Work anniversary
by Anton Zuiker on July 12, 2020
Late last month, I marked a full 10 years since I started my job as communications director for the Duke Department of Medicine. It’s been a fabulous job, and I feel fortunate to have been given this challenging, rewarding work. Together with my colleague, Elizabeth McCamic, we built a responsive and adaptive communications strategy and set of tools—a sprawling website, the MedicineNews portal, and the This Week in Medicine e-newsletter, among others—to reflect the mission and activities of one of the top internal medicine departments in the country.
When I started in 2010, there were only a few other communicators in the School of Medicine. Today, there is a network of dozens of communicators across the 25 departments and 12 institutes. There have been many opportunities to help recruit, mentor, partner, and celebrate these colleagues over this decade, and every day I’m inspired by their talents and work, which you can see flowing through the Duke River of News.
As I mentioned in my birthday post, one of my work projects, Voices of Duke Health, received an honorable mention in the GIA Awards for Excellence. The Association of American Medical Colleges hosted an online awards ceremony last week and posted the award winners. I was proud to represent Duke University, and the winning projects got me thinking about new ways to do our work here even better.
Close encounters
by Anton Zuiker on June 22, 2020
I have time on my hands, and a nice spot to enjoy it. I brought a stack of recent issues of the New Yorker, and in the June 8 & 15, 2020 issue—the Fiction Issue—I found four essays on the theme Close Encounters. The New Yorker publishes these essays in special issues throughout the year, and I’ve always enjoyed the compact writing, contained in two columns and an illustration on one page. I read them, marvel at the good writing, and feel inspired. The themes can be good writing prompts, so my goal this week is to use some of that time to write a close-encounters essay of my own.
Apeirogon
by Anton Zuiker on June 21, 2020
Today was the first day in many months that I truly relaxed. Sitting outside, I alternated between mindlessness—just sitting there, calm and breathing and not thinking—and reading the final 100 pages of Apeirogon, by Colum McCann. It’s an amazing book that has had me in tears a few times over the last month. The book jacket describes it as “an epic story rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss.” It’s that, and so much more, sad and maddening and full of connections and hope. As the title suggests, there may be a “countably infinite number of sides” to the Israeli and Palestinian story, but in the end, the Occupation is not good for either side. It must end. And my country must stop exporting guns and bullets to places where daughters are killed and their fathers, through their unending grief, must teach us all that peace can prevail. It’s fitting that I should finish this book on Father’s Day. I am grateful that McCann used his storytelling gift to honor Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan and their daughters Abir and Smadar.
This land
by Anton Zuiker on June 21, 2020
Earlier this month, Erin and I purchased the undeveloped lot adjacent to our home in Chapel Hill, so now we own 8-and-a-quarter acres of land. Most of it is covered by tall oak and tulip poplar and red maple trees. We have plans to build a new house at some point, and we’ve been thinking about ways to use the land for good, at least regular Long Table dinners with friends and strangers, on tables made from the blackjack oak we had milled last year.
For now, we are going to make a trail through the woods, and I’ll continue to stand out back listening to the birds and feeling grateful to live on this land.
Answering
by Anton Zuiker on June 15, 2020
Manton added a new feature to Micro.blog, the quoteback. Here’s a test:
I went for a job interview today.
The interviewer asked me, “What’s your biggest weakness?”
I said, “Answering the semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics.”
The interviewer asked, “Could you give me an example?”
I said, “Yes, I could.”
BOOM BOOM
My silence
by Anton Zuiker on June 14, 2020
Next month will mark my 20 years as a blogger. It’s an anniversary I have been looking forward to for a long time, and something for which I thought I could rightfully be proud. I’ve used this blog to chronicle my Peace Corps service and to reflect on my family, to organize events and to continue my education, to refine my tastes (in food and music, at least) and to detail my observations of the natural world. It’s my writing on my space on the web about my place in the world.
But, this week, spurred by the national outrage about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and so many other persons of color, I searched my mistersugar archives (15 years of my blog) for the word racism.
There is not a single instance of the word.
Here on Zuiker Chronicles (the last five years), I found the word once, in this post I wrote about wondering what my great-grandmother, Frances Link Zuiker, may have thought about race.
News sites these last weeks have shown historical photos of police dogs terrifying African Americans, and the man who occupies the White House gleefully threatened to be just as aggressive and horrible.
So I searched the archives to see if I’d ever written about a certain incident early in my life when I witnessed racism up close. As a six-year-old boy, I was playing outside the Phoenix apartment building where my family briefly lived. I heard a dog begin to bark ferociously, and I looked around to see a German shepherd running straight at me. Petrified in fear, I watched it come closer and closer, louder and louder…but then it raced right by me. I pivoted my head to see the dog chasing a younger black boy; luckily, the boy made it to his doorstep and just inside before the dog could snap. I pivoted my head back around to see an older white boy, who’d let the dog loose, laughing. I was still frozen in place, but my brain registered the naked racism.
That memory isn’t in my blog.
I searched the archives again, remembering my few, mundane encounters with police.
Had I written about that incident when I was in my early twenties and working on the John Carroll University campus over the summer? One evening, I was out for a run through the University Heights neighborhood when a patrol car slowed down and a voice told me to stop. An officer rolled down the window, told me there was an ongoing search for a robbery suspect and while I didn’t match the suspect’s description, he had some questions. I didn’t have identification on me, but I told him I had memorized my Illinois driver’s license number. He was amazed, or amused, I think. A few minutes later, background check complete, I was back on my own, free to keep running. I was aware of the deep racial disparities in Cleveland and its suburbs, but safe in my own skin. By the time I graduated from JCU, I knew that a friend of mine, also a JCU student, had opposite experiences with campus security and local police—he was often harassed simply because he was black.
Not in my blog.
Nor was my memory of my very first day at JCU. I was in an elevator in a nearby department store, and when I glanced over at an older woman, I noticed a concentration-camp number tattooed on her arm.
I searched the archives for a mention of the playground slurs, aimed at the children of Mexican immigrants, that I heard in Idaho.
Nothing.
I searched for the history of slavery in this country or in the U.S. Virgin Islands where I’m lucky to visit so often. Four mentions: Mount Vernon and Estate Mount Washington, Amistad and Bislama.
I did find my Northern Ohio Live innovations column from August 2001, Dealing with our differences, which opens with this:
When Cincinnati erupted in social unrest last Spring after the police killing of an African-American suspect, Marlene Feder was prepared to make a difference.
Suspect was not the right word then, or now. Timothy Thomas should not have been killed in 2001, just as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor should not have been killed in 2020.
I had been a blogger for a year when I wrote that article about what others were doing to confront structural racism and an inequitable justice system. And in the 19 years since, regardless of my past memories and current knowledge of how real and entrenched racism is, I’ve been silent.
That’s my white privilege.
It makes me complicit.
I’m ashamed by this.
+++
In 2015, for my last post over at mistersugar.com, I defined my creed:
To be kind to others. To stand up, stand tall, and stand for something good.
This I still believe. But given all that I didn’t find in my blog archives, and all that is still not right in this world, such a passive creed is simply not adequate for my next 20 years. I expect more from myself.
I intend to keep living and keep blogging, and to make both matter.
I swear now to make this blog reflect not just my memories and my family, and the books I read and meals I eat, and the narrative initiatives and community events I organize, but also the protests I will join, the bystander training I will take, the justice I will advocate, and the racism we will defeat.
Screams, squawks, silence
by Anton Zuiker on May 31, 2020
When the hens start to squawk in competition for their favorite egg box, I wonder what the neighbors might say. But then the crows start in with their warnings, and the hawks circle above screaming, a wren tribbles in the pear tree, and a train whistle sounds in the distance. This is a noisy world.
I am on the porch, reading Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, and I pass over pages in which he writes about composer John Cage’s 4’33”: ‘Cage’s piece was not just about the nature of silence, but also about all the sounds that could be heard within the silence…’
For a few minutes this morning I added the sounds of a typewriter, my Triumph Tippa 1 on my lap, half a page of words about satyagraha, civil disobedience and public protest and nonviolent witness in the very faces of those who corrupt and kill and steal justice.
Now it is the wind in the treetops in crescendo.