbers and looking at different advisories from public health departments, to figure out what I should be doing. Either I should do something differently from what I’ve been doing in the past, or not. And then, trying to stay healthy. Again, doing those exercises where I walk anywhere from three to six miles, just to get some of that fresh air. That’s been most of my routine—trying to stay healthy and pay attention to what our public health experts are telling us to do. <br /><br />Interviewer: When you’re walking around, what does the neighborhood look like? What are people doing?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: It’s interesting, especially this time around Madison in May it starts getting warmer, so you’ll see a few more folks out. The good thing is that most people that I’ve encountered are trying to keep their distance, so when I cross paths with another walker, they usually try to give you a good berth, so you can keep at least six feet of distance from each other. Seeing a few folks wearing masks, as well. It’s really quiet, which is good, too. This neighborhood in general is pretty quiet too, so I don’t know if it reflects a difference from pre-pandemic, but at least it seems like folks are trying to observe the Safer at Home order.<br /><br />Interviewer: Are you working right now, during this time?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: I am not, actually. I’m a unique case in that my employment wasn’t affected by COVID-19 explicitly. I took off from work last September to travel the world for the better part of a year. I was able to get to most of the places that I wanted to visit prior to things getting really serious here in the States. The last places I visited were Vietnam and Cambodia, in February. At that point, I was realizing that the U.S. may not have been taking it as seriously as the rest of the world, at least, especially, that part of the world. <br /><br />I had a layover in Hong Kong, for example. I remember there, that temperatures were checked at airports; I was given a mask at the airport. This was February; I don’t think we even had as many Shelter in Place or Safer at Home or any of those types of things in the States yet. It was definitely a little bit more serious, or taking it more seriously, there, at that point.<br /><br />And then when I got back to the States, it was strange, still. That was at the end of February when I flew into Chicago, and—no temperature check, nothing, really, at that point, to signify that we were in the middle of a crisis. But, here we are (laughs).<br /><br />Interviewer: Besides the airport, was there any indication on your travels that things were different? Were you seeing the locals act differently, or places that you were staying?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: Yeah, I think all of the places that I stayed, for the most part, most of the people behind the front desk had masks. That was definitely a change. That said, I don’t know if, in that part of the world, since they were used to SARS before, and H1N1, I don’t know if that may have been something that they were accustomed to already. So I can’t say whether it was just in reaction to the Coronavirus or that was just how they did things.<br /><br />I remember also, when I was in Hong Kong, it was encouraged for folks to do takeout versus dining in. So, I remember when I got food, I got a discount for just getting food to take out versus dining in. I knew that was something that was different. Then when I was chatting with my partner via WhatsApp at points I was like “Oh, my gosh, it’s crazy here!” I was thinking it was sort of overblown, like I thought they were doing a lot more than they needed to. So, I think it was just crazy. That was just a few months ago, now, when you think about it. But it feels like years (laughs).<br /><br />Interviewer: You said that you had plans to travel the world. Did you have any future plans that are affected by the world being, essentially, shut down right now?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: Yeah. One of my trips, my last trip that I had scheduled, did get cancelled. That was to go to Europe. It would have been pretty close to Italy—sort of a mix of disappointment and relief. I’m at least at home during this time as opposed to trying to navigate that situation. Around the time when I was planning to go, I know there were U.S. citizens who were still stuck in various places, trying to make their way back home. I’m glad I wasn’t in that situation.<br /><br />That said, I’m still hopeful that maybe in the next few years, when they have a vaccine and when it’s safer for folks to make these international trips that I’ll have the opportunity to do so again. Right now I’m trying to keep things in perspective, and recognize what things I should be grateful for.<br /><br />Interviewer: Since you’re not working right now, and you’re not traveling the world, besides exercising, what is it that you do to occupy your time?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: Honestly, lots of Netflix, puzzles, reading, podcasts. I guess a hundred years from now people won’t understand what a podcast is (laughs). But one of my favorites right now is “Hidden Brain” through NPR. It covers a lot of interesting psychological, philosophical questions. I get super-engaged in that stuff. As more profound as it gets, I get more engaged. Usually, when I’m walking, I’ll be listening to a podcast.<br /><br />And cooking, too. I do love to cook. I’ve been trying to brush up on a couple of dishes, since I have plenty of time to do so. That’s been pretty much what I’ve been occupying my time with. Also, trying to keep in touch with family and friends. If there’s an opportunity to do some type of service, then trying to do that, if it’s safe. That’s a thing that I’ve been struggling with, is how can I feel useful and helpful in this time, when the directive is to stay home. <br /><br />Interviewer: Have you found any place that you can volunteer right now?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: I did volunteer at Second Harvest Food Bank here in Madison a couple times. I still am on their list, and I plan to do so in the near future as well. What I was doing with the other volunteers was just packaging up food for a lot of folks in need. I know with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s really affected a lot of folks financially. A lot of people have needed Second Harvest services more than usual. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Also donating money where I can, to various charities. <br /><br />Interviewer: You mentioned keeping in touch with people. How are family, friends, loved ones doing right now?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: So far, most of my family and friends have been healthy and, luckily, not directly impacted by the virus. One of my partner’s friends did have the virus, in Florida. He has since recovered, which is good. Most of my family and friends have been safe and healthy thus far. I think the one that I have the most concern about is my sister; she lives in New York City, and she’s been working remotely, luckily, as a political director for the nurses’ union in New York. It’s been really stressful for her. She started right in the middle of the pandemic that new position—I think March 20th—and she has not had a day off since (laughs). It’s been constant working, dealing with the stresses of hearing of workers losing their lives, having to contact families, and keep everyone else’s morale up in the midst of this crisis. That’s been really stressful for her. I’ve been trying to make sure that I at least try to keep positive for her, and make sure that I’m there for her as a support system. That’s the main person I’ve been really concerned about, throughout this.<br /><br />Interviewer: You talked a little bit about the news, the media, and how you’re limiting your viewing of that. Are there any news images or stories from the last seven, eight weeks that stand out to you? <br /><br />Victor Crentsil: When I heard about the disproportionate impact of the virus on Black people in particular but definitely people of color, people on the front lines, etc.—when it was originally reported, they cited Milwaukee, Detroit, other cities across the country. Because I didn’t see anything in Madison at that point; that was earlier—either late March or early April when I was keeping close tabs on that, I reached out to the Dane County Board of Alders [Dane County Board of Supervisors] to see—“Why aren’t we getting this information?”—to see if we’re seeing the same type of disproportionate impacts, so people can concentrate on where they can help people the most.<br /><br />I was directed to the Dane County Public Health Facebook group, and their website. They started publishing weekly reports detailing the impact in Dane County, and also calling out that there is a disproportionate impact of the disease and the effects of the disease on Black people even in Dane County. That was something that struck me; it was reflective of the injustices, inequality and inequity in this country, as was reported a lot of places. It was something that I felt passionate about; here in Dane County we should be mindful of it, and try to do something about it.<br /><br />Interviewer: You mentioned before, being grateful for things. What are some things that you’re grateful for right now?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: The biggest thing right now, in light of the pandemic, is my health. I’m healthy; my family and my friends that I’ve contacted are healthy. I’m thankful that I’m able to still keep in contact with a lot of folks through Zoom and other means. I’m grateful that my partner is—we’re still able to keep in touch—socially distanced—but still able to keep in touch. He lives relatively close to me, so we can still make that effort without having to go across the country to meet with one another. And grateful that I’m in a position where I can take the time to reflect and be at peace, and still have food and a roof over my head, because it’s definitely hard for a lot of folks who are dealing with uncertainty—financially, etc. I’m grateful that I don’t have that worry or that anxiety.<br /><br />Interviewer: At some point in the future, when this is behind us, what changes do you hope will have happened as a result of this?<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: It’s a good question. One of the biggest things that I notice, in terms of the immediate relief that I saw from governments—supporting people, almost without conditions. We’ve seen the stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, people getting relief on rent, on mortgage payments. I’m hoping that we become a little more compassionate as opposed to greedy. Because I think that what’s exposed a lot of the problems in the country as a result of this pandemic is the greed. And if we steer more towards compassion, we can save each other, literally. I’m hoping that when we come out of this, we take those lessons to heart and try to be more compassionate, from a policy perspective, from government, as well as individually. I’m hoping that our leaders take to heart that—yes, we can still survive but be compassionate at the same time, as opposed to focusing just on the bottom line.<br /><br />Interviewer: Victor, thank you for joining us today and for sharing your story.<br /><br />Victor Crentsil: Thank you, Danny.<br /><br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 story by Victor Crentsil, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Social distance
Travel
Public health
Health and race
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright 2020, Victor Crentsil and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Crentsil, Victor
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Atwater, Daniel
Wolff, Jane
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-08
Description
An account of the resource
Victor Crentsil describes the experience of traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia in the lead-up to the Safer at Home social distance measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He shares what he's been doing to stay engaged while staying at home, including listening to podcasts, cooking, and volunteering with a local food pantry.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Madison, Wisconsin
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
covid19-045
cat-family
cat-medical
cat-volunteering
covid19
covid19-045
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/826251326440419633237306588a73fe.mp3
2c720f33ae32953645bb7b5327bd7706
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollection Wisconsin
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound recordings
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:29:37
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Identifier: covid19-048<br />Narrator Name: Christa Parmentier<br />Interviewer Name: Danny Atwater<br />Date of interview: 5/14/2020<br /><br />Index<br />[00:00:00] - Start of interview<br />[00:01:31] - What have the past few weeks looked like for you<br />[00:05:24] - What does distance learning look like for your kids<br />[00:09:09] - What does heading off to college look like for your older kids<br />[00:10:24] - What was it like when the library closed, and how has work shifted over time<br />[00:17:54] - How has work changed to offering public services again<br />[00:19:29] - Is there a reference question that jumps out as being memorable<br />[00:22:11] - How has curbside service been going so far<br />[00:22:37] - Are there any news stories, images, moments that stand out to you<br />[00:25:36] - What sorts of things are you doing for your own mental wellbeing<br />[00:26:32] - What positive changes do you hope will have resulted from this experience<br />[00:28:38] - Is there anything else that you want to discuss<br />[00:29:32] - Thank you <br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />[00:00:00]<br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater, and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project: Stories from a Distance series. Today’s date is Thursday, May 14th, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the video conferencing software Zoom. I’ll have our storyteller introduce themselves; please tell us your first and last name, and describe your connection to Madison.<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Hi, my name is Christa Parmentier, and right now I am at home on the east side of Madison, in the Darbo-Worthington neighborhood. I’ve lived here, in this house, for about eight and a half years. I moved to Madison in 1990 when I was starting high school. I had an older sister who was in school here, and my family moved here from Milwaukee. And I’ve more or less lived here since then—with some jaunts elsewhere in the country. My mom had a business on the east side of Madison for over twenty years; it was a little cafe, and I worked with her there. That was about my whole adult life before I started working for the Madison Public Library, which is where I work now. I work at the South Madison location on Park Street. I’ve been there for about two years and I really love working for the library. I feel like I’ve found my home.<br /><br />[00:01:31]<br />Interviewer: Well, thank you for joining us, Christa, and for being willing to share your story. What have the past few weeks looked like for you, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Safer at Home order that was issued by the governor?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Well, it has certainly been a dynamic time. I remember very vividly the last day that I worked in the library was March thirteenth. It was a Friday, and I actually had a plan to visit New York City with my seventeen-year-old daughter. My brother-in-law lives in Brooklyn, and we were going to go for her spring break and just live it up in New York. And, you know, that last week, before the shutdown, things were just kind of, like, slowly but inexorably moving forward, and I think that I was in a state of, just like, complete and utter bewilderment. Like, what was happening, and I was still thinking that I was going to go to New York, even as late as Friday morning. And I was at work Friday morning and, you know, my supervisor came in and she was telling us, you know, what might be happening with the city in terms of closures and with the libraries, and I remember her saying that if the school district closed schools, the library would almost certainly close. So, it was like, just all these little pieces sort of just one by one falling. And my brother-in-law called me that morning and he said that he had just been to the store in Brooklyn to try and get some supplies for our trip, and he said that there was nothing on the shelves and he went to five different stores. And he said that he didn’t think it was a good idea for us to come. And, you know, that whole week it was like, while everything was happening I still had my sights set on that trip, we were so excited about it. And, you know, Broadway shut down. We were going to go see Stephen Colbert, and that was done. So, it was like, little by little, it was just eroding. And then, that was that. It was over. And then, that weekend, things just kind of played out slowly with the library and finally, the beginning of the following week, we shut down. <br />Anyway, so (laughs) that was like, that was the beginning. It was, it was just, I think it was like this for everybody. We just were so disbelieving of what was happening, and how it was going to affect us personally. And I was, you know, holding on to this vision of normal and then it was just poof. It was gone and we were in our homes and, gosh, it seems like so long ago now. And it is! And, yeah, I guess I would say, like, over the course of these last nine weeks, you know, my family has—I have three kids that are home with me, and my husband. I’ve got a nineteen-year-old, and a seventeen-year-old, and a ten-year-old. So they’re all, you know, at different stages with school; they’re all in school, but, like, my older kids (laughs) have really struggled to adapt to going to school online, and I could go on and on and on. (laughs) I don’t know how much you want to hear about that.<br /><br />[00:05:24]<br />Interviewer: Actually, that would be great to talk about: if you could tell us a little bit about what distance learning looks like for your kids, especially their different age levels right now.<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s really different for my older kids and my youngest. So, my youngest, she’s in fourth grade. She loves school and once they figured out, once the school district figured out the online learning and they started to introduce, you know, they have Zoom meetings, they have online lessons that they do for various programs; she was really excited and eager to do all that work. And she loves to read, and she hasn’t had, really, any difficulty with, sort of, performing the tasks that the kids are being asked to do right now, and I think she’s got a great teacher who’s doing a beautiful job of taking care of the kids distantly and keeping them connected with bi-weekly Zoom meetings and fun things to do. So, she’s doing pretty well with school. <br />My older kids are—(laughs) It’s just been sort of impossible, I think, for them to perform. I think that they feel a lot of anxiety, and it makes sense to me. You know, thinking about myself at that age, I was so eager to get out in the world and explore and have adventures, and it’s like the opposite for them. Their reality is that they have to just be at home, and not see their friends. And so, I think it’s really hard on them, and also, you know, the world already felt really kind of dire. (laughs) You know? There’s so many intensely pressing problems facing this generation, and I think it was bad enough. And now, with this pandemic, I think that sense of uncertainty about the future for the teenagers is just, it’s kind of unimaginable. I mean, I think they really feel like we’re in the end of the world. And it’s hard for them to focus on school. (laughs) You know, like, what’s the motivation there? I don’t know. So, I’ve been, as a parent, trying to just support their well being and their mental health and emotional health. And honestly, whatever they can or can’t do as far as school performance, I’m not going to worry about it because it’s just—if it's too much for them, I think that’s okay. And sometimes I have to push them. Like, okay, you didn’t do any of your work this semester, but could you just email your professor so they know that you’re still out here? And, you know, maybe they’ll pass you. (laughs) I don’t know. (sighs) I don’t know. It’s rough.<br /><br />[00:09:09]<br />Interviewer: You said your oldest is nineteen, I think.<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Right.<br /><br />Interviewer: Are they looking at heading off to college? And, what does that look like?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Yeah, he actually is at Madison College. And my seventeen year old, she is technically a junior in high school, but she’s in the STEM program, which is a partnership with Madison College and Madison Metropolitan School District. So, she’s in this cohort of kids that are going to school at Madison College, taking the regular college-level classes, but also completing their high school credits at the same time. So, it’s really a great program, but I think the drawback for her is that, you know, she’s in college but she’s in high school; her high school friends are, you know, doing their own thing with all the social aspects of being in the same place—well, before COVID. Anyway, so, they’re both in school at Madison College, my older kids, and, I mean, they both want to continue with school, but (laughs) yeah, we’re just kind of waiting and seeing what’s going to happen.<br /><br />[00:10:24]<br />Interviewer: Let’s go back to your work with Madison Public Library. You talked a little bit about what it was like leading up to the closure; could you tell us more about when the closure happened? And then, what work began to look like, if there was work, and how that shifted over the course of time. <br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Yeah, so, if I can remember clearly, when the library did finally close—I mean, it was a real hard pivot because we were so excited about the opening of new Pinney, and that was exactly when the pandemic unfolded, and they had to shut everything. We shut down, and what the managers did is they directed staff to professional development. We were given access to a whole bunch of resources, webinars to participate in. And then, you know, we started to connect over email and via Zoom and develop, like, projects. Okay the library’s closed now; what can we do? (talking aside to child) So then it became sort of exciting, in the sense of, we had a little bit of a pause, like, here’s something to do while we figure out what to do long term, or however long this term is going to be, because everything’s just so unknown. But, what I found really awesome and exciting was that we have this organization that’s full of really creative people, and really resourceful people, and people who desire so much to serve our community. And, so everybody turned their focus on well, how can we do that if we can’t open to the public? What can we do to improve our organization? And so, people just started generating ideas! It was a really neat thing too because we do sort of have a hierarchy in our organization where we’ve got the higher-ups that sort of make decisions about what’s going to happen, but, in this time, what I’ve seen is that people have really been given an opportunity to have a voice, to participate in conversations in a really real way about how we can improve our services.<br />One of the workgroups that I’m in, in normal MPL life, is the Employee Engagement Team, so as Engagement Team met over Zoom to talk about, like, how can we help staff stay engaged and connected when we’re all in our homes? One of the ideas that came up was how this time is particularly impactful for people, like myself, who are parents and caregivers, as we adjust to working from home. And so we formed a workgroup, and I guess because that was my idea I got (laughs) to be in charge of it. So the parent/caregiver support team was born. So that’s been some of the work that I’ve really enjoyed a lot. There’s been a lot of interest in it, and once I put out a call for, you know, for help, basically—because it was just me to begin with—a lot of people stepped up and we talked about ways to support staff. We put out a survey to staff like, What supports would be useful to you? And a couple of the things that were most requested were a discussion forum, and also resources for staff. And so what I’m talking about, when I say parents, that’s pretty obvious, but caregivers is, I think, also really important because there are a lot of us who have aging parents. Like myself, my mom is seventy-five and her health is not super robust, and she, fortunately, lives really close by to me, so I’m able to give her a lot of support. But, you know, at the same time, the more (laughs) you’re doing for other people, it takes a toll. So we wanted to support people in situations like that. I also have a brother who has a disability and I’m a support person for him, and I know that there are others in our organization who are in similar situations. It’s just a lot to keep afloat when you’re working and looking after a lot of people, so we wanted to sort of curate resources and have that connection point, that discussion forum. <br />We were able to get the support from Madison Public Library to work on that. Our wonderful digital librarian, Jake Ineichen, developed a platform for us to do that digitally. I feel like it’s my baby; I’ve been watching it grow. The forum and the resources are located in one spot on our MPLnet, so people can subscribe to it. We’ve got, like, thirty-three members right now, and people were a little shy to post at first. Then I was just like, Okay, I’m going to keep on posting things (laughs) to sort of try to, you know, fish for responses, and— Like I posted a parenting haiku challenge, and that’s been fun to watch that discussion thread grow with parenting haikus. Anyway, I feel like, Okay, it’s on its own legs now; it’s walking. It’s been really great and rewarding to see that.<br />The other thing that our team has done is the teen Zoom sitting. A couple of us on the support group have teenagers and this felt like a really cool way to sort of give them something to do because—you know how I was talking about them feeling, like overwhelmed, and lost, and maybe hopeless? So this is, like, we’re giving them an opportunity to do something positive, and we’re serving people. So, what the teen Zoom sitting is, is we’ve got a couple of teens who are offering a Zoom meeting with, like, a focus; like, one coworker’s son did an origami project, and my son did a storytelling and drawing thing. So, this was the first week we did it. The response has been really great, and we’re going to continue offering it. And I actually got two more teen recruits, so we’re going to expand our teen Zoom sitting offerings. So, MPL staff with kids can sign up for one of these sessions, and maybe get a break; maybe just go make dinner while somebody is engaging with their kids, and it’s a teenager so that’s kind of fun. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:17:54]<br />Interviewer: As Wisconsin shifts a little bit more towards opening, with the Badger Bounceback Plan, and, you know, various restrictions being slowly dialed down, how has work begun to change from these workgroups to offering public services again?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Yeah, definitely. So, a couple weeks ago we started offering the phone reference service. There has been a reference email throughout this closure, but we’re very aware that there are thousands of people in the city that don’t have access to the internet, that don’t have a computer at home, so we created this system where people can call a number—315-5151—to reach a phone reference person. This is something that staff are able to connect to from home, so we’re not having to leave the house to go and offer this service; we can do it from our computers. So, when people call they reach a reference librarian, and they can ask whatever kinds of questions they’ve got, and people have all sorts of different questions: sometimes they’re looking for a person that they don’t have their address or their phone number; sometimes they want to find out about a resource or, like, is a business open, or, gosh, I mean, there’s a million different things. So, it’s kind of awesome because anybody with any kind of question can call and someone (laughs) will answer and try to answer it. <br /><br />[00:19:29]<br />Interviewer: Is there one question that jumps out as being very memorable to you during this time?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: (laughs) I don’t know. There was a lady that called who wanted to know if the arboretum was still open, and she was really looking forward to this time of year when the arboretum is really lovely; there’s blooming crabapples and lilacs; it’s very fragrant and beautiful, and she didn’t know if she could get there, if it was going to be open or not. And that’s also a place that I love, so I got to connect with this lady about our mutual love for that beautiful place at this time of year. And yes, it is open. (laughs) And then, we were sort of wrapping up, and then she started to tell me about how her rearview mirror had fallen off of her car, and she had gotten it fixed, but she wanted to know what she could do to prevent that from happening again (laughs) in the future. So, that’s like one of those pretty fun reference questions where you're like, I have no idea what the answer to this question is, but I’m going to look it up and—yeah, that was a good one.<br />The other service, obviously, that started this week is curbside pickup. In Madison, the libraries have opened up for people to be able to get items from the library. There’s a whole process that they have to go through to place holds online or over the phone, that number that I mentioned earlier, and then they have to call and schedule a pickup time. And I think a lot of people are probably pretty accustomed to processes like this, because curbside pickup is sort of the norm now for restaurants and grocery stores and you name it. So that started this week and it’s really, really, really nice to be able to serve people. Like, in the first several weeks of Safer at Home, we were focusing on how we can improve our services within the library for when we do, eventually, reopen; now we’re sort of incrementally offering services to the public again, and I know that I’m not alone in feeling really gratified that we can do that. It’s also really hard, and it’s really stressful. And, you know, like everyone else, you’re out in the world in a new way, and we’re wearing masks, and that’s odd, and we have to keep apart from each other, and that’s odd. I mean I think, little by little, we’re adjusting, but it’s difficult.<br /><br />[00:22:11]<br />Interviewer: How has the curbside service been going so far? <br /><br />Christa Parmentier: So far, so good. I think that people are really, really excited to be able to get new library materials. They’re really excited that we have something for them. And, I would say, I haven’t encountered anybody that’s been less than grateful, you know, that they can do that again.<br /><br />[00:22:37]<br />Interviewer: Just thinking about this time period in general, are there any particular, perhaps, news stories, or images, or moments, even personal moments, that stand out to you?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Well, it’s definitely been a roller coaster. I mean, there’s been a lot of beautiful things like, I think, a lot of people being able to spend more time with their families, if they have families, you know, that’s always mixed, but it’s lovely. Oh, I’m listening to my daughter and my husband argue right now. That’s a thing. (laughs) Like, being at work but also, (laughs) you know, having that listening ear for, What else is going on in this household? So that’s, that’s a big thing. I don’t know. <br />I think the toll on people is not to be underestimated. Like, one thing that really does stand out to me was a couple weeks into the Safer at Home, I was over at my mom’s house doing some yard work, and we were, like, bagging up leaves, you know, we had raked, and we were bagging up the moldy old leaves from last year, and I think I started to have an allergic reaction, and then that triggered an anxiety, or, what’s it called? A panic attack. I’d never had a panic attack before. I didn’t know what was happening, but I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe, and so naturally I was like, Oh, I’ve got COVID! I’m dying! So that really stands out to me as a real climax of all the stress and fear of this time. Experiencing that in my body in a way that had never happened to me before. I was holding my husband’s hand, like, We got to make a plan if I die! You know, like, we hadn’t had that conversation ever. Like, What are you going to do if I die? And so, you know, thank God I had someone to help me through that time. I mean, he just stayed with me and reminded me to breathe, and eventually, I kind of came down and I was okay, but it was terrible. And I know that that kind of anxiety and fear are, I mean, everybody’s feeling it to some degree right now. So, I feel for people. And I feel for people that don’t have somebody to hold their hand.<br /><br />[00:25:36]<br />Interviewer: What sorts of things are you doing for your own mental wellbeing?<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Getting outside is probably number one for me. It’s such a beautiful time of year, and I love to go on bike rides and walks, and doing that with my family is super awesome, super fun. I went on a late night walk with my husband one night, and we just kind of rambled. We never had done that before, way past bedtime. (laughs) So, that’s always, always, always helpful to me. And, what else? Like, connecting with friends over Zoom, or in whichever way we do it, like, you know, standing on somebody’s porch and talking. That’s been super helpful too.<br /><br />[00:26:32]<br />Interviewer: At some point in the future this will be behind us. What positive changes do you hope will have resulted from this experience that we all went through? <br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Well, I certainly hope that all of the dysfunction in our society that has been really laid bare in this time, with people having unequal access to health care, or, you know, just the deep inequities in our economy. The fact that there are millions of people that are out of work and—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I mean, I know what I’m trying to say. You know, we have a really, really unequal distribution of wealth in our society, and so the way that this pandemic affects people absolutely correlates to where they stand with their income level, or with their race. And so, what I hope is that those realities being so magnified right now will have a lasting impact in how we move forward as a society in trying to achieve equity, and in caring for members of our society, people we may or may not know. Like, I think that that’s something that exists, that sort of loving your neighbor thing. I think we have that, but I think that our policies and our structure doesn’t really reflect that. And so, yeah, I hope we move forward in that way. Yeah. <br /><br />[00:28:38]<br />Interviewer: Is there anything else that you want to discuss that didn’t come up in this time? <br /><br />Christa Parmentier: I don’t know. I hope that other people like me have gotten an opportunity to connect with people in a new way, in a more authentic way. I think it’s so ironic that we have—you know, we’re talking to each other in Zoom meetings. I mean, we are. I don’t know what other people are doing, but we are, and there’s just something kind of neat about being with a person in their home. You know, we don’t have to have our masks on in the same way that we do as we move about the world, in the normal pre-COVID world. There’s just been a really neat, new way of connecting that I think is really cool, and I hope that other people have gotten to experience, too.<br /><br />[00:29:32]<br />Interviewer: Christa, thank you for taking the time to share your story with us today.<br /><br />Christa Parmentier: Thanks, Danny.<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
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Title
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COVID-19 story by Christa Parmentier, 2020
Subject
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Epidemics
Public libraries
Social distance
Distance education
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Christa Parmentier and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Parmentier, Christa
Contributor
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Atwater, Daniel
Propheter, Nicholas
Glaeser, Colleen
Date
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2020-05-14
Description
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Christa Parmentier describes her and her family's experiences during the social distancing measures in Madison, Wisconsin in spring 2020. Christa talks about the emotional challenges facing her children as they navigate distance learning in the midst of a pandemic and existing social pressures. Christa describes remote library work, especially her work on the Parent and Caregivers Support Group, which is designed to offer different kinds of forums and support for library staff that are parents or caregivers for family members.
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-048
cat-education
cat-family
cat-work
covid19
covid19-048
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/7473533c53c758fdae0471a4bb15f2d1.mp3
03a1a235125d764d4d003e3eb1ce7487
Dublin Core
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Recollection Wisconsin
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00:23:40
Transcription
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Identifier: covid19-050<br />Narrator Name: Michelle Herbrand<br />Interviewer Name: Danny Atwater<br />Date of interview: 5/1/2020<br /><br />Index<br />[00:00:37] - Talk about your Covid-19 Safer at Home story<br />[00:07:25] - Has your family been concerned for you?<br />[00:10:20] - What have your grad-school friends’ work experiences been like?<br />[00:13:06] - Can you go into more detail about work groups, or curbside pickup?<br />[00:22:29] - Is there anything else you want to talk about?<br />[00:23:28] - Thank you for sharing your story.<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />[00:00:01]<br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being conducted as part of the Madison Living History Project: Stories from a Distance series. Today’s date is Friday, May 1, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the video conferencing software Zoom. So, now to our storyteller. Please tell us your first and last name and what your connection to Madison is.<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: Hi, I’m Michelle Herbrand. I work for the Madison Public Library. I’m a clerk at the Sequoya neighborhood library, and I live on the west side.<br /><br />[00:00:37]<br />Interviewer: Thank you, Michelle. What have the past few weeks looked like for you, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Safer at Home order?<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: You know, I feel like every week has been different. I know a lot of people joke about how March felt like it lasted two months, if not a whole year, and I really agree with that. When the Safer at Home order first started, that first week, I don’t think I really worked at all; it was just, it was kind of shocking, and I got really obsessed with, What is this virus; what is it doing throughout the country, throughout the world? I had CNN on all day; I was just obsessed with being informed. I wanted to know up to date: How many people are sick? How many people are dying? How many people need respirators, and how many people are recovering? But after that first week, when it started to sink in that, okay, this is going to be going on for a long time, you need to start building a routine, and start working again.<br /><br />So for the rest of March, it was really just a struggle to find a routine that worked for me. I thought at first that trying to sleep as much as I wanted to would be a good way to stay mentally healthy, but then I was sleeping till ten, ten thirty in the morning, and then that just kind of ruined my whole day. So the past couple weeks have been really good in terms of getting my routine set. I have my alarm set for the morning; I know exactly what I’m going to be eating and drinking in the morning, and then I know exactly what I’ll be working on. I think part of the reason, in March, that I struggled so much with building a routine was that, at Madison Public Library, no one really knew what was going on and what we should be doing, as well. So the first couple of weeks, it was like, Well, here’s a bunch of professional development stuff that you can do, so basically just watching videos all day, and I didn’t like that (laughs) at all. So once Madison Public Library started to figure out what the quarantine would look like for the library, and what they needed of their staff, I think that’s when I really started to do better. I started working on different groups to improve staff engagement and connection during this time, and then I also started working on groups to help plan for providing services to our patrons through circulation, and how would that help.<br /><br />On a personal side, I guess, it’s been not that different? I feel like I’m more social now than I was before. Working at the library is such a social job. I work circulation, as a clerk, and so my day is just talking to patrons and to fellow staff all day, and I love it. I can talk about the weather (laughs) all day if I have to. And I don’t mind having the same conversation about the weather all the time! And I love just hearing tidbits about people’s days. So once I got cut off from that, I started reaching out to my friends and family more than I have in the past couple years, a lot. I graduated from grad school, it’ll be two years in May, and after grad school, a lot of my friends moved to their jobs around the country. We kind of kept in contact, sending Snapchats, Instagram stories, and texting every now and then, but since this quarantine, I have been meeting regularly with my friends a couple times a week, that I didn’t before. And same with some friends from college. In terms of that, that’s been good. But it’s exhausting. The reason I like working in the public library is that I don’t have to be super social when I’m not working, because I get the satisfaction from being social at work, so then I could come home and just relax. But now, I’m working all day, and hanging out in meetings and Zooms isn’t social; it’s just getting stuff done. And then, after that, when the workday is done, now I have to change to hanging out again on either Zoom or Google Hangouts, but it’s for a social thing. So I’m exhausted. (laughs) I’m so tired. All the time. There’s only one night a week, usually, that I get to myself, and then I just don’t know what to do with myself, because my whole day is scheduled at this point.<br /><br />In terms of my family, too, it’s been a little hard—my mom’s a nurse, she works for a small clinic up in La Crosse County, and she’s in the high-risk category; she just turned 60 this year, so I do think about her a lot. I mean, I talk to my mom every Sunday. Luckily, La Crosse doesn’t have that many cases; they’re at 27—I’m still kind of obsessive, so I know exactly how much stuff is going on there. (laughs) So her and my dad are doing good. My dad is somewhat working from home; he works for an army contractor at Fort McCoy in La Crosse, so they’re ok. My sister got laid off, kind of furloughed, I guess. She’s up in the Twin Cities; she lives in Roseville, which is in between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. She worked for Outback Steakhouse as a bartender, so I don’t think she’s really working that much, and so her normal job is a seasonal summer job, and I don’t know if that’s going to be happening too, so she’s who I worry about the most. My sister and I are very close; we’re like, the same personalities, just four years apart. So yeah, I think about her a lot. I follow her on Twitter, and she just complains all the time about being stuck inside and how she hates everything, so I worry about her so much. And my brother has kind of lost it because of this. He lives south of Rochester, Minnesota, in a place called Stewartville. He supervises quality control for a couple farms, so he’s testing whey and cheese and dairy products for mold and all that stuff, so he’s in a small, beautifully clean lab with only one other person, and he’s still freaking out about this virus, and stuff, so I just don’t really talk to him. (laughs) Yeah. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:07:25]<br />Interviewer: Has your family mentioned any concern for you, given that you live in a larger city, around more populated areas, and the fact that you’ll be going back to work in a physical capacity soon?<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: My mother is curious about it, I guess I would say. I have been pretty good with the quarantining stuff; I go grocery shopping like maybe once every two weeks, and I also go outside to walk or play tennis, but that’s the only time I go outside. So once my family understood that I was respecting the social distancing stuff, I don’t think they really worried too much. I don’t know if it helped that Milwaukee just kind of went crazy with the COVID-19, so everything looked so much better compared to that. So I don’t know if they’re worried. And also, since my mom’s a nurse, she’s a pragmatist; I think she knows that I’ll be okay, and I mean, it helps I’m under 30 still, barely, so I am in a very low-risk category for the disease. I wish my family—my sister gets it, and we talk regularly about the mental struggles of staying at home all the time, and I live by myself; I don’t have any pets, so I really am truly by myself. I don’t think my parents really care about that too much. My parents are classic conservatives, so you know, it’s, pick yourself up by your bootstraps; you know, like, if you have mental problems, that’s your own business; that’s no one else’s. I remember when I was in grad school I was telling my mother about all the stuff I was stressed out about, because grad school is stressful, and my mother’s helpful advice was, “Don’t be stressed.” That’s all she said, so that gives you an idea of my mother and what she’s like.<br /><br />Like I said, I haven’t talked to my brother too much; I don’t know if he’s concerned at all or not. To give you a hint on what my brother is like, I had knee surgery in February, which was so lucky, because they cut off doing elective surgeries a month after I had my knee surgery, so I feel so, so grateful that I could—I’ve had this knee problem for six years, so I felt so, so grateful that I could get my knee fixed. My brother never called or texted me after I had my surgery to ask how I was, and my mom told me that I should reach out to my brother because she was so sure he was worried about me. (laughs) No, that’s not what I’m going to do. I had surgery, I was put under! Yeah, so that’s my family. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:10:20]<br />Interviewer: You mentioned getting together with grad school friends via Zoom. What have their experiences been like in their places of employment?<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: Hmm. Yes. So my closest friend from grad school is Zoe; she lives out in L.A. She works for USC; she’s a metadata librarian, is what she is, so—a digital metadata librarian, I guess I should say. So the collections that they’re digitizing, mostly photographs and also I know there are pamphlets and stuff, and they’re all usually L.A.-based, so all the things that get digitized, she’s describing them and cataloging them for them, so she’s been able to work from home. She complains about Zoom meetings a lot, too. She has twice daily checkups with her team, like with her boss, just to make sure that things are going okay with work and stuff. I’m really grateful that I don’t have that situation, because I have probably on average two Zoom meetings a day for work. Oh, and I should also mention, I’m only sixty percent, too, so that flexibility has been great. I usually work about five hours a day. But what I love about my friend Zoe is she is also a social creature, so she does dance, so she has two dance classes each day that she does via Zoom. It’s so amazing, and then she has a yoga that she’s doing via Zoom, and then we hang out and we’re watching a show together on Netflix, La casa de papel—very, very good; would recommend. (laughs)<br /><br />The other one I’ve been talking to is Sarah. Sarah is down in New Orleans. She works for—I can’t remember what university; it’s a small university down in New Orleans, and she is the academic adviser librarian, or something like that, so she helps freshmen learn how to use the library, and learn how to access all of the resources that they have at the library and stuff, so her experience, she is doing fine working from home as well, because most of the stuff she does is building tutorials using Jing, and stuff like that, so she can work. And then my friends out in Seattle, those I met in undergrad, and my friend Kelsey is nine months pregnant right now. I do worry about her a little bit; there’s a chance her husband might not be able to be in the delivery room with her when she has her kid, which would just be heartbreaking, but then you hear stories—out in New York, a guy knew he had COVID-19 and he went to the hospital to watch his wife give birth, and so it’s just like, Well, that’s why you can’t do that (laughs); that’s why they won’t be able to do it.<br /><br />[00:13:06]<br />Interviewer: You talked a little bit about what work looks like for you right now; do you want to go into a little bit more detail about some of the work groups, or what’s about to happen with curbside pickup?<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: Yeah, I can just run through my week real quick. So Monday, I wake up, and then—okay. (laughs) So the three big work groups I’m on right now, Monday would be mostly preparing for the town hall, which is an offshoot of the engagement team. So when this quarantine first happened, no one really knew how to use Zoom, really. Like, I didn’t even really know it was a thing. I knew about Skype, and I knew about Google Hangouts; and I guess there’s Microsoft Teams, is another one. Everyone was trying to learn how to use it and no one really knew proper etiquette for Zoom, so we were hosting, it was like the second week of quarantine—engagement team was hosting a meeting for anyone who wanted to come, and Carrie, who is the co-lead of engagement team, was super nervous that it would be people talking all over each other, or there would be a lot of silences, and it wouldn’t be a very productive meeting. So she asked me to help out and help field questions, and call on people to answer, like there’s a Raise Hand feature, and stuff like that.<br /><br />So the meeting went super well, and it turns out the director of the library was there, and he really liked how the meeting went—it was super smooth, we transitioned from topic to topic flawlessly, and all that—so he asked Carrie and myself to help lead these, what he thought would be called town halls, where we could get all of the staff together, and by “all staff,” there’s about 280 people that work for Madison Public Library, so it’s a lot of people that could hopefully all get together and could facilitate discussions, disseminate information in a very productive manner, so obviously, when the director asks you to do something, you say, How high? <br /><br />We just finished week four of that, so on Monday, it was making sure the agenda was set, because Carrie and I both agree, the second the town halls don’t look like everything is being organized correctly, people are going to stop coming, so I think this week we had about 180 people that came to the meeting, and that’s because, like you said, curbside pickup is going to be ramping up; the new Governor’s order went into effect on Friday, like a week ago, so with the new order, the libraries are allowed to offer curbside pickup to patrons. Yeah, so the town hall was a lot about that, which I think went well. I had to moderate the discussion forum, which I don’t remember at all (laughs); it was so fast! There were like probably, it felt like 30 questions that I read out for Margie, who is the circ services supervisor for MPL. But I think it went well.<br /><br />Oh, so, the other thing I am a part of as the engagement team, I had the idea for Netflix parties—so Netflix Party is an extension that you can have on your Google Chrome browser, and it allows you to watch a Netflix show or movie at the same time as whoever else has the link, and then it also gives you a chat option. So I had the idea, and of course then it means it’s my problem to make this work, so (laughs) every Monday I send out a survey to anyone who’s interested; there’s about 40 people in the group, and it’s just a quick survey of, What movie do you want to watch? Do you have any suggestions for next week? And (laughs) most of the suggestions are for movies that are not on Netflix! People don’t understand that Netflix Party means it has to be on Netflix. <br /><br />So this week, my survey was very short. I usually try to have a nice paragraph of entertaining nonsense, and then give people good movie options, but I didn’t give people options this week. So my first question was, “This week we’re going to watch Naked Gun; is that okay?” and the only option was yes. And then it was a mandatory question, like, I didn’t want people to get out of it, so you had to answer yes.<br /><br />So I built that on Monday, and then Tuesday was—I’m in a subcommittee on engagement team, which is Parent and Caregivers, which I am neither, so (laughs) of course I’m a perfect fit for the group. My thought process was, in engagement team, when this group was proposed, no one said anything, so I was like, well, I might as well just offer my services. And since I don’t have any children, or any pets or any elderly or disabled people that I live with, I have more free time and I’m much more flexible to help out, so I basically just offered myself as a grunt worker to do whatever needs to be done. So Tuesday, we had the meeting for that, and then we got the good news—I had helped with the lead of that group, Christa, to build a forum that would help parents and caregivers talk to each other on MPLnet, where all of our information is, so then once you log on you should be able to go to this forum now, and ask any questions, ask for support, offer meal-kit prep, and all that stuff, so that was really fun to build. So that’s what else happened.<br /><br />So on Wednesday, I worked at my other job. I work for a business called Holder Print Works, which is a small business on the west side. We digitize media for people, so we digitize photos, slides, film, video, reel-to-reel audio, cassettes, records—whatever you can think of, really. We’ve actually been doing fine since the quarantine, people are still dropping off stuff. I work Wednesdays, my boss works Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, so I don’t come in contact with him; I haven’t seen my boss in a long time, honestly.<br /><br />Yeah, so I was at my other job Wednesday, but then I still was in a couple meetings. I had my curbside-pickup meeting on Wednesday; we meet twice a week. That group is fun, because it started as a group by my supervisor, Marc Gartler; he wanted to have a group that would think of medium- and long-term circ services. So, obviously we’re going to be doing curbside, but the next step isn’t, the libraries are open and everything is fine—there's going to be a lot of in-between steps. Curbside pickup is really ramping up; we had a meeting about what next week would look like. So next week, people will be back in the library, getting things ready for curbside, which will start on the eleventh. After the circ meeting, I met with Emer, and we planned out more Sequoya-specific stuff. I started making a document with procedure stuff, and I helped—or, I didn’t help, I made them myself—the document for the pickup schedule for people, and finalizing all that.<br /><br />And then, I forgot that I’m on another committee, which is Zoomers, so that’s hosting programs for patrons, so we met on Wednesday to discuss what should be involved in training videos for hosting Zooming events, so if you’re hosting an event, what information do you need to know about Zoom to make sure that you have a good event; you know, how do you set up the right options? How do you do breakout sessions, and how do you mute people, and stuff like that. So I had that meeting on Wednesday too, and then Thursday, which was yesterday, I don’t even remember. Oh, we had the Sequoya staff meeting, which went pretty long, because we were talking about curbside a lot, and then I had to finish compiling the curbside pickup procedures list, and then email a bunch of people about it, and then I get the, when I came to work this morning at ten, I had five emails from Margie and Emer because the SCLS directors met yesterday and decided that there would be delivery, so now all of the procedures in that document are wrong and out of date, so, yeah, that’s been my week.<br /><br />And then we had another curbside pickup meeting today, which was more about the health and safety stuff, so going over procedures for like, how often do you need to switch your gloves, and the mask situation--do we have masks at each location? And are you allowed to take your mask off briefly? If you do take it off, do you have to get a new one, or can you reuse your mask? So it’s been a week. And then this afternoon is the engagement team, and then after that, I’m meeting with Carrie and Krissy to go over the town hall agenda for next Monday. So yeah. <br /><br />[00:22:21]<br />Interviewer: Michelle, thank you for going so in depth into—<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: (laughs) I’m sure you regretted that question the minute you asked it.<br /><br />[00:22:29]<br />Interviewer: —into your work. Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about before we wrap up here?<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: I guess I would just like to say that this situation is the worst. I never thought—I’m a lover of history, and I never thought that I would be in a situation that will be talked about for centuries to come. Like, it’s a worldwide thing that doesn’t happen very often, and I’m in it, you know? So it’s really weird. But it’s also weird that good stuff has happened. I’ve gotten closer to people that I was starting to lose contact with and at work, it’s going really well. I’m meeting with the director regularly, and he knows my name now, and the circ supervisor thinks I’m doing amazing work, so, I don’t know. It’s weird, I guess. That’s what I have to say. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:23:28]<br />Interviewer: Well, Michelle, thank you for taking the time today to share your story with us.<br /><br />Michelle Herbrand: Oh! Yeah. Thanks for listening to me. No one wants to hear me talk about (laughs) anything, so. (laughs) Thank you!<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
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Title
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COVID-19 story by Michelle Herbrand, 2020
Subject
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Epidemics
Public libraries
Family relationships
Social distance
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Michelle Herbrand and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Herbrand, Michelle
Contributor
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Atwater, Daniel
Glaeser, Colleen
Bergmann, Frances
Date
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2020-05-01
Description
An account of the resource
Michelle Herbrand describes what work with Madison Public Library looks like at the time of Safer at Home social distancing measures. Michelle shares updates about her family, what her social life looks like right now, and the process of planning for curbside pickup at the library.
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-050
cat-family
cat-work
covid19
covid19-050
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/8b87747e9a5bdf298dcdfe9651a74f36.mp3
60ae6603de7af8b51bca3e6a428cf770
Dublin Core
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Title
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Recollection Wisconsin
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00:32:09
Transcription
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Identifier: covid19-052<br />Narrator Name: Rachel Werner<br />Interviewer Name: Laura Damon-Moore<br />Date of interview: 5/26/2020<br /><br />INDEX<br />[00:00:00] Start of interview<br />[00:01:22] What have the ten weeks since Safer at Home looked like for you and your household<br />[00:04:40] What have your conversations with your daughter regarding the public health crisis been like<br />[00:08:17] What does your professional work look like right now<br />[00:11:14] What preparations did you take before and at the beginning of Safer at Home<br />[00:15:18] Are there moments or images that stand out to you from the beginning of social distancing<br />[00:16:47] What is the creative landscape in Madison like right now; what are small businesses/entrepreneurs dealing with<br />[00:19:17] How has teaching online shifted because of the social distancing measures and with the pandemic in general<br />[00:22:16] What was the experiencing of adopting/fostering a dog like<br />[00:25:01] Do you think you will continue to foster in the future<br />[00:25:59] What are you worried about right now<br />[00:29:08] Are there any other good things or opportunities that you see at this time<br />[00:30:34] Is there anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to add at this point<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />Interviewer: Today is Tuesday, May 26, 2020. My name is Laura Damon-Moore. I’m speaking today with a narrator for the Stories from a Distance story gathering project for Madison Public Library. We are connecting via cell phone call at the moment. We’ll have our narrator introduce themselves, and then share their connection to Madison.<br /><br />Rachel Werner: Hi, I’m Rachel Werner, and I’m currently the content marketing specialist for Taliesin Preservation based in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I’ve been a Madison resident for eleven, twelve years now, off and on. I first moved here in 2004 and lived here for about five years, and then I was away for a few years living abroad, and then came back in 2011, and been residing in Madison ever since--actually right downtown, just a few blocks away from Madison Public Library. I teach classes as well, for writers and other artists, through the Madison Public Library system, Arts + Literature Laboratory, at UW Writers’ Institute, once or twice, sometimes in the last couple years. And then, also, I’m lucky enough to be on the board of directors for a couple of Madison-based nonprofits: Madison Reading Project and Childrens’ Theater of Madison.<br /><br />[00:01:22]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much, Rachel. So, it has been ten weeks since the Safer at Home social distancing measures went into place in Wisconsin and Madison. Rachel, can you tell us, generally, what those weeks have looked like for you and for your household?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: So, my household is me and my daughter Phoebe, who is currently nine. We’ve been pretty busy during COVID and the quarantine so far, in regards to--I’m blessed that a lot of my professional life is already housed online. Doing content marketing is, obviously, a lot of the digital marketing, so social media-based and website development. So, I was actually able to pivot. I was already working remotely from home actually, because I have to travel sometimes when I’m teaching as well, two to three times a week. So the full shift to working at home remotely was a bit more smooth for me than, I think, it was for some other people. And then my classes that I teach, several of them are for entities that are based on the West Coast. So Hugo House, which is a writers’ hub in Seattle, Washington, and San Diego Writers, Ink. So, again, having already been in the flow of teaching online now, for about nine months, it was, kind of just like, I’m already doing this and I’m already set up, so now I was just home more, with less running around, distractions.<br /><br />My daughter’s pretty active in the children’s theater scene here, and so she was able to--one of the things that was a little bit of a disappointment was that they were supposed to perform Peter Pan.So actually Overture, our main theater here, shut down just the day before they were supposed to have their opening weekend, but they allowed them to actually do one performance for a very limited audience. So, that ended up being really special. And just recently they made the announcement that they’re actually just going to shift the play into next spring, in 2021, with the hopes of retaining most of the original cast. So that actually was a pretty exciting announcement for my daughter. So, yeah, now they’re doing acting things online. She participated in Young Playwrights Festival online, and done some little mini-commercials that will kind of help later on this year, to talk about and hype up what the next season for the theater will be here, for Children’s Theater of Madison. Although, fingers crossed, (laughs) we will totally be out of quarantine by then and plans can roll on as expected for the 2021 season, for not just theaters, sports--for everybody. I think those are the things, some of those extracurriculars, are things that are most missed.<br /><br />She’s also started taking yoga classes online through little om BIG OM; they’re live, for children, that are being offered now a couple days a week. They’re donation-based, which has been really lovely. And she really has enjoyed--she’d done yoga a number of years ago, a little bit, off and on, but again, our lives are pretty busy, so we haven’t consistently been able to get her to a yoga class.So, I think, having that time to not only move in that way, her body, but also just, she really digs the mindfulness and the breathing exercises and the (unintelligible), so those exercises have really been useful to her during this time, too. And we’re staying busy reading, even without the library, (laughs) supporting local bookstores. We both actually have gotten Kindles in the past six months too, so that’s been great--like ebooks, audiobooks. We already had a book problem at our house, so now I would say it’s just grown. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:04:40]<br />Interviewer: Thank you, Rachel. That’s a great snapshot. (both laugh) Just thinking about, especially Phoebe and you, right now, can you tell us a little bit about what your conversations with Phoebe have been like regarding this public health crises, and the social distancing measures that have been put into place?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: Sure, yeah. I, with Phoebe, it’s always, it’s really been kind of delivering information on a need to know basis, and the reality is it’s just a lot of information that, you know, I’m not getting. The school closures are a good example. You know, obviously, originally they were out for a couple weeks, and then it’s kind of pushing out until May, and then it’s like, All right, actually school is out for the year. So, you know, I feel like I probably told her things relatively soon after they got on my radar, but maybe not always immediately, just because, you know, I’m trying to respect the fact that she is a child, and there’s only so much. I mean, it’s hard enough for us as adults to kind of process each next step, or the next wave of whatever’s happening. So I’ve kind of been very conscientious about that. I mean, luckily we essentially live in a pretty tech free household anyway; we don’t have a TV set, we don’t really watch TV. Obviously, I have my computer, you know, for work and school and stuff for her, and then my phone, again, you know, for work, for social media and stuff. But, actually, other than the Kindles--like hers is literally just an ebook reader, like, she can’t go on the internet. It’s not a tablet or anything. So, you know, being able to limit--and we don’t really listen to the radio, we haven’t really been listening to the radio at all. Just trying to limit her exposure to hearing--you know, as an adult, every time I sit at the computer it’s, like, the update on how many people have died, every day, around the world. So that kind of stuff, or locally, or whatever it is. So, just trying to limit her exposure to that. I mean, I don’t think that kids need to hear about that kind of stuff day in and day out.<br /><br />The other part of it--but also being honest about the fact that life is the way it is right now is because it needed to be, you know, and pointing the fact that we're really grateful, at least so far that we’re both healthy. Nobody that we’re close to, whether here in town or, you know, relatives that live in other states are sick at this moment. And so, just trying to have that sense of gratitude that we’re safe, we’re blessed.We have enough food to eat, we’ve had heat when it was warmer, you know, we might have to turn on the air conditioning here soon (laughs) now that it's suddenly getting hot and humid in Madison. But we have kind of all the modern comforts. We’re not in need right now. And so, even though this may be inconvenient in certain ways, you know, we’re not hurting. I read a quote in the first week or two of the quarantine starting here in Madison, and it said, “Despair is a privilege of the bourgeoisie.” And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. It’s like, you think about the idea that, yes there’s lots of things, I’m not trying to downplay the fact that there are a lot of people who are hurting or suffering here, you know, because they have been unemployed now for months, or that their businesses are totally shut and they don’t know if they’re ever going to be able to reopen them, or, God forbid, if they’ve gotten sick or someone in their family has, or close friends and stuff. But could you imagine living in someplace like India, or another developing country, where they’re dealing with the pandemic, but they don’t even have, you know, some of these infrastructures. Some of these cities and little villages don’t even have modern sanitation that we’re so used to. You know what I mean? We’re worried about there being enough beds in hospitals, and there are people who live hundreds of miles away from the closest hospital. So, just trying to kind of keep making her aware of that as much as I possibly can too, that yeah, there’s things about this that are inconvenient, but we’re pretty blessed. (laughs) We’re sitting plenty pretty compared some of the other people in the world. You know?<br /><br />[00:08:17]<br />Interviewer: Yeah, thank you. Going back to what work looks like for you right now, can you give us a rundown of what your professional work looks like at the moment?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: Yeah, like I said, from Taliesin, you know, with being an art space nonprofit, I mean, that essentially runs on a seasonal calendar year, we were already in our off-season when all this began, so in certain ways it was a little bit easier, I think, for the organization to pivot because it really just became, Okay, we have to keep--so they just kind of kept pushing out the dates of when it would be reopening for tours and events and et cetera this year. I mean, obviously that’s still unfolding as far as exactly what that’s going to look like, specifically in regards to, obviously we’ll have to greatly reduce the number of people who are allowed on tours, probably limit the number of tours that are running a day. There are certain events that probably just won’t happen this year, and I know they’re trying to figure out whether or not they’ll still run any youth or adult programming, and there’s also, like, photography workshops, or calligraphy workshops, architectural workshops for kids during the summer, if those things will still take place in person, or will they shift online? So most of those conversations are still happening. So I ended up being furloughed for a couple weeks, but I was lucky enough to be able to take PTO before that.<br /><br />So I feel lucky that I have diverse revenue streams. Since, because I also teach, I’m a fitness instructor as well, so obviously most of the gyms have been closed, so that, kind of, you know, that income has kind of went away, for a bit, (laughs) so it’s off the radar for a while. But I’ve, like I said, teaching online, the fact that I was already teaching writing and marketing classes for writers and artists online, that’s actually been very lovely that this kind of just rolls on because this was already set up, and these are things I was already scheduled to do for this spring and summer. So and, yeah, just kind of plugging along as is, and it’s been interesting to interact with my students, who are in different states, most of them on the West Coast. And they were already living, you know, experiencing a lot of things in quarantine weeks before they started here. So it was interesting to kind of be having these conversations and listening and kind of, you know, helping people cope with the fact that their lives were changing so drastically. And then, you know, two weeks later, or three weeks later that was kind of what it started to become here, and I was like, Ah, yes, I’ve been hearing about this (laughs) pretty in depth and in detail for a while now. So, it was definitely very interesting in that way. You know, I feel, I guess it was kind of a gift to be able to help mentally and emotionally support some people through that. And then, also, it kind of gave me a little bit more insight, you know what I mean, as far as what this was going to look like. It didn’t play out exactly in all the same ways here as it did there, but I had a sense of like, all right, this is what this means and, you know, it’s kind of like, yeah there’s no toilet paper. (laughs) So, good thing you, you know what I mean, bought a twelve pack or whatever. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:11:14]<br />Interviewer: For sure. That was a question I was going to ask actually. Since you kind of had, you know, sort of a precursor to what was coming, or a version of what might be coming, were there any preparations, or precautions that you took, kind of at the beginning of, as we were getting more information here in Madison, or at the beginning of the Safer at Home order? Could you tell us what that looked like?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: So, I would say the two biggest ways that were kind of prep for me were the, you know, I pretty early on sat down and figured out worst case scenarios. Like, okay, let’s say, all income fell away, except for me teaching online essentially, as that was the only thing that was really ensured, that was guaranteed at that point, I would say, within the first couple weeks. Other than that, it’s like, what’s the longest I can kind of pay the, you know assuming no other kind of thing, you know, rents and mortgages, and all those things will have to be paid, and electricity bills. It’s like, what’s the longest I can get by on what’s in the bank now, and have bare minimum funds coming in for the next couple months. I figured it out, but just because that was probably the biggest thing that a lot of my students were dealing with. And Seattle kind of giving that preview was just this idea that like, okay, it’s even things that people never would have expected, like shutting down or being furloughed or laid off, and kind of just realizing that no one really knows how long this is going to play out, or necessarily how long this is going to go on for. And so, by the time the quarantine really got started here, you know, it was like a week or two in, they had almost been like a month in at that point, you know? And I think that was kind of the time when people started having conversations about like, rent-free this, you know. And just kind of--those things just don’t seem realistic to me, so I was just like “That’s probably not going to happen.” (laughs) So I need to figure out how long I can pay my bills. (laughs) You know. So that was probably the preemptive thing I did. Just to kind of, so I would have a real sense of, okay like, how long can this go on for and it just kind of gave me more of a peace of mind too. Knowing,okay, worst case scenario, I can probably get by until July if I have to. I think the other thing that was proactive for me with doing that too, was that you realize as you see the news reports and stuff coming in too, there’s so many people on unemployment, so even filing that, it’s not like it’s going to be immediate. You may not see that money for three months, six months, whatever it’s going to be, you know what I mean, because they’re processing so many--you know what I mean? So this idea I need to figure out, again, doing nothing else, like no other paycheck is coming in except for just teaching online. What does that look like? I think that’s the first thing from a preparatory standpoint.<br /><br />And then, the second thing was, what has also been, but it also still factors into that budget, it’s also realizing because of how many local businesses are being impacted, I also wanted to be able to find a way to keep supporting other local businesses and entrepreneurs as much as I could. I did a lot of that the first few weeks, I mean, I still am doing that, you know, as needed, but, I mean, I’d definitely say that those first two to three weeks, just because people were being hit so hard, and it was just so shocking. So whether that was jumping on and doing an Instagram live with someone, if it was, you know, just having one-on-one phone calls, you know. Just kind of offering our support, you know, getting take-out. You know, obviously, it’s like with anything, it’s like, I want to give money to everybody, I obviously can’t do that, because I got to be able to pay rent in three months. (laughs) But I really was committed to, and I think we still are, as much as possible, as much as I can to, whether it be in an organization, and whether it be, you know, like I said, an individual entrepreneur, brands, whatever it is, it’s local. So I’ve been doing, up until, I literally just went to Trader Joe’s for the first time since March, since all this started, since right before, probably, sometime in early March, for the first time this past week. So, I mean, literally, I’ve done all my grocery shopping for the last two and a half months has been done at the Willy Street Co-op. Because I’m supporting a local business. I can ship. I know a lot of the stuff in the store is purchased directly from local vendors and retailers and farmers and stuff. So, literally, that’s how committed I’ve been to it.<br /><br />[00:15:18]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much for that answer. So, thinking back to, you know, while we’re at the, sort of, start of social distancing in our thoughts here, thinking back to the start of the social distancing measures ten weeks ago, are there particular moments or images that stand out to you from that time period that you, that have, sort of been burnt, you know, that you’re carrying around with you a little bit? <br /><br />Rachel Werner: No. (laughs) I don’t. You know the only, I think the streets, you know, probably, and this is not just from the beginning of COVID, I would say that that’s still true now. Since I literally live right downtown in Madison--I mean our loft is just a couple blocks, you know, four, five blocks down from the Capitol Square--the one thing that is still, not jarring, but we’ve obviously gotten more used to it, but like, you usually, living downtown, especially this time of year, now that it’s starting to get warm and stuff out, or even towards the end of the school year, you know, like graduation week and weekend typically would have been insane, there’d be people everywhere. You know what I mean? And the farmer’s market would be going on and there’s just, you know, parking, obviously, but there’s, it’s weird to like, I mean that part I would say has been probably the biggest, something that was weird or off from a visual standpoint. But, you know, it’s pretty quiet down here now, most days, and the streets are pretty empty, and obviously, seeing so many businesses shuttered. That’s probably the thing that’s been the most awkward from a visual standpoint.<br /><br />[00:16:47]<br />Interviewer: Got you. Thank you. And, Rachel, you mentioned that you are, you know, fairly tapped into, especially the creative landscape in Madison, small businesses, entrepreneurs and things like that. Can you give us a snapshot of what the creative landscape is like right now? What are people dealing with? What are you seeing from your perspective?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: I think, you know, I’ve been seeing a lot more call to kind of like, I think, action as far as people feeling like, okay, we need to support these people, whatever that looks like. I’ve seen a lot more people kind of reaching out be, like, Hey, you know, not only just to kind of make it, get it more on people’s radars. I mean Jenie Gao in particular, is one particular local artist that I know, that it seemed like for a while, almost weekly, she was having some conversation with some local media source about the idea that like, you know, if you want local art and local artists to be here beyond all this, we need your support. It’s been really affirming to see Dane Arts and the Madison City Arts Commission stand, kind of come forward, and come up with these creative ways to provide emergency grant funding to artists too, over the last few weeks, month or so. And, I think, spreading the word. I know I’ve had conversations with people, like, Hey, I saw this grant on Twitter, you know. People just kind of making an active effort to kind of be like, you know, I’m here for you, I’ve got you. I just ordered a hanging plant hanger from one of the local makers this weekend too, where it’s just like, you know, it’s kind of like, if you’ve been waiting on something, waiting to do something, or purchase something, like a print, you know.<br /><br />Emily Balsley, is another local artist, she’s been, she kind of was doing, you know having a child herself, and knowing parents are at home. She kind of just made these coloring worksheets, that was probably five, six weeks ago now. It was in April, and she just put them up on her website for free, for parents to download. Some of them were drawing instructions; Phoebe did a few of them. Some were just straight up coloring sheets. But I think it’s just been really heartwarming to see the community. I see a lot of artists and organizations that are in place that support artists really coming together and kind of actualizing the community to be like, We got you. You know, but it’s reciprocal. It’s not that people are just asking for support, they’re also offering ways too, to kind of provide, like Emily did, they’re finding ways to give things to the community too, to the city. So I think that’s really beautiful.<br /><br />[00:19:17]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much for that. So, thinking about, I’d like to return to your online teaching work for a moment. You teach for Hugo House, mostly with students on the west coast.<br /><br />Rachel Werner: Yeah.<br /><br />Interviewer: Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what the experience of--so you had been teaching online, anyway, but how that role, or how that--the feel of those classes, if that has shifted due to the social distancing measures that are in place, you know, in places all over the country, and just with the pandemic in general.<br /><br />Rachel Werner: I think that people, I would be interested to see how many people, I’m betting now that people realize that how acceptable online learning can be. I mean, I’m in a weird, you know, I would say not weird position, but interesting. I’ve taken online classes a lot, kind of in my later college years, you know, whereas I feel like, you know, for current college students that’s not necessarily super unusual, but I do think there’s a lot of people that still--I’ve heard many people say, “This is my first online class. I’ve never taken an online class before,” and whether it’s one of my classes, whether it’s a webinar, you know, whatever it is.<br /><br />I know just from teaching social media workshops for the last couple years, there’s a lot of fear around technology for people sometimes. They're just not comfortable with apps or software, you know, or they just haven't spent that much time using their phone or their computer in a certain way; that can be really intimidating. But COVID has kind of just, even from a homeschooling perspective for parents, has really forced people to kind of like--you know, one of my coworkers said, like literally, every single week I’m learning a new skill. And I think that’s true for a lot of people in a lot of ways. And, whereas, they kind of have to push back some of that fear and get past the fear and hesitation, you know, just to be like, this is my only way to, you know, like, do this thing that I want to do. Whether it’s take this class, whether it’s participate where I’m being required to be in this webinar for my job, you know, or I have to figure out how to use Zoom, or set up my webcam because this is now how we’re going to be running meetings, you know, our weekly staff meetings, whatever it is. And so I think that’s a big positive, because I think, you know, most people are pretty smart, and a lot of times people are smarter than what they give themselves credit for. And I would never wish there would be a pandemic to motivate more people to kind of figure these things out, but I think that now that people know that this is in their wheelhouse and these things are possible, I think it opens up a lot more possibilities for people. And people have been able to take classes from all over the world, right? Just because, let’s say, a particular place isn’t offering, you know, let’s say, a culinary--just because there’s not necessarily an online culinary writing course here in Madison, doesn’t mean you can’t sign up for one that’s taking place somewhere else. So, I think that kind of global connectivity has really become super tangible. You know?<br /><br />[00:22:16]<br />Interviewer: Great. Thank you so much for that perspective. So, when we were communicating a little bit before this interview, you mentioned that you and Phoebe have adopted a rescue dog, and I’m wondering what the experience of adopting a rescue dog was like during this time period.<br /><br />Rachel Werner: So, yeah, so, we actually didn’t adopt the dog; we fostered twice. So we’re fosters. We actually became active fosters during quarantine through Underdog Pet Rescue of Wisconsin. So, because our lives outside of quarantine are pretty busy, and we are not usually home, but Phoebe has been asking for a pet for the last couple years, and it’s like, you know, Uh. I was like--but once we were home for about a month and it’s like, things are going to be changing for a bit, I was just like, Well, let’s look into fostering. That’s one of those things, again, from being so plugged in online, you know? I had seen lots of posts and, you know, whether it be here in Madison, or in other locations, the need for more fosters right now because a lot of the shelters have had to close, or are operating at minimum capacity because of the fact that, again, it’s like that whole social distancing, right? To care for an animal, caring for animals en masse, twenty-four hours a day, or even twelve or thirteen hours of a day, would involve people needing to work in pretty close contact with each other. So, if animals are healthy, and they don’t need pretty intensive medical care, they just can’t have that many animals in shelters at the moment. And so there’s just become this need for more fosters. Obviously and adoptions do help that.<br /><br />We became fosters and, because of COVID, they had shifted the whole training process online, so going through that online, and then getting approved, and then yeah. So, we’ve had two foster dogs now, and they both were lovely. Like they say people tend to live longer who have pets or care for pets, and I think there’s probably a lot of truth to that. You know, it’s hard to feel sad when you’ve got a puppy to cuddle, (laughs) like ten times, ten times a day. So it’s been a really positive experience. The other thing that’s been cool to be in that experience, and then also transition the pet into their permanent home too, as well. So then, knowing too, you have to care for this animal, but then also be the one to actually deliver them, you know, or pass them off to their permanent home, too, their--what they call them, their quote, unquote forever families. And that’s really heartwarming too, to just be able to see, you know. The last one, the second one we had, Rocker, to be able to be like, okay, here’s these two parents and they’ve got these two kids, one of their daughters, she was about the same age as Phoebe, and the other one looked about tween age, but they were just so excited, so excited to be getting this puppy, and taking it home. So that’s just so heartwarming. You know what I mean? It’s just like, yeah, life goes on, and these are just these snapshots of normalcy that are still happening. So, yeah, it’s been a really cool, amazing experience.<br /><br />[00:25:01]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much for that. Do you anticipate that you will be able to continue that, maybe on or off, sometime in the future? <br /><br />Rachel Werner: I think so. Yeah. No, I think so. I think that we are definitely--it’s been so--our experiences with the first two have been so positive that I think--I have every intention of us staying active fosters. I mean, the nice thing is, is just like, unless it’s like an emergency and it’s like, Hey, we really need you to take this animal right at this minute, you know, you kind of can say yes I can take this, you kind of commit when it works for you. So, I think for sure we’ll probably end up fostering, at least once or twice more, sometime this summer, and then I think, whenever--like I’ve told Phoebe, whenever it works for us, when we’re back into--whatever, I mean, who the heck knows what the new normal looks like, so I don’t know if our schedule will even be at that same pace. But, I think, yeah, we will remain active fosters for a while. At least until we finally do adopt one of our own to keep. (laughs)<br /><br />[00:25:59]<br />Interviewer: Thank you so much. Let’s see. Rachel, what are you worried about right now? <br /><br />Rachel Werner: What am I worried about? I think the thing I’m most worried about is just, how many businesses are going to be able to come back from this? You know, it’s hard because I feel like I can see both sides, or--I’m sure there’s more than just two sides, like with anything. I feel like there’s been at least, like, in the media, or in the biggest, kind of, struggle, between what, when does quarantine end, how to kind of reintegrate into, quote unquote, normal life, post COVID. You know, you never, you can’t place a value on human life, even one person. You know what I mean? If you can save one person, then everybody should be invested in doing whatever possible to keep people alive. You know? That being said, you know, there’s that realistic economic side of the impact where, you know, my heart goes out to them, I mean, I’m one of the people, like for the gyms that I work for, you know, I have other occupations, I have other income coming in. But, you know, seven, eight years ago, I would have been in the position of some of my other coworkers, where it’s like, I did work in the fitness industry full time, that was my main job, that was my job, like my income was coming from me teaching and training. And so, you know, I’ve been on a work call, as far as just, in regards to one of the gyms I work at reopening. And there was some shaming happened, and I was really struggling with that, you know, because it’s like one person in particular who--again, working in the fitness industry is not their primary occupation, they have another job that--she was, really just kind of kept coming back around and around again with a lot of really negative comments about the fact that, in her opinion, the gym is probably reopening too soon and all the risks involved to the members and to the people teaching. It’s like, here’s the thing, you don’t need to go back to teaching right now, because you can pay your bills. (laughs) You know what I mean? But I can tell you right--you know what I mean, but like, I don’t feel comfortable telling anybody that they shouldn’t be operating their business. I mean, again, if the public health department is legally, if the powers that be are telling people they can reopen, you know, and they’re willing to follow whatever parameters that have been set, I think you got to let people do that, because part of your survival too, is being able to feed and clothe yourself. You know what I mean? And if you’ve got kids, and being able to pay--I mean, not everybody has health insurance and might be paying for health insurance out of pocket. It’s like, I don’t know what their economic situation is, and so I think that there’s that, there’s that reality to that as well. So, I guess my biggest fear is just like, how many people are just really in dire straits because of all this, economically? And I don’t know what that looks like. I’m not an economist, I don’t know if there should be more stimulus checks. I don’t know if, you know, there needs to be some sort of more government thing. Or if there are--you know, yeah, I don’t know what the answers to all those are, but I do think if I have to say one thing I’m worried about, I am worried about what does that look like for individual people and business owners. You know, just depending on, because I do think there’s been a lot of fear still. I don’t think everybody’s going to be like, yeah, I’m going to eat at a restaurant tomorrow, or go to that. You know what I mean? (laughs) Yeah. So, I guess, those are my fears.<br /><br />[00:29:08]<br />Interviewer: Yeah. You’ve touched on a couple of these things, but are there any other good things, or opportunities that you see at this time?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: I think the good thing is that I think people really are, I’m hoping, I think it’s a lot of truth that we’re more invested. I mean, I think we’re already blessed to live in a city that is very community oriented and very action focused. But I think people are maybe just more poised to be kind and accepting. You know, at least I’m hoping that’s true. You know, we’ve all kind of come through this, we’re starting to see a little bit of quote, unquote the other side. And so, I just hope that as we all, kind of start to, are allowed to reintegrate, and be around, and socialize with each other more in public, that this kind of overwhelming, you know, just gentleness and kindness, just kind of this acceptance, and this kind of just you know, tol--where it goes beyond tolerance, but it’s just like, I’m just glad that you’re here. And I’m glad those of us who are still here are here, and that there’s support that we can provide to people who have lost loved ones. You know what I mean? I hope that there’s some sort of like, you know, I don’t know if there’s a memorial at some point, I mean, I just, I feel like there’s been a little, a lot of loss that those of us who haven’t personally experienced, that has still happened. And so I hope that there’s some way for that to be acknowledged too. You know, I guess I--but I’m hopeful more for that sense of, okay, what can we do as a community to, to come back stronger and better?<br /><br />[00:30:34]<br />Interviewer: Thank you. Rachel, is there anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to add at this point?<br /><br />Rachel Werner: No, I think we did it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to reflect. (laughs) To reflect myself, and just kind of like, oh yeah, what has it been like, you know? Yeah, I guess, and thank you. I guess one thing I would want to say is thank you. Thank you to every single person who has put themselves on the line in some way, shape, or form because they were in an essential job while this was going on. Everything from my car mechanic to, obviously, the nurses, doctors, you know, CNAs, the grocery store workers, like every person, you know, whether you’re at the co-op or Hy-Vee or Woodman’s. (laughs) You know, delivery drivers, everybody who has just, who has been out there every day, day in. I mean, we went to mail something, pick up something at UPS a couple weeks ago and he told me, he’s like, This isn’t weird for me because my life has been pretty much the same the whole time. He said their hours didn’t change one bit. You know what I mean? I thought that was, I was shocked. I was like, What? You know what I mean? So, the postal workers, FedEx, everybody. Like, thank you. Thank you for, you know, hanging in there. Thank you for bringing us our, you know, packages of, like, stuff that we probably didn’t need. (laughs) But we wanted because we were home. So, thank you. I do want to say there’s no way any of us could probably thank you enough, but, if, if governments still give out medals, all these people should get, like, twenty. You know? (laughs)<br /><br />Interviewer: Thank you so much for that. Yeah, and thank you so much for talking with us today.<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
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Title
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COVID-19 story by Rachel Werner, 2020
Subject
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Social distance
Epidemics
Taliesin (Spring Green, Wis.)
Writing
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Rachel Werner and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Werner, Rachel
Contributor
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Damon-Moore, Laura
Date
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2020-05-26
Description
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Rachel Werner talks about her experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in Madison. Rachel talks about working remotely as a content marketing specialist for Taliesin in Spring Green as well as a writing instructor for Hugo House in Washington State. She talks about the impact of the social distancing measures on her daughter Phoebe's education and extracurricular activities, including Phoebe's involvement with Children's Theater of Madison. Rachel talks about the impact of this time period on creatives and artists in Madison. <em>This interview was recorded using a mobile phone recording app, and it may affect the audio quality in places.<br /></em>
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-052
cat-family
cat-work
covid19
covid19-052
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/114ca8984017e0168479d74ac1cd813b.mp3
835493251ac90fd440de9b309744ca01
Dublin Core
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Recollection Wisconsin
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Sound recordings
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00:34:01
Transcription
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Identifier: covid19-054<br />Narrator Name: Andres Torres<br />Interviewer Name: Carrie Gostomski<br />Date of interview: 6/3/2020 <br /><br /><br /><br />INDEX<br />[00:00:00] Start of interview<br />[00:00:56] What is your Safer at Home story (leading up to Safer at Home)<br />[00:25:00] What have you found during this time, in either your work or fatherhood at home, that you’ve really enjoyed the most<br />[00:30:21] Have you felt any urge to paint because of what’s going on<br />[00:33:44] Is there anything else you’ would like to mention before we wrap up<br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />Interviewer: My name is Carrie Gostomski and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project: Stories from a Distance series. Today’s date is Wednesday, June 3, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the videoconferencing software Zoom. I’d like to have our storyteller introduce themselves. Please tell us your full name, and what is your connection to Madison?<br /><br />Andres Torres: Hi, my name is Andres Torres. I’ve been in Madison for just over five years now. I came here for grad school. I went to UW Madison and I was in their art program. I’m a painter by trade. And now I work for Madison Public Library as a Library Assistant.<br /><br />[00:00:56]<br />Interviewer: What is your Safer at Home story?<br /><br />Andres Torres: So, I had some interesting experiences leading up to the Safer at Home order here in Madison, and the closing of the Madison Public Library. In the days leading up--so in mid March, mid to early March--I was getting really stressed out because we had some plans: my daughter’s birthday is March 16th, and we had planned her first birthday party on Sunday, March fifteenth, I believe. As part of this birthday, my parents were going to be in town from South Dakota, and they were going to be staying with us for the weekend. Also happening at the same time, I had a friend, a good friend that lives in New York City, and he was going to be visiting Madison, and we were going to be attending a concert by one of my favorite bands called Shellac, and the concert was going to be Friday, March 13th. So basically, it must have been, like, either Tuesday or Wednesday, which would have been, I don’t know, the 10th or 11th, or something like that, is kind of when things started to get pretty serious in the United States, as far as COVID-19 is concerned. Up until that point, a lot of the news and stuff had been focusing on other places in the world, and the threat to the United States, and Wisconsin and Madison specifically, didn’t seem like a very real thing. I can remember talking about it with coworkers, and we started cleaning things a little bit better. We started putting hand sanitizer stations on every floor, and taking small steps. So it was something that was in of all of our minds. Information was changing so rapidly that just within a few days, the threat just became much more real. <br /><br />I can remember that Friday the 13th, that I was at work, I couldn’t get anything done, because all I could think about was that my parents were coming that night, and that my friend was already in town that day, and we were supposed to go see this concert that night. Tony Evers, our governor, had just created the restriction of no gatherings over two hundred people. And so, I was thinking maybe that the concert would be canceled for that night, but the venue can only actually accommodate around a hundred people. It’s this really small venue. It used to be called The Frequency; they’re just off the square, and now it’s BarleyPop Live; it’s a beer bar. I was hoping it would be canceled but it wasn’t; it was still happening, so it was still kind of like the decision rested on my shoulders. And (laughs) I mean, my friend and I had been planning this for months. We bought tickets months ago. He flew, literally, he flew in from New York City to see this show. And also, New York City, as far as the United States went, was the hotspot. That was something that was real. This was a problem in New York City and also in Seattle, at the time, were the two places where it was pretty serious. And so, I’m like, Oh, gosh! I have a friend coming from New York who’s going to be staying with me at my house. And my parents, who are both over the age of seventy, going to be staying with me at my house. This kind of puts me in a bit of a--between a rock and a hard place. And so I was just kind of talking with people at work about my options. And everyone I talked to--I talked to my supervisor, I talked to the adult librarian supervisor. And they were just like, Oh yeah, just tell your folks not to come, and don’t go to the concert, obviously. And tell your friend he just has to get a hotel or something. (laughs) Like those are just the easiest things in the world to do. Which was not the case. (laughs) Ultimately, I basically voiced my concerns to my friend from New York City about how worried I was. And he said that he would find other accommodations, and put the ball in my court and was like, you know, You do whatever you think you have to do; this is what I’m doing. And, as far as my parents go, they were already on the road, so I wasn’t going to tell them to turn back. <br /><br />And so, most of my plans went forward. I had a few other friends that were going to come in from out of town to see the show; they ended up not coming. So I ended up going to the concert that night, and tried to take as much precautions as I could have at a concert. I saw my friend. We literally only got to talk to each other for about twenty or thirty minutes, and then saw this concert, and then chatted a little while afterwards, and then I came home and my parents were here already. And, at that point, I felt pretty relieved because my biggest concern was potentially getting infected from my friend from New York City. Once he found other accommodations, I felt relieved and was like, Okay, this is fine now.<br /><br />Then we just had to figure out about my daughter’s birthday, which was happening on Sunday, but we ended up canceling it. We canceled that birthday party on Saturday, let everyone know that that was no longer going to be happening, and just kind of had a small celebration with my parents. And then on Monday, my supervisor started reaching out to some of us Youth Services staff--I work in Youth Services at the library--and it was funny because my anxiety level was so high for those, you know, Friday and Saturday, and then I started to feel a little bit of relief on Sunday, after I felt like I may have dodged the threat. And then I get a call from my supervisor that somebody at one of our library locations had tested positive for COVID, and that she had been doing interviews with the supervisor from that location all week, and so that she may have potentially exposed anyone that she had come into contact with that week also. (laughs) It just kind of reopened this box of anxiety inside of me. And then I was like, Oh gosh, I thought I had avoided the threat, while the whole time the threat was just right here next to me. And now my parents are still here, and if I’ve been exposed, maybe I’m exposing them to it. So, it was just—it turned out that I did not have COVID, so I didn’t expose anyone to it. None of my family has—none of us have been tested, but none of us have had symptoms that would warrant that. So that was just, that anxiety lasted another few days, because I just knew how long it could incubate, and I knew how long symptoms could take to start forming, so. And that was kind of my experience leading up to the Safer at Home order. <br /><br />My parents left that Monday, and I ended up going and getting groceries Tuesday morning. It would have been Tuesday the seventeenth, which, I think, is the day that the library closed officially. And I just had this, still, this anxiety going, so I was up really early, and I went to the grocery store, and got all my—got to the grocery store and there was hardly anybody in the parking lot, and I was like, Yes. I did my shopping; I got a huge, full cart. I was at Hy-Vee, and normally I always get a little bit upset at Hy-Vee because they don’t have nearly as many employees working cashier in the checkout lines, and oftentimes it’s in an attempt to force you to go through the self-checkout lines, which I have kind of an issue with. It used to be that I didn’t know how to use them very well, but now I know how to use them very well, and it’s more, I’m just taking a stance because it’s--yeah, it’s taking people’s jobs away and stuff. But, this particular morning, I had this huge, full cart of groceries, and I walk up, there’s only one checkout line open, and nobody is in it. And I checked out, and it was the fastest checkout experience I’ve ever had at Hy-Vee. And I was like, This is just weird. And then when I left Hy-Vee, the parking lot was absolutely full of cars, and I just realized that the clouds must have parted, and a little ray of sunshine shone down on my head and allowed me to get out of the place really quickly. Grocery shopping ever since that day has not been the same, you know. I have not had that experience happen again, but now I feel like doing little errands like that has kind of, to a certain extent, gotten back to normal. (laughs) Yeah, that was the time just leading up to this whole Safer at Home order for me. Yeah.<br /><br />Interviewer: It sounds like a lot. (laughs)<br /><br />Andres Torres: It was a lot. It was a lot and, yeah, the anxiety was real. It was a horrible feeling, really. A horrible feeling. And that anxiety has crept back from time to time over the last few months, you know. Since then, it’s really been a matter of getting used to this working from home stuff. So the stresses and anxieties have been a little bit different. My family is still taking a lot of precautions, as far as not exposing ourselves to COVID. But life has kind of settled into this, kind of a routine, I’d say. It was really strange, transitioning to work from home for me because, I would say, about fifty percent of what I did was work reference desk at Central library. And that was just answering people’s questions, interacting with the public, and that’s not something we were doing right away, so it was--and I’m sure this was the case for so many people--a struggle trying to figure out how to be useful in this new situation. And with things changing—the first few weeks, I feel like nobody really understood exactly what we were supposed to be doing. So I was just finding things that could be relevant to my job at the library, and doing research and professional development, and just kind of awaiting on instructions, and counting myself as being lucky that I was able to still be at home doing something and getting a paycheck. <br /><br />And then, as time progressed, it’s been interesting to see how this has just become normal for us, you know, doing these Zooms, and we’ve all had to figure out what work looks like for us now. And so, for myself, one of the hardest parts about it is the fact that one of the things I liked, one of my favorite parts about my job was my schedule. I was incredibly lucky, as are a lot of people at Central Library, because of the amount of people we have at Central, our schedules can be a little different. So I was only working one Saturday a month, and only one night a week. And I’m an eighty percent appointment, so I work four days a week, so I work Tuesday through Friday. Well, since I’ve been working from home, I have not been able to put in my hours in just four days, so I’ve been working five days a week, sometimes six days, oftentimes six days. I’m just kind of putting in hours here and there when I can. <br /><br />My daughter is home; she’s not going to daycare. Although her daycare did remain open, and has remained open throughout this whole ordeal, it was only open for essential employees’ kids, so it still wasn’t really an option even though it was open. And that’s been both really cool to have my daughter, Isla, at home, but also very challenging as far as getting things done and figuring out how that’s going to work. My wife, fortunately, has even more flexibility with what she’s doing. She’s a PhD grad student at UW and has a lot of flexibility, and has really cool supervisors and people that she’s working with that are totally understanding about things. And so, I guess, my duties have been able to kind of take priority, and she’s been able to work around all of that, which has been so helpful and has made this so much easier for me. But it’s--you know, taking care of a one-year-old all day long is also a very tough job, and so that’s not been the easiest thing for her either, but we’ve settled into kind of a routine: working, taking care of Isla during the day, and we try, almost every day, to do something to get us out of the house, which, ninety percent of the time that’s just going on a walk, so we’ve been exploring our neighborhood. We live really close to Warner Park, which has been nice because there’s so much opportunities for different kinds of trails and just not having to take the same walk every day, basically. So that’s kind of the routine that I have fallen into during the Safer at Home stuff. We’ve been ordering our groceries online at Hy-Vee, doing pickup. We only, about a month ago, started ordering takeout every once in a while, kind of in an attempt to support some local businesses, and do most of our shopping online if we need something. <br /><br />Oh! One other thing that I also did not mention is that about a month before the Safer at Home order was issued, basically in late February, we bought a new house, and we bought a new house without selling our old house first. We were just planning on, Okay, buy this house, move in; we’ll get an extended amount of time to move in, you know, take two weeks to move in or something, a couple weeks to move in, and then put our house on the market. Well, after we moved in and the Safer at Home order started and we had no more childcare, and now I’m working more days a week, it made getting anything done at the old house almost impossible. I would move things by myself, but Ranza, my wife, had to be watching our daughter all the time, so it was basically just me moving as much stuff. Luckily, her parents had visited us the week that we bought the house, so they were able to help us move most of the large things that I would need help carrying anyway, but definitely not all of the large things. And so we had enough stuff at our house to live and do the things we needed to, but so much stuff was still at the old place. All the work we needed to do was just not something that we could get done without help. And so, that house has basically been sitting there the last few months, and we’ve been doing little things here and there. <br /><br />But my wife’s parents came, they decided— I didn’t want any visitors for a long time, but I finally relented about two weeks ago, and we decided to let her parents come up and visit us from Kentucky. They were dying to come visit us because they don’t have any family or any community, really, down in Kentucky. Her mom works on a military base for a school. They were just chomping at the bit to come see their granddaughter. And I kept being like, No, we can’t. That’s just not smart. But, eventually, we were like, you know, Let’s take precautions as best we can. And so, on both ends we did, and her parents came up. For the past week and a half we’ve gotten everything out of the house, got it cleaned up. We just finished cleaning it yesterday, actually. And now we’re talking with a realtor about getting it on the market. Something I was worried about at the beginning of all of this was that property value was going to plummet, and luckily that’s not been the case. As a matter of fact I’m almost thinking it might be opposite, because no one, like, not many people are selling their homes right now. And so there’s still a lot of demand; there’s a lot of buyers looking for homes, but about half as many homes on the market right now. So that hopefully will bode well for us. But, yeah, that’s kind of a good summation of how the last few months have been going for me.<br /><br />Interviewer: Getting your house straightened and cleaned and ready to sell must have felt like a weight coming off of your shoulders, I would imagine.<br /><br />Andres Torres: Oh my gosh, it was--it’s been a huge weight coming off the shoulders. And not only that, but I’ve been having to mow two yards every week, as well as do the majority of the moving and stuff. I’ll be happy when I don’t have to mow two decent sized yards every week.<br /><br />[00:25:00]<br />Interviewer: I’m curious, speaking of more positive things, what have you found during this time, in either your work or fatherhood at home, that you’ve really enjoyed the most, or projects that spoke to you the most from work? <br /><br />Andres Torres: Yeah, so I guess, as far as work goes, (laughs) I’ve been really fortunate, actually, to be involved with some of the work groups that I’m on. And this work group, with the Living History Project, which I am also involved in, is probably the best thing to have happened. It’s funny, I was talking with my wife the other day about how I feel like I’ve been more productive as a library staff working from home than I was, almost, in the library. Just as far as being involved with things and getting things done. <br /><br />Now I just started doing phone reference also, and that’s been super, super cool. I was very nervous to start that. Like, I literally—my first shift was on Monday, and I wish I could remember the name of the scheduler who’s doing the schedule, but thank you so much, because she schedule—my first shift was a five to seven on a Monday, which was kind of easing me into phone reference. I think I only had about four calls, but all Monday, before five o’clock I worked like eight hours, just looking at resources and stuff to try to prepare myself for doing phone reference because—myself, like most people, are probably just trying to anticipate the most random questions that you might get once a year, a question like that—We just want to be prepared for everything. But, once you actually start doing it, it’s just normal questions that are well within my skill set. So that’s been actually really rewarding for me. <br /><br />It was kind of funny, my first shift I had three calls in the first hour and forty-five minutes of a two hour shift. With fifteen minutes left in my shift, I got my fourth call at like ten to seven, and I was on this call until 7:20. (laughs) And I don’t think I actually helped the lady with anything; she just wanted to talk. She wanted to talk about all the books she had on hold. She wanted to talk politics. She wanted to talk about protests. And honestly, I enjoyed talking to her, but I struggled to get a word in edgewise, and it was really—normally, I’m pretty good at kind of putting an end to a conversation, being like, Okay, that’s great. Well I got to go, sorry. But it was so hard to do in this situation. For one, because I wanted to humor the lady and talk to her about these things, but the other reason is, I couldn’t figure out a polite way to tell her that I had to go. And then when I finally did, I think I just worded it like, Well, if there’s not anything else I can help you with, I need to make myself available for other callers, as we have a lot of people calling. Which was actually kind of a lie because it was already past seven o’clock and we’re done at seven. So then I finished with that call and I felt a little bad about letting the lady go, but oh well. So, that’s some stuff at work that’s been rewarding. <br /><br />At home, it’s been really cool to just have our daughter here and get to be with her so much of the day. And I found that, the other day I was doing—it was one of the days when we basically spent all day working on the other house, moving, cleaning, and stuff, and she–our daughter–was with her grandma and, halfway through the day I found myself thinking about her and being like, Oh my God, I want to see her and I miss her right now. (laughs) I literally only had been away from her for like six hours or something. It made me remember what it’s like to be at work and stuff too. So, yeah, those have been the highlights, I guess, of this time.<br /><br />[00:30:21]<br />Interviewer: You had mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you were a painter by trade. I’m curious: have you felt any urge to paint because of what’s going on, or have you just been so busy that it’s kind of more a hobby?<br /><br />Andres Torres: I guess I haven’t done much since my daughter was born, as far as my creative endeavors go. And in this new house, yeah, it’s weird because at our old house, I had a studio that I would work in, and after Isla was born, my studio kind of started becoming more storage for things. Then it was this point where I had so much stuff in my studio that it was like, if I wanted to start working on it I would need to reorganize and clean. And so, then things started piling on top of each other. And then we moved into this house, and I love the house that we’re in now. It’s a lot—the reason we had to move was just because of space; we just were living in a tiny house, and with a new member of the family, we just realized we needed more space. We literally could not—there was nowhere in my house where you could, like, lay down and not be touching something, or running into something. And now we have a lot more space, but this house does not have a place for a studio for me. So that was one of the things—I was thinking that I was going to maybe build a studio in one of—this has a double garage, and so I was thinking I was going to try to build half of the garage into a studio, which might still be something that I do. But now, since I’ve been living here, I’ve been thinking about other things that I could do with that. So, as far as—I have not been able to get much done artistically, although I did do a few drawings during some MPL town halls that I—I was inspired by an artist friend of mine who had been on a social media hiatus for the last two or three years. And he just rejoined social media and started posting some of these drawings that he’s been doing, which kind of inspired me to do a few of my own. But then I kind of stopped doing that. I have strange work habits as an artist; I really go in these spurts. So I have these long periods of not doing stuff, and then I’ll have these bursts of creativity and output. So I’m hoping for something like that here in the future, now that I’m starting to get some of these other responsibilities out of the way. Hopefully I’m clearing a little bit of space in my life for that creativity again.<br /><br />[00:33:44]<br />Interviewer: Is there anything else you would like to mention before we wrap up?<br /><br />Andres Torres: I don’t think so. Thank you, Carrie.<br /><br />Interviewer: Yeah, thank you, Andres, for your time and for sharing your story.<br /><br />Andres Torres: You’re very welcome.<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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COVID-19 story by Andres Torres, 2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Social distance
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Andres Torres and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Torres, Andres
Contributor
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Gostomski, Carrie
Propheter, Nicholas
Glaeser, Colleen
Date
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2020-06-03
Description
An account of the resource
Andres Torres describes what the days leading up to the Safer at Home social distance measures were like for him and his family. Andres talks about his experience of hearing the news about COVID-19 as it applied to other parts of the world, and how information locally changed very rapidly. Andres describes going to the grocery store on the day that the governor's Safer at Home order went into place, and the anxiety of waiting for the incubation period of COVID-19 to pass for him and his family. Andres talks about library work and what that has looked like for him from home, and about the experience of putting a house on the market during this time.
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-054
cat-family
covid19
covid19-054
-
https://omeka.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/original/52e7c93a745cb1ef4e9bea864b35df38.mp3
e3543495284faac82474d65625de4357
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Recollection Wisconsin
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Sound recordings
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00:43:18
Transcription
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Identifier: covid19-056<br />Narrator Name: Terry Cohn<br />Interviewer Name: Danny Atwater<br />Date of interview: 6/13/2020<br /><br />INDEX<br />[00:00:00] - Start of interview<br />[00:01:11] - Describe for our listener where you are right now<br />[00:01:29] - Tell us about your trip to Spain<br />[00:26:35] - Was there a turning point where you felt better<br />[00:31:13] - Do you think that our local and federal governments have done enough to help prevent the spread<br />[00:37:57] - Do you anticipate that there will be a second wave of Covid, and how will you prepare<br />[00:42:07] - Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about<br /><br /><br /><br />[START OF RECORDING]<br /><br />Interviewer: My name is Danny Atwater, and I am a library assistant for Madison Public Library. This interview is being recorded as part of the Madison Living History Project Stories from a Distance series. Today's date is Saturday, June 13, 2020, and this interview is being conducted via the video-conferencing software Zoom. I'd like to have our storyteller introduce themselves. Please tell us your full name and describe your connection to Madison.<br /><br />Terry Cohn: Hello, Danny. Nice to talk to you. My name is Terry Cohn, and I moved and have lived here in Madison since 1977. I kind of had two previous connections to Madison. One was in the fifties and early sixties, when my father brought our family here because he had a research colleague, and we saw the beatniks and a huge ice cream cone from Babcock ice cream, so that was a memory of Madison, and so now I've lived here since 1977, and my husband and I have raised two daughters: Sarah, who lives in Madison and actually works at Central Library, and Leah, who lives in Portugal.<br /><br />[00:01:11]<br />Interviewer: Well, Terry, thank you for joining us today. Would you please describe for our listener where you are right now, so they can get a sense of where you're recording this.<br /><br />Terry Cohn: Sure, so I'm in my home on the east side of Madison, where we've lived for forty-two years.<br /><br />[00:01:29]<br />Interviewer: Terry, you have an important story to share, and I want to recognize that some of it might be hard to talk about, so again thank you for taking the time to do so. We had talked a little bit before the interview that today is the three month anniversary of you arriving back from your trip to Spain, and that's perhaps where your story begins, but I wonder if you could tell us about that trip a little bit first.<br /><br />Terry Cohn: Sure, so, way back in January, before we were going, we heard about this weird virus that was in China and Iran, and I was wondering, Gee, is that going to come to Europe? Will that affect our trip? We were due to leave to visit our daughter in Portugal February thirteenth, arriving February fourteenth, and then stay two weeks there, and then spend twelve days in Spain, where we had never been. So we took our daughter's advice, and we armed ourselves with disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizers for the airplane and took off and arrived in Lisbon on February fourteenth. And I have two little grandsons; they're two and four. So during that period of time, my daughter had to go to Milan for work, and three days after she returned, Milan completely locked down because of the coronavirus. And this was all something very new to my husband and myself, but Leah was totally terrified that she would infect myself and my husband because at that time it was considered people sixty and older were the vulnerable people, and she wasn't worried about herself, but she started giving us extra vitamin C concoctions and green smoothies and things to keep us healthy, and she wanted us to take our temperatures. But we had a wonderful time in Lisbon, the two weeks we spent there, and we'd been there before to visit her. But we always explore new places. <br /><br />And then we were leaving to go to Spain the very end of February, and the night we were leaving, or early in the morning, I woke up and I said to Michael, “We can't go. We just can't go because we'll be—what if we're quarantined in Spain and we can never get back to Lisbon, we can never get back home?” And I wasn't even thinking about getting ill, it was just like, What if we're stuck, and where do we stay? And then I talked to Leah and Michael, and I thought how— This is just your anxiety, Terry. Just go and have a good time. It's too much to deal with to cancel all the places we thought we—you know, we had planned to go, so we took off and we—Leah armed us with thermometers, and I had her phone, so she texted and called us every day, "How are you feeling?" And we spent twelve wonderful days in Madrid and San Sebastian and Barcelona, so all northern Spain, and ate wonderful food, and didn't really think too much about the virus, because it wasn't Italy, it was slowly coming into France. Spain was functioning just normal. And, so, everybody was walking around, nobody seemed cautious or nervous about anything, so, fortunately, it was not the height of tourist season or spring break, so all the museums and sites that we were going to were rather empty and we looked around and we wondered, Gee, are people thinking about this virus, or is this really because of tourism? And because nobody seemed nervous, we just thought, Okay, this must be lack of tourism, and we just—we really had a blast. I mean, we had no trouble getting into any of the places we wanted to go to, the Picasso museum in Barcelona, discovered incredible public markets, ate tapas galore, so we just really had a wonderful time. But the day that we were supposed to fly back to Lisbon for three days to say goodbye and get our suitcases and other things we had left, I got a text like at two in the morning from my neighbor saying, Gee, Terry, I hope you guys get back to the States, and I thought, What is going on? So I looked at the news, and I saw that Trump had initiated a travel ban for all planes from Europe starting a day later. <br /><br />So this was the twelfth; we were to fly to Lisbon on the twelfth and spend the three days there. So on that day, we went to the airport early. Leah tried to call the airlines, but she was going to be on hold for six hours. And the airport—this was in Barcelona—was just packed with frantic people, and people who had just arrived the day before who were going to have to turn around and go back, no vacation. And so while Michael waited in line to check in for our flight to Lisbon, I went over to see about changing our flight from Lisbon on Sunday the fifteenth to Friday the thirteenth, and I waited in line forever to get to the travel agent and then the travel agent took about forty-five minutes trying to find us a flight, and every time he'd say, "Ugh! That one's booked; that one's booked." And finally he said, "Oh, I got you a flight! It's Barcelona to Amsterdam to Chicago," and I looked astonished and I said, “Wait a second;I have to get back to Lisbon!” And he said, "I'm sorry. There's no flights from Lisbon going." And I said, “Well, can't you fly us home on Saturday?” And he said, "No, no, I'm sorry. The travel ban is supposed to go into effect, and we will not book any flights or guarantee anybody anything." So, I'm hysterically crying at not getting to be able to say goodbye to our daughter and our grandsons, and I go and find Michael and he says, "Terry, why don't we just follow through what we were supposed to do?" I said, “You don't get it, Michael; we can't do that. We have to go home.” So, as I'm crying, a television station from Spain comes up and wants to ask me how I've been affected by this travel ban, and I—in between my tears—I said, ”Well, I don't get to go back, and everything's changed.” And so we spent most of the day in the airport, flew to Amsterdam, and then that night in Amsterdam, I started to get a funny cough, and I didn't think too much about it—certain scents or smells can trigger a scratchy throat. And the next day, we got to the airport early; we were warned to be at the airport early, and we got on our plane with our disinfectant and everything that we had, our hand sanitizer, and it was an absolutely full flight, and I spoke to the young woman next to me, who it turned out was a UW senior, and had had her vacation interrupted after three days in Lisbon, and she was exhausted and she just covered herself completely up with her coat and the blanket, and she slept most of the trip. But I had said to her, “I'm so sorry I have this cough. Don't worry about it, it's just this cough I have.” And I felt terrible with all the people, you know, because—a cough! You know, who wants to be near someone with a cough? But they gave us this large towel at the beginning to kind of sanitize our hands, and I just kept it, and I used it kind of like a mask and coughed into that and coughed into my blanket. And that was a nine-hour flight. And at the end, my husband says, "Wow! That went really fast!" And I went, Oh my goodness! That was the worst flight. That took forever. I was popping cough drops two at a time in my mouth, trying desperately not to cough, and then, the surprising part was we had heard that as people entered the country, we were all going to be screened for coronavirus—then becoming COVID-19, that's the vernacular now—and we get to O'Hare and nothing is different than anything. We're—the long lines to go through customs; we go through the machines at customs, and the customs agent at the end—we say we've been in Portugal and Spain, and by that time things had really heated up in Spain, so it wasn't—I mean, we left and three days later Spain was in lockdown. So, he just looked at our papers and said, "Oh, how cute. You were each born six days apart." And nothing about, You all need to self-quarantine. And I was pretty disturbed about that because Europe was so much more advanced than the States, and my daughter, after being in Milan, could not go to her children's little school for two weeks. She had to stay at home. And, so, about a week before we were to go home, I texted my sister who lives in Madison and said, “Could you just stock up on some groceries for us? We really need to stay home for two weeks.” And, you know, let's just enjoy cooking, and that was that. <br /><br />Well, then, that was the thirteenth we arrived at home, and I didn't feel all that great, but just that same cough. And the next day I spiked a fever.And, that, unfortunately, is Sarah's birthday, and so we couldn't say happy birthday other than through FaceTime, and I was feeling more and more ill, and she didn't tell me until a couple months later how horrible I looked on the FaceTime call. (laughs) But, anyway, I was able to get through the UW Health triage phone system to be tested, and I think it was very hard to get tested then, and I think what was key was my travel, and obviously the fever and the cough. And two days later I learned that I was positive, and absolutely shocked. I thought I was getting a call about a totally different thing, about an appointment that I had coming up and to tell them, Well, you know, I really should self-quarantine. Well, I had no choice by then. <br /><br />The other thing that happened that I thought was impressive, was the public health department called me about a day later to ask me who I'd been around. And I in fact had been around my sister, although before she picked us up, I asked her to please bring us masks, and you wear a mask, because I have this cough. And, I still didn't know I was ill, so we all wore a mask. She didn't touch our luggage or anything. But then she was called because I gave her name. And she had to self-quarantine also for two weeks. And she'd kind of been our source for, we thought, getting us food and groceries, so what then became a very rapid onset of symptoms which were nothing like anything I've ever had before. I had zero energy. Our house is two stories; the bathroom is twenty steps away. That was all I could do. I couldn't even imagine going down the stairs. The cough became worse, the fever became higher. And then, two days later, my husband spiked a fever and chills, but he had all, like, GI symptoms, and I called for him because he was feeling so horrible, and he got tested and learned that he was positive. But he was over it in two days. And that was the saving part of this household, in terms of having somebody who could feed me and just take care of a hundred percent of the household, things that had to be done. And that's where I say that my sense of what was going on—and this is five weeks in bed, of not getting out. I just lay there, I could not read. I couldn't watch anything, any movie. I kept trying to think of something that could catch my interest, but nothing did. I slept. At three to four in the afternoon I just got so anxious because I hated the night time. The night time for me, the dark was totally frightening, and so I slept every night with the light on. And, by the way, the public health department had told my husband and I that we had to be in separate bedrooms and wear masks around each other, even though we were both positive. So, Michael, I learned after—I learned a lot after the fact because everybody just tried to keep up the positive momentum for myself—was that he couldn't sleep because he was afraid that I was going to stop breathing. <br /><br />So at one point in time when the fever just really wouldn't go down, I called my doctor, and she said, "Wow, you know, this is"—I was one of her first Covid cases, and so she consulted with the infectious disease team they had put together and came back and said to me, "I think you need to go to the ER." Actually, back up a minute. She—as soon as I was positive, I did call her, and she did call me every single day for two weeks to check up on me. But, anyway, at that time she said, "I think you need to go to the ER. I will call ahead to tell them you're coming. Michael cannot go in with you, and take whatever you think you need because you may be admitted." And, so, it was just like that. They met me with a wheelchair, took me into a special negative pressure room and examined me and thought that maybe the cold saline they would give me would help reduce the fever, but it didn't, and they couldn't find anything—no pneumonia, nothing wrong with any of the bloodwork, so, fortunately, I was sent home. And I really, at that point in time, I felt like if somebody was admitted to the hospital, it was kind of like a death sentence, and so I truly did not want to be admitted. So I was so grateful to go home. <br /><br />And then a few days later, my heart started to race, and it wouldn't stop and it wouldn't stop racing. Like three times as fast as normal. So I reluctantly called my doctor because I once again didn't want to have to go back with the possibility of having to be admitted. But I did go to the emergency room, and they were able to slow my heart down with an IV medication and, fortunately, I was sent home again, although this time, they saw that I did have pneumonia, and my liver enzymes were not normal, so it had now affected two of my organs. And this was all still kind of new. As I would talk to my doctor each day she would say, "Oh, I just learned that there can, in fact, be liver involvement." And that was when it was all considered just a respiratory illness, but they were learning more and more, but they were still way behind from what could have been known, from cases in other countries, much earlier. I also told her that I can't eat because everything tastes so salty. And so I didn't lose my sense of taste or smell, but everything tasted awful, including water, so it was really hard for me to keep hydrated and to eat. And so she said, "Well, maybe you better drink some Pedialyte." And so the next day I said, “You know, that stuff just tastes like what you drink when you're going to have a colonoscopy. It's just gross!” And she said, "Really? I had no idea!" And now I know, it was me. Everything was tasting really—all I can describe it as salty. And, so, unfortunately, two days later, my heart raced again, and fortunately that was the first day I had no fever, so this was a little over two weeks into the illness. I still felt horrible, but I was finally fever-free. And so, on the way to the emergency room, a cardiologist called me and said, "Terry, I think we can treat you at home. I hear you really don't want to go to the emergency room again." I said, “No, I don't.” They couldn't get to my veins last time. I came home with like three punctures all over in my arms, and it was a very different experience from the first time in the ER, and it was not pleasant. So, I was able to go home. I know that day I actually quickly FaceTimed with my daughter in Portugal, just to say, I'm going home; I'm getting this medication, and I'm not having to go to the emergency room, but I didn't realize how awful I sounded or looked. So, in fact, I was actually making her a little (cough)—excuse me—more nervous. <br /><br />But the rest of the weeks went by with pretty much just me in bed, and while everybody else was kind of getting bored at home, and doing their lists of things that they had always put off, I wasn't doing anything. But what I was getting from family and friends and people in Madison was an incredible amount of support, and they were really my cheerleaders, and I can't tell you how many things appeared—how many surprises appeared at our front door. Meals, goody packages from girls that my daughter had gone to college with, flowers. I got a text message twice a day from a neighbor of positive thoughts. So on days when I said—not even thinking what I was saying—to my family, I just can't take this anymore, I'm ready to give up. Not knowing the impact of those words would have on people. But that was truly how I was feeling, that this was too much to take. I can't—I'm so weak, I can't do this. But not considered ill enough to be hospitalized. So that's something that people need to keep in mind, because we're considered mild cases of the virus. We're not having any problems with our oxygen levels, but we feel horrible. So, what ended up happening was, I really—there's—no one knew anyone else in Madison that had this. And friends of mine would just be, you know, "I'm in shock. Wow! You and Michael had COVID, or have COVID?" And, so, the good part was this outpouring of love and goodies; the negative part is that people really don't get it. People close to me, and who saw me or contacted my family regularly—my sister who lives in Madison (cough) excuse me—they all understood it because they had really first hand experience, but other people in Madison who aren't really part of my social circle but still delivered food to us—I was like this novelty, but not an understanding really of what I was going through. So I think what it left me with is a sense of confusion. I'm very grateful that people here in Madison and Dane County have relatively low cases, but I have to say, the day I was tested, there were twenty-seven positive cases in the state of Wisconsin. I believe there are sixteen thousand now. So it's here. It may not be right in our own community, and it may be scattered throughout the state, but it's not over. And I feel people really need to be serious about social distancing, and about wearing masks. (cough) And the other thing I—excuse me for coughing; it’s one of the residual parts of this. One of the things I reflected upon is way back when we would, in my generation, get exposed to chicken pox or something at school, we’d get a note home saying, Oh, there was chicken pox in your class; you might expect to get chicken pox. Or today, if we're around somebody with a cold or the stomach flu or something, we just think, Oh, shoot, you know; I've been exposed; I may get this, I may not, but now I've been exposed. That's not true with this. You don't know when you're going to be exposed. You don't know who has it. The research is just so new, and it changes every day whether people who are asymptomatic have it or don't have it. So with all this unknown knowledge, I'm just afraid that we're getting too complacent and that when I look around, I say, What's really changed since March thirteenth when I came back ill? Nothing's really changed, in terms of the virus itself. It's still here. We've controlled it some, but we don't know what's going to happen. So that's really what I think about day to day. I feel my husband and I are super sensitive, super careful because we don't take for granted that we may be immune because there's no evidence that shows whether we truly are or aren't, so we wear our masks, and people might wonder, like, Well, you guys had it, you guys should feel safe. <br /><br />And the other—I’d say one of the more positive things for Michael and I has been that we have given plasma, and this is one of the programs that the University of Wisconsin is part of along with now thousands of other institutions around the country where recovered patients—if they have had a positive test on record and then actually have a negative test on record, are allowed to give plasma for their antibodies. So that was very rewarding, and I will do that monthly in hopes of helping other people. And the other thing that we are a part of is we donated blood to Promega, who is doing research on coming up with a truly valid antibody test. So there are antibody tests out there, but they haven't been totally rigorously tested, so it's not known how valid they are. So whether Promega gets it or someone else, it felt good, at least, to be part of that also. So that's my story, and I welcome any questions you have, Danny.<br /><br />[00:26:35]<br />Interviewer: Thank you for going so in depth into your story. I'm curious—if you would say that you feel better at this point. Was there a turning point when you said, "Hey! I feel better," and what was that like?<br /><br />Terry Cohn: So I did not put on clothes for five weeks, other than to go to the emergency room. And my poor husband would have to do four sets of pajamas a night because of the horrible sweats that would happen at night. But then I had signed up to be tested to see if I was negative to donate plasma. So this was a little over five weeks of when I was first diagnosed, and that day I put on clothes to go, and after that day I put on clothes. And so that was a turning point, and the other thing is I have my own little business; I have a little Etsy shop where I make kids’ clothes, and I closed it the month of February, March, and hoped to open it actually mid-March, but I kept it closed in April also, and opened it the beginning of May. And that was also a big turning point to have something to do. And the other thing that was kind of funny was, I read, and I could not find a book that would, that I could just, like, get into and not be too heavy, and not be too real, so I had never read Harry Potter, so I picked the first Harry Potter book because Sarah has all of them, and that was the first book I read. And so that was also a big turning point, was to actually have concentration, because that's something that also was, has been noted now, is a lack of concentration, and I think, for myself and for others, even after the physical parts—and they're not gone—I haven't built up my stamina. We were walking ten miles a day in Barcelona, and some days I just can't walk more than, you know, the five blocks to the post office and back. So that ebbs and flows. I don't know when I'll feel, you know, which day I'll have the strength and energy and other days I'll just feel kind of blah. But I also was listening to the news one day, and I found out about a woman who, like myself had one of these so-called mild cases, and was also—I think hers was three or four weeks—and then recurrent-like symptoms that kind of come and go. She started a support group and I am lacking people like myself who have this, and so I joined that and I was talking about—so my physical stamina came back earlier than my mental healing. And my mental healing has taken much, much longer. And I'd say, really, it's only been in the last week to ten days that I've felt mentally much better. It was very traumatic. And you know, I don't really know what PTSD feels like, but I would say it felt kind of like that when I would hear people kind of downplay what the severity of what this illness could be like, "Oh, if I get it it's not so bad, it's just like the flu." That, that was difficult to hear people say, like, "Oh, you know, the percent chance of getting this is really slim," and I'll never know how I got it. It could've been anytime I was in Spain because I was there long enough. We were in Airbnbs, we were in buses to go to sites, we were in airplanes, we ate in restaurants. I don't know. We tried as carefully as we could. I carried that hand sanitizer and every time we touched anything we washed our hands, so I don't know, but that part was—I was so sensitive to hearing the people negate the seriousness of this virus. So that part's been rough. The mental turning point was much slower than the physical.<br /><br />[00:31:13]<br />Interviewer: You mentioned early on noticing, I think you said it was a more sophisticated response from other governments. And I'm curious, do you think that our local, state and our federal government has done enough to help prevent the spread?<br /><br />Terry Cohn: Absolutely not. I mean, I have a lot of anger. (laughs). I have a lot of anger from what I experienced at the Barcelona airport, where we were given, you know, barely forty-eight hours for everybody to madly change what they were doing. But, I can attest to what was going on in Portugal because of my daughter who lives there. They did a close—soon after we left. So we left Lisbon February twenty-ninth. They, soon after that, they closed every park, every museum, that we had been in. So it hadn't—they had no cases in Portugal, they were just watching it come across—and it’s not like it comes across with the wind—but they have a lot of tourism industry which is really what thrives in Portugal, so they locked down. They told people they could only go outside for essential reasons, the grocery store and the pharmacy. And my daughter was very fortunate. She lives in a flat on the, like, four stories up and the two little kids that they—her father-in-law had a place up north in the country, with lots of property and no people, and they were there for eleven weeks, in lockdown. I mean, they could go out and walk around. You couldn't really do that in Lisbon because it's physically not made for social distancing. The sidewalks are too narrow. And I saw that when she came back from Milan, and Milan went on lockdown, her company stopped all travel. It's an international company, so this was a company that in the middle of February said, "No more of our employees will do any travel anywhere." And she was to organize a large worldwide meeting in Barcelona, for close to the end of March. Well, that was canceled. And the reason being, is people were going to be coming from all over the world. And everybody shakes hands, and everybody's happy to see everyone. And that was not going to happen. <br /><br />So I feel like we were way behind in this country. I think that Wisconsin has just been like the Wild West once our orders for Safer at Home were abolished. And, you know, we have a culture here in Wisconsin that's a pretty party hearty culture and bar culture and all kinds of scenes that are just ripe for transmitting the virus. And then, even here in Madison, where we think of ourselves as kind of being smart and progessive, over Memorial Day, there were crowds of people behind Memorial Union and right next to each other. And that place is roped off now and off limits. You cannot go there. So people—and what the governor had to do to the state parks, when people couldn't just enjoy them, social distancing, and smart, and not littering. They took advantage, and so then when the governor had to close the state parks, people were upset. Well, now they're open and hopefully people will be able to do it respectfully and smart and safely because I think we're all a little bit too—too much involved with our own safety and not the safety as a community, and that's where I think of wearing masks. If people wear masks, what it says to me is, "I care about you, and I want to protect you." Because the newest research shows that makes a huge difference. And it may in fact make a difference for acquiring the illness, also. So that's where I think, you know, this attitude in this country is not—I mean, it's played out in everything—in our healthcare system and whatever, but it's not about us as citizens and respect for each other. It's too much about me and what's convenient. And, you know, I see people who make up their own rules about what is Safer at Home. And they're just lucky that they don't live in a city where, you know, it's really prevalent. And so they've escaped it, and I can't say it's because how they chose to live safely. I think it's just not here in the sense it is other places. And not to say it can't come. I mean, we've had, you know, Memorial Day and who knows what's going to happen on the fourth of July, and things are opening up, and, you know, I try to figure that out and it's just hard for me to figure out, how we open up safely, but my heart is just so upset for those people who can't work and whose livelihoods are just being taken away from them and all the businesses having to close. So, it's a really—it's very hard, but I think that the leadership in this country has not been for the safety of its citizens. And I think it was—I think that that was tried here in Wisconsin and unfortunately—it was for political reasons, I believe that, you know, things were just, like, put in an open free-for-all. And to leave it up to county by county is a little ridiculous, because if we're in Dane County and we go over to Sauk County and we go have our whatever and then come back into Dane County, you know, there's no difference. So, I think ultimately it should have been a nationwide process of dealing with this in a smart way, and statewide it gets tougher, but then when you go down and try and break it up into counties and municipalities, it's a lost cause.<br /><br />[00:37:57]<br />Interviewer: Given what you see with the way that people are acting, do you anticipate that there will be a second wave of COVID, and how will you react to it? How will you prepare for that?<br /><br />Terry Cohn: My heart says, I hope not. Already my daughter is not coming in August. She usually comes every year. Her next trip that she comes every year is November for Thanksgiving. That's the time they're talking now about, you know, this possible surge. I think, you know, it corresponds with flu, so, you know, if we're, if people have weakened systems already from something else that they're either fighting or have, there's a possibility—I don't know if I'll deal with it any different than I am today. I'm, like, cautious. Everybody has their own, you know, rational or irrational reasons for doing what they do. I cannot have somebody else pack my groceries. I just—it's beyond my ability to be comfortable with. I'm much more comfortable wearing a mask, going into a large grocery store where people wear masks, where they adhere to the social distancing. And there are two places here that I've been, and I—mostly my husband does the grocery shopping, because I'm still nervous. But, you know, so I feel that, for me, that's what feels safest. And, you know, for somebody else, that's not logical, just like I don't want—I don't want anybody touching my stuff, and I don't know when they pack it if they've coughed or sneezed on it. You know, there's too many unknowns for that, for me. So I would say if something happened, and I think there will possibly be, because I think, because I believe the knowledgeable scientists and public health people that believe there is going to be an upsurge, and I think part of it has to do because we all go indoors again. And, you know, if it's slower in the summer, maybe we have more space. I don't know. I mean it's just sort of things to think about and I don't—I think I won't feel comfortable until—really comfortable until there's a vaccine. And I don't believe I'll travel, and it's really painful for me to not imagine seeing my daughter and kids, but—grandkids—but I can't imagine going through this again, at all. And, I, one funny story about Sarah here in Madison is, so we FaceTimed on her birthday, March fourteenth, and then I didn't see her, probably for five weeks, and I didn't see her, and I really, I only saw her through the glass window on our front porch, where we talked through the window. And she said, "Wow, you look a lot better than you did back when I last saw you." So that was kind of a weird thing, to not see a family member and I didn't see my sister, either, who lives a mile from me. She, when she was freed from her two weeks, she was one of the people that got us groceries, but nobody still has been in my house. I haven't gone in other houses. (cough) I've had one meal, I mean I've had meals with one person, my sister—oh, and Sarah—two people, we have—I've cooked, not with them, but we each prepared and we sat our six feet apart. But other than that I have not—I see people passing by and when we walk, but, you know, I'm pretty, pretty careful.<br /><br />[00:42:07]<br />Interviewer: Terry, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that just hasn't been mentioned at this point?<br /><br />Terry Cohn: I just want to say that I am so grateful for the Madison community and the grapevine because I think that when people either contacted my sister or food showed up, and I thought, How did they ever even know I was ill? I don't know. I don't know, but it's a grapevine, and this is a grapevine, as I mentioned earlier about people who are not in my immediate social circle who reached out and did things for us, and that's what's really special about this community, is people do care and do reach out, and I truly feel like that was what saved me. So thank you for doing this whole project. I think it's really fascinating. I think it will be good to hear what everybody's experience with this unreal environment is.<br /><br />Interviewer: Well, Terry, thank you for taking time on this beautiful Saturday morning to share your story with us. I appreciate it.<br /><br />Terry Cohn: Thank you!<br /><br />[END OF RECORDING]
Dublin Core
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Title
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COVID-19 story by Terry Cohn, 2020
Subject
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Epidemics
Respiratory diseases
Public health
Rights
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Copyright 2020, Terry Cohn and Madison Public Library. All rights reserved. For more information, contact Madison Public Library.
Creator
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Cohn, Terry
Contributor
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Atwater, Daniel
Witkins, Romelle
Glaeser, Colleen
Date
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2020-06-13
Description
An account of the resource
Terry Cohn describes her experience traveling to Portugal and Spain in late winter 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to ramp up in Europe. Terry talks about the logistics of traveling during the travel ban that went into effect in March. Terry began to have symptoms, including a cough and a fever, that turned out to be COVID-19. Terry discusses the process of interacting with the public health department immediately following her positive test, and how contact tracing worked in Madison. Terry talks about the symptoms of the disease, which varied between her and her husband, who also tested positive for COVID-19, and how this experience has affected her view of public health and the need for social distancing and face coverings. <br /><br /><strong>Addendum:</strong> As I listened to my interview, I realized that I left out two important events that occurred during my illness with COVID19. As part of my healing, I tried to avoid focusing on the frightening parts of this illness, but some events replayed themselves. On my second visit to the ER, my encounter with the doctor left me traumatized for weeks. I was hooked up to 3 IV needles when the resident came in to discharge me. He was covered with a shield and mask and all I could see were his empathetic eyes. He gently rubbed my arm and said <br />
<ol>
<li>"You know age is against you."</li>
<li>"I'm glad we didn't have to use a particular cardiac medicine on you, because it is really scary. It stops your heart and then your heart has to be started again."</li>
<li>His parting words "I really hope you make it".</li>
</ol>
He said this three times. These words echoed through my head for weeks as I lay in bed, when I took a shower, and in my dreams. I was not able to tell those words to my husband, daughters, or sisters until I realized that I was getting better. In addition, there was a whole other scene going on at the same time on the other side of the curtain that I was told about after I recovered. My husband, daughters, sisters, family, and the close friends, who checked in daily, were all terrified. I did not realize the fear they were dealing with. I recently learned more about the tears they shed when I was too weak to talk to them, when I was sent to the ER, and when they heard extreme weakness in my voice. While I want to project my gratitude to the Madison Community and to those that provided me with positive thoughts, I must reiterate, this virus is frightening. As we learn more every day, we are finding that we really don't know who will live and who will die, what age it will strike, whether one can develop immunity, and whether it will come back with a greater magnitude.
Coverage
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Madison, Wisconsin
Language
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en
Identifier
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covid19-056
cat-family
cat-healthcare
covid19
covid19-056