The year so far?

What's been good about 2020?  Well, the pandemic, and especially our national response to it which was and is criminally negligent and extremely political and slothful (does the man actually have a job he does?) isn't one of them, as over 149,000 needlessly dead Americans could attest to.  But November 3d is coming up in less than 100 days and that is good after four four chaotic, dystopian years; make sure you all carefully vet the candidates this time, eschew wishing upon a star when you vote this time, and actually vote, and responsibly, this time!

I went to a wedding in a ballroom in a new hotel along the new DC waterfront in January and that was a great time, dancing well into the night, and I caught the very last train back to Virginia that night, by 3 minutes!  I went to see the Academy Award winning best picture Pandemic, er, Parasite, on Valentine's Day in a movie theater (perhaps my last visit to a movie theatre ever), and during the lengthy, dystopian foreign movie in Korean with English subtitles I started coughing, and by nighttime I was coughing my lungs out and spent the next two weeks with a debilitating malady that still goes undiagnosed ("you had the flu" everyone tells me, including a doctor I spoke with on the phone later trying to get an antibody test so I could participate in plasma therapy--naw, Kaiser doesn't that).  I went down to the Tidal Basin on a weekday morning in the spring and enjoyed seeing an early version of the Cherry Blossoms before the nation shut down in an effort to control the coronavirus which we have since squandered.

I have enjoyed infrequent meals at a Little Tykes Table on my front porch a have dozen times with a friend who comes over from the District (she doesn't have a place that would afford outside seating), and I keep up with a friend, former colleague and mentor who lives in Florida now via bi-monthly virtual lunches on FaceTime on that very same front porch.  I enjoyed reading, or re-reading, To Kill A Mockingbird, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel (I almost always read history for relaxation) that I thought I had read in ninth grade but now I'm not so sure because I wasn't familiar with any of it, and good on Boo Radley.  I finally put my eye travails of the last two years (detached retina) behind me, for now, by fitting my fifth and last procedure into the tiny window I had between my recovery from my February malaise and the nation shutting down, along with almost all health services, for a long time; the laser-shot treatment following my four eye surgeries improved my diminished vision noticeably, so that was good.

I went to two protests in the District on behalf of BLM and against our out-of-control president and his chief henchman the butterball inveterate liar Bill Barr, and I enjoyed treading on BLM Plaza a block north of the White House, and I tried to speak with National Guardsmen guarding various monuments who Trump brought into the District to "dominate" the streets but mostly they wouldn't tell me where they were from or why they were here.  I stopped going anymore when such gatherings seemed to sometimes turn into potential flash-mobs that might act upon a momentary notion to tear down statues as diverse as Andrew Jackson and Mahatma Gandhi.  I really enjoyed seeing a magnificently restored B-29 bomber roar over my house on July 4th at about 500 feet escorted by four P-51 Mustang fighters, two WW2 planes that played an outsized role in winning the war against Germany (Mustang) and against Japan (B-29); that moment still stands out as I just hang out in the house or yard these days.

A walk in the sun...

Last weekend I took a walk with a friend, for the first time in two weeks, who is stressed out beyond what's healthy because she is still working, from home now, and as usual in American management these days they want more with less while giving mere lip service to how much they know more help is needed and they're working on it and oh, BTW, now that you're working from home you can be on duty and on the job any hour and all hours.  It was a nice pleasant, warm spring day with the verdant outside world of lawns and bushes bursting forth with the colors of the season of resurgence.

We went three miles and listened to birds chirping and watched whole families bicycling by single file, dad in front and mom bringing up the rear, like a couple of ducks shooing ducklings across a roadway, and just worked off the gloominess and despondency of always being inside with no physical contact with others (she lives alone, as I do, and that induces a special languor that easily settles into a blue funk not overcome by calls to or from your friends).  We saw a thirty-something man come out of his home in his green scrubs and get into his car at the curb and called out to him from a safe distance inquiring if he was was going to work, and when he indicated yes, we called out to him to Be Safe.

Everyone maintained respectful distances from everyone else, except for some more closely spaced couples or family units, and mostly went to opposite sides of the street as persons passed by other persons.  And almost everyone had a mask on, the new norm which could be with us for years going forward.

There was some good news.

 My last walk took me past a house whose front yard was littered with little riding devices of all sorts, a baby seat, bicycles, tricycles, little scooters, plus pet containers like water bowls, and I wondered if the parents inside were able to cope with all those kids cooped up on the premises (plus doing the cooking, cleaning, homeschooling etc.) and as we walked by that house, the parents were in the yard, alive, well and apparently ably managing the chaos created by four young children, three dogs and any stray tiny friend that wanders by or in.

You say it's your birthday...

I had a birthday earlier and it was a most unusual affair.  I didn't enjoy the company of anyone else in person, and except for the morning stroll to the head of my driveway to pick up my morning Washington Post, I didn't leave my house the entire day.

After a desultory morning during which I enjoyed my usual two cups of coffee and watched the news about how dire our current situation and how endless were our dismal prospects for escaping our self-imposed and self-dealt quarantine (no tests), I had my "party" at noon by making myself and enjoying a special sandwich made of braunschweiger, a liverwurst pate, and mayonnaise seasoned liberally with coarse ground pepper and sea salt.  It was a glorious party, like something out of the Mad Hatter's realm, although during the day I did have several phone calls from relatives and friends wishing me a happy birthday, with more than one refrain of Happy Birthday sung to me over the phone.

That was it, happy birthday to you, cha-cha-cha as the Beatles song goes.

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too, yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you

I want to thank my sisters, my girlfriend, and my other friends who called for their well wishes and good cheer as I hurtle towards my seventies.  And as I approach sooner rather than later my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil, I'm also so glad that I fostered three children (now adults) and wiped their bottoms and drove them to school and helped with their homework and coached them in soccer (bleh) all those years and provided for payment of full tuition and fees for college and during this deadly pandemic, they have expressed nary a word of concern or care about how I am, as always.

Seventy days in lockdown

The days of sameness drag on by.  I keep track of the days by two weekly benchmarks, beyond my looking at my Timex Ironman watch which has the days of the week on it as part of its date feature on its display field and which is cheating and mentally lazy, because trash and recycling barrels need to be rolled out to the curb every Wednesday, and the weekend does come and with it I'm usually cognizant of when it is Saturday, an ingrained holdover from my working days.  Not Sunday, mind you, because there is no live church service to go to anymore (my church does stream Sunday services but it's not the same thing and I don't attend).

On Facebook, as part of my daily post, I am listing the twenty albums that had the most meaningful impact on me musically while I was growing up; I list a picture of the cover of the LP and a YouTube clip of its most impactful song to me.  All of the albums so far are from the sixties and I wonder if anyone even knows what LP means, although I only have a following of two or three people who regularly click "likes" on my posts, and the shallow medium has kicked up a tempest in a teapot with some relatives who despise my anti-Trump posts, which I think are righteous, self-evident portals into the truth and which they think are anti-Godly screeds that they attribute to the news "filters" that apparently surround me because I live in the Washington DC "bubble."  So far, I have listed in order the Mamas and the Papas debut album (California Dreaming); the Best of the Animals (The House of the Rising Sun); The Velvet Underground & Nico (Heroin); Procol Harum (A Whiter Shade of Pale); The Doors Light My Fire album (Backdoor Man); and Neil Young Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Down By the River); Are You Experienced (Hey Joe); The Chambers Brothers (The Time Has Come Today); Derek and the Dominos (Layla); and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (A Day In The Life).  Speaking of songs, as I wander around my otherwise empty house, a song from the seventies keeps going around and around in my head, 30 Days in the Hole by Humble Pie.

I put on my mask and go to the grocery store on Tuesdays and Saturdays.  I don't need much because I have a back porch full of dented cans from the clearance rack in my local grocery store that I've accumulated over the years and a freezer full of frozen meats from 50% markdowns on packages nearing their expiration day.  I must have seen the pandemic coming, right?  It's a routine, we all need routines in our enforced lassitude.  I feel these days like a refuge from an Edward Hopper painting, waiting for the 1918 Spanish Flu Influenza to run its course.

To go back to my reasons for adhering to this lockdown, it's not fear, except the fear of infecting others; I do it to be a part of the common good and to set an example.  A relative told me that I was living in FEAR (my relative put it in all caps in the text), that we all die sometime and it's time to get out there and get our economy going.  The seven years I was a state trooper I patrolled high mountain roads solo thirty minutes from any back-up at times, especially late at night, and I had a couple of terrifying moments to be sure and I was exposed to extreme danger more than once, so I don't think I'm afraid.  I think it's a faustian bargain to trade a percentage of the population for a few weeks head start on restoring our economy.  The economy will come back sooner or later, the lives lost will never come back.