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Cynthia Kraack

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Tag Archives: Fear of being ill

What About the Kids?

Cynthia Kraack Posted on July 24, 2020 by Cynthia KraackJuly 24, 2020

In normal years, the nonprofit Twin Cities Theater Camp (TCTC) offers professional quality theater training for seven dozen or more kids. Over five weeks, these six through fourteen-year-olds develop creatively in an environment where it is okay to spontaneously break into song, dramatically slide across the floor, talk endlessly about the energy of being on stage, eat lunch, play outside then go back to work. In five weeks they will evolve from kids at camp into a theater company. Friendships grow strong as they learn acting, singing, dancing skills, and expressing themselves through art.

Ninety kids were registered in less than thirty minutes for TCTC 2020, many returning for their fourth, fifth, sixth year. Then COVID-19 claimed center stage. Like many nonprofit boards, TCTC directors were faced with cancelling summer plans. Fortunately they had a management team of teachers and artists already working virtually with kids, who had ideas for building a different kind of program.

Four hours a day for three weeks, five teachers and 46 kids worked together virtually. Many parents called those hours the best their kids had experienced since March 17.  In fifteen days, an eighty minute video YouTube presentation was written, produced and performed by kids and teachers for viewing by an invitation only audience. Technical wizardry made the show possible.

It’s always entertaining to watch TCTC’s productions. But unlike great finales, what stopped adult audiences this year was listening to nondramatic sections–kids talking about COVID lock down, about things they fear, and things that make them happy.

Their fears ran from scary movies and snakes to becoming sick, to losing others, to developing an illness that can’t be cured. Under their words, there is sadness about the abrupt changes with no known end. Immediate family and friends are what they value. They have sad times, days they aren’t sure they can keep going, they miss the hugs of friends and distant family, and they have sparks of happiness that keep them hopeful. Older kids also worry about societal equality struggles. While still optimistic, reality has diminished that sweet childish belief that destiny is in their hands. Until the future is more clearly understood, they get by with help from friends, parents, family and other adults who care.

A big thanks for all who are caring for kids. Virtual hugs for you.

Posted in Change, Events, Family, Pandemic | Tagged Family, Fear of being ill, Friends, Kids' words, Pandemic, TCTC | Leave a reply

Frightened Off Station Eleven

Cynthia Kraack Posted on November 8, 2015 by Cynthia KraackNovember 8, 2015

Following New Year’s celebrations in Door County, I celebrated by going to bed early and watching a movie. The next morning I woke up feverish, the first day of what would be a four-week journey through bacterial and viral mysteries. Maybe it was the flu. Maybe not.

“You know, if we were living a hundred and fifty years ago, I’d probably be dead,” I Paris museumdeclared deep into the second week when the unnamed illness turned into a sinus infection, an ear infection and swollen tonsils. My husband, who leans toward the “soldier on” philosophy of empathy, agreed and encouraged me to make a doctor appointment.

While sick I read my way through all the non-Ken Follett novels I had received as holiday gifts. Fever and a constant headache placed Follett’s thousand page volumes in the same category as learning a new language or understanding articles in The Economist. Marilynne Robinson, Maeve Binchy and Emma Straub filled my hours. Then I began Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Back to that certainty that in the days before antibiotics, Tylenol and throat lozenges, I might have been a dead person. In the spirit of full disclosure, I think I told my husband if the crud took me in 2015, I wanted to be cremated.

IMG_0349In Door County, Wisconsin, where this story began, there is a joke that Peninsula State Park will one day be lined by memorial benches and ankle deep in the ashes of visitors and residents who cannot bear to spend eternity anywhere else.

I am perplexed about what is to be done with the ashes of loved ones. Urns behind glass in mausoleums give me an odd feeling. Urns on the bookshelves of friends make me wonder what happens when the Boomer generation passes and grandkids are left with an increasing number of urns holding their grandparents and their parents. I am aware of people carrying a small vial of a loved one’s ashes. My mother-in-law asked that hers be spread over her gardens. Four pounds of ash is not an insignificant amount of material.

With most of the world dying in Mandel’s book, the whole ashes disposal question is moot. When sick with the ever-changing illness, Station Eleven was not a good choice for passing the time. In the dark of my nights, Mandel’s quick killing Georgia flu seemed plausible. Two days and over two hundred pages into Station Eleven I closed my e-reader to ponder whether I would want to be a survivor of such a pandemic or die. After fifteen or thirty minutes of such wondering I knew I would not finish the book. Margaret Atwood, PD James, Cormac McCarthy and James Howard Kunstler have not bothered my sleep in worse times. But I wouldn’t sleep with Mandel’s story in my mind.

As a writer of speculative fiction, I’ve stewed for weeks about catastrophes that could alter the world. I write of things I fear might happen—nuclear missteps, military encounters, financial collapse, uncontrolled corporate growth. Mandel’s work is brilliant. Last week, fully healthy, I carried her book to the gym, set the elliptical machine on thirty minutes and read another forty pages. Over the next days I managed another forty. Close to the end, I walked away once more. To finish the book would be worse than my decision to watch Contagion while flying home from Paris. This year I’m piling up magazines, chick lit and historical fiction in case my flu shot is ineffective. Nothing stronger.

Posted in Blog | Tagged cremation, Emily St. John Mandel, Emma Straub, Fear of being ill, James Howard Kunstler, Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Minnesota Cold, Station Eleven, Thinking Out Loud | Leave a reply

The Writer’s Mind

Cynthia Kraack Posted on June 17, 2015 by Cynthia KraackJune 22, 2015

Every dozen years or so the story circulates about women who live together finding their 011monthly cycles beginning to align. In the past few months I’ve begun to think some similar lunar phenomena is pulling the annual physicals of writing friends into a similar pattern, regardless of gender.

We work in fiction and memoir with deep minds that push the thought of blood tests and stethoscopes into personal zones that should not be explored until necessary. All of us are of a certain age and know of bad news that has been given to good friends. And we have written about grim events that required researching information we should not be thinking about the night before a physical.  But we can’t help ourselves.

This wasn’t the way being a writer was supposed to be according to the likes of Hemingway and Parker. Not one of us smokes or drinks (to excess). None of us are promiscuous or live in lands where diseases could be contracted in the water. We just think too much.

That same amount of overthinking is wonderful when crafting a scene. For example, I once crawled the length of our house dragging a thick book tied to one ankle to be sure a scene was accurate. I’ve watched an odd exercise show over and over to capture the intonation of the leader. I’ve researched the Mayo website a health condition that might kill a character.

My life is absolutely normal. Today I did laundry, dusted a few rooms and went to a baseball game. I also drew pictures of the farmstead where my next novel takes place, verified the tree species that make up a windbreak and researched high blood pressure during pregnancy. Farms, tree stands and pregnancy won’t be discussed at the doctor’s office. High blood pressure remains on my mind tonight.

Midwest Book Award Seal

That worry isn’t groundless. My mother dealt with high blood pressure from her thirties until she died fifty years later. My brother took medication for high blood pressure in his early fifties and died before his sixtieth birthday. My father had wonderful, steady, low blood pressure.

Time to calm down. Think I’ll read something by Jennifer Weiner before bed.

 

Posted in Blog | Tagged American culture, Fear of being ill, The Human Condition, Writers | Leave a reply

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