Memories

Pandemic Diary 15: A Rainy Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Quarantine considerations: Outdoors or in?

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A 1964 article in Nature with the euphonious title, “Nature of argillaceous odour,” gave the world the euphonious-sounding word, “petrichor.” In the article, two chemical researchers attempted to scientifically break down what it is we smell when we smell the world after a rain shower and to give the phenomenon a name.

The two authors coined the word, “petrichor,” which I have been mispronouncing in my head since I first encountered it in 2015, when an article on the Huffington Post started to make its social media rounds. It has a long “I,” so say it like this: “petra,” then “eye-core,” which is not how I hear it in my head, with a short “i.”
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Pandemic Diary 14: A Love of Books

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My eight-year-old self enjoys his shelf of books in quarantine. He gets to choose each day between writing about reading or reading about writing.

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I’ve been told that I look like a kid in a candy store when we visit a book store. I suddenly appear to have multiple arms, like a Hindu deity, and my stride becomes a purposeful lurch.

There are two booksellers in my hometown of New Paltz, NY, plus our legendary record store offers a wall of books. When was the last time you visited a record store? Heck, it’s been a couple years since I have … and I reside in a community which has one.

An acquaintance, a rare book collector, was about to open a third bookshop here this spring, but the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent quarantine interfered. It is a difficult time to start a business other than a vape outlet or coffee shop anyway, even in a college town like ours, even in times when one can come into physical contact with customers, delivery boxes, cash. There will be better times.
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Pandemic Diary 13: Teach Your Children

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The control freak aspect to my personality hates life in quarantine.

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I taught freshman composition at two upstate New York colleges in the early 1990s for five years. My last class met for its final session at the conclusion of the fall 1995 semester.

From the start of that school term, I knew that this was going to be my last semester teaching or attempting to teach or even correctly referring to myself as a “teacher”; thus, of course, two of the three classes that semester were two of the best groups of students I had yet worked with, and they almost made me regret my decision to retire at age 27. Almost.

The decision never was mine to make, however; I was not a good teacher, and I am grateful that I learned this on the sooner side of “sooner or later.” I am, perhaps, an entertaining lecturer but I am an even better student; as a twenty-something freshman composition instructor, I must have been execrable. It was too bad that I had barely made even the faintest start in what eventually became my pose as a long-suffering anything by the time it was all over.
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