Same Storm, Different Boats by Emily Martin and Cy Hedayati
The first lines of a poem Damian Barr posted to Twitter on April 21, 2020 was the starting point for a series of conversations between artist Emily Martin who lives in Iowa City, Iowa and her nephew Cy Hedayati a Trader Joe’s employee in Denver, Colorado.
Those conversations resulted in this text and a set of images made by Emily Martin.
I heard that we are in the same boat.
But it's not that.
We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat.
Your ship can be shipwrecked and mine might not be.
Or vice versa…
The entire poem can be found here
Emily
- I started my isolation with a variety of studio projects, some of which panned out and some of which fell by the wayside. My teaching was abruptly shifted on-line as per a University wide decision. I feel like I was on the sidelines of the pandemic rather than being in the midst of it. Cy was right in the middle of it as an essential worker.
Cy
- When the pandemic first began, everyone made a point of thanking us for working. It felt a little awkward because we didn’t feel like we were doing anything special - just bagging groceries, stocking the shelves and helping customers find the tahini. It wasn’t clear how difficult our job was about to become with the added responsibility of enforcing mask-wearing and social distancing. And while we still appreciated them, the thanks and gratitude went away quickly - we started to feel like villains, with customers bristling when we asked them to follow safety guidelines.
Emily
- Cy and I share a family trait of finding the humorous even in stressful situations. He did better at that than I did, over the last year, I mostly hid.
Cy
- A few angry customer encounters have taken on legendary status at our store for being unintentionally hilarious. One of my coworkers working the door asked a customer to wear a mask before entering the store and was accused of being the “Gazpacho”.
Emily
- I would say that Cy and I are temperamentally quite similar, sensitive, empathetic. This last year, I had very few interactions with people I didn’t already know. I could avoid conflicts and protect myself.
Cy
- Other tense exchanges can be rooted in good intentions. At our store we don’t have space to let customers help us bag groceries while standing six feet apart so only employees are allowed to do it. But some customers get frustrated by this and seem to demonstrate a wounded pride with statements like “I was only trying to help” and “I feel guilty just standing here and watching you bag for me.” Sometimes it’s difficult to tell who’s acting in good faith and who just wants to lash out at us over having to wait longer to get in and out of the grocery store.
- Some exchanges are more light-hearted in their awkwardness, like misunderstanding what items customers are looking for due to the speech-muffling nature of masks. A kindly man went through the trouble of asking five of us individually to find “cornichons” but none of us could understand for-the-life-of-us what he was asking. He ended up finding them on his own and still graciously thanked us for our help.
Emily
I’ve had more than a few clerks shout while talking to me through their masks, maybe assuming I’m not just old but also deaf. Generally I tried to find that amusing rather than annoying.
Cy
- As retail workers we often find gallows humor in the juxtaposition of our predicament with what is playing on the store speakers. Sometimes it’s a song so over-the-top cheery that it can’t help but mock our struggle like Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Sometimes songs in that vein will have explicit lyrics that feel grossly at odds with quarantine life: DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night” earnestly declares “Now is not the time to stay home” for example. Other songs like The Specials’ “Ghost Town” and Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” sound grimly on-the-nose in a pandemic lockdown and curfew/police crackdown in response to Black Lives Matter protests. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” somehow manages to tick all of these boxes in one song! And that’s before you even get into the topic of every retail worker’s arch nemesis: Christmas music!
Emily
- I could manage my shopping and other outside interactions to minimize my contact with anyone else. I might think harsh thoughts about people’s sloppy mask wearing but I never confronted a non-masker, I could and did move away or leave.
Cy
- While it’s challenging to deal with people who are tired of having to wear masks and socially distance, it can also be upsetting to see some customers get overzealous about enforcing those norms through public shaming. While working the door I witnessed a customer yelling at a young woman talking on the phone in our parking lot with her mask pulled down despite the fact that the young woman was nowhere near anyone while outdoors and therefore well within the Denver County ordinance. The young woman put her mask on, but the customer had reprimanded her with such rage that I could see her eyes welling up with tears as she entered the store. I saw her looking at our flowers and offered to let her pick some out free-of-charge to help brighten her day. I also did it to show her that while our store does take COVID seriously we also know that many people like her are going through their own struggles through this pandemic and none of us should forget each other’s humanity.
Emily
-That last statement of Cy’s “none of us should forget each other’s humanity” is something I will keep with me long after the pandemic is over.
About Emily Martin
Emily Martin teaches bookbinding and paper engineering classes at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She has been exploring the relationship between format and content for many years in her work. Martin often combines letterpress printed images and text with movable and/or sculptural book forms using a variety of traditional and experimental techniques. While earning her MFA in painting (completed in 1979) from the University of Iowa, Martin was introduced to letterpress printing and artists books. She has held artist’s residencies at the Center for Book Arts, New York City (2002); Lawrence University (2012), the Penland School of Crafts (2014), The University of Florida, Gainesville (2015); and most recently was printer in residence at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, England (2018); where she printed a small book entitled “Order of Appearance, Disorder of Disappearance”. Martin has taught many workshops across the United States, in England, and In Chile, most often at the Center for Book Arts in New York and at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She received a silver medal from the Designer Bookbinders for her book The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (2012), and her book The Tragedy of King Lear was a semi-finalist for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts Artists Book award (2020). Martin’s work is represented by Vamp & Tramp Booksellers , and is in collections world-wide including The Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Library in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
About Cy Hedayati
Cyrus Hedayati is a former marketing and PR professional who now works in the service industry. He grew up in San Jose, California and lived in the Bay Area before moving to Denver in 2019.