A sign of the times

Our world has changed beyond measure. Maybe we'll never get our old world back.  Two thirds of my 401K is gone, in the last fortnight alone.  Two decades of work towards my retirement years gone in a flash.  (The flowers I planted still grow anew each spring next to my front porch steps.)

I was looking forward to three trips within the next two months which now are gone forever.  My fiftieth high school reunion in Lawrenceville, New Jersey; my thirtieth law school class reunion in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the wedding of my oldest nephew in New Mexico, somewhere on its southeastern plains.  All three trips, and any future trips beyond a short local drive, are gone due to lack of money and as being too risky in the current state of affairs, except for, perhaps, a trip of absolute necessity born of heretofore unseen circumstances.  (The Cherry Blossoms have started to bloom.)

Life changes, sometimes forever; sometimes it comes very fast and seemingly out of the blue, like on September 11th, 2001, or December 7th, 1941, or October 29, 1929.  That's what this pandemic seems like, now that it's here within our country this week in its full, uncontrollable form after we frittered away the late fall and the winter hitherto in foolish whistling-past-the-graveyard barking or tweeted denunciations of it as a democratic hoax, a fake-news creation or a plot by the radical-left socialists to take down our faux president by any means even if the country was destroyed in the process.  For the past few days I have been going out once a day to depleted stores to lay in provisions, whatever I can find, for the long winter ahead of sheltering in place while the disease walks the world largely or wholly unchecked and a million or more Americans die, along with many millions more people worldwide, in the greatest human kill-off since 60 million persons died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.  (The quiet burble of the fountain in the Mary Livingston Ripley fountain on the Mall is as pleasing as ever.)

What's been happening since I last posted on my oldest child's birthday last month?  My youngest child  had a birthday (he was a no-show at his party too), February 29th came and went, perhaps never to be seen again by me (I'm in the suspect group in terms of lethality for the Coronavirus pandemic), I was sick as a dog the last half of last month but I'm better now and I wonder what I had but--no tests for us Americans, once I was well I had my fifth eye procedure in the last eighteen months (the other four were surgeries, this was a laser shot into my lens pocket to obliterate building up scar tissue that was obscuring my sight), St. Patrick's day passed by unobserved, practically all public accommodations in my community have been shuttered (no school or community classes or church services, the libraries are all closed, keep your checked-out or overdue books at home until further notice and public transportation has been severely throttled down and restricted), practically everybody I know is working from home, my next-door neighbors have been furloughed from their jobs with no further paychecks forthcoming, everybody gives you as wide a berth as possible in public, and I wonder if I, or any of my siblings will ever hear from any of my three children ever again (hopefully they're alive and well).  Those are three very strange and weirdly unnatural and unfathomable thirty-something men, none of them has any interest in whether their blood kin on the Lamberton side are well or even live or die in these desperate times.  (The Martin Luther King statue on the Tidal Basin is as imponderable as ever.)