Two Memories

 I'm trying to remember occurrences in this year that wasn't. when the coronavirus closed down our lives in March and the USA's non-response to it was akin to allowing the Japanese to invade America in 1942 and now they're poised upon the heights of Arlington ready to overwhelm DC on the morrow. I guess FDR wouldn't be one of the Triumphant Threesome off Presidents if he had followed Trump's incompetent response to everything (which gets lots of people killed) and thrown up his hands and said, The Virginia and Maryland governors need to act and if they need combat boots or web belts for their militias, I could assign my son-in-law to seek contracts worldwide to help procure those.

My last post detailed the one thing during this year-that-wasn't that was normal that I indulged in. Movie-going, I went to see Parasite on Valentine's Day, the Academy Award winning film that, well, sucked. I got incredibly sick that night that made me see God and for the next two weeks I thought I might die as I coughed my lungs out. I wonder what I had, but there were no reliable or helpful tests then, despite the president's subsequent claim that If you want a test you can get a test.

So now it's time to remember my two most memorable moments this year without referring to my daily notes, and I can do that. I went to a wedding party in January in the District that was thrown by a supermarket magnate that was way over the top; I boogied with my love and barely made the last subway to Virginia and expected moreso the rest of the year. But no. the coronavirus intervened and way later, in July when we were all housebound, I come out of my house on July 4th and saw 500 feet up a B-29 bomber fly over my house escorted by four P-51 Mustangs, all restored WW2 warplanes which had flown on Independence Day over the National Mall and were headed to IAD then, and in that instant I thought of my dad who endured 180 days of intense combat in two battles in the Pacific and my mother who got out of her small-town as a teenager by traveling to CA to work in the war industries (where she met my dad at an USO dance).

It's December . . .

 It's December finally in the year that wasn't.  The time for a summing up of the year past, a making of lists.

Except there aren't many or any noteworthy personal events in this year that never should have happened; it's like God stepped away for a moment and got distracted.  What would I list as something I did, because I never went anywhere hardly, or did anything practically, once the virus took hold, and what I think happened this year, my reality, is regarded by the Trumpite side of my family as my fantasy, induced by osmosis apparently by my location not only within the Northeast Bubble but actually inside the Beltway. 

Of course, they live in the real fantasy world, not me, because I operate on real information that I acquire from the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and my further reading in books and magazines as filtered through my education at boarding school, a state university and a top ten law school which taught me critical thinking skills to augment my life experiences acquired from being a ski bum for four years, a policeman for nine years and a lawyer for 25 years.  So what did I accomplish or do in this DOA year?

I went to one movie, on Valentine's Day, Parasite, because it won the Academy Award for being the best picture, where I got really sick by that night with a respiratory ailment that kept me down for two weeks and that I still don't believe I've fully recovered from. The movie was, well, awful and the illness was, well, I'll never know what I actually had because in Trump's America nothing is as it was before him and not for the better by a long shot.