The 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

As I write this, it is late March, 2020. It’s been a while since I last shared my thoughts. And If the truth be told, it’s been a depressing few years, here in the desert. My life has taken some turns which I would not have wished for; the job I now have is not the one I was hired for, almost two years ago. Over the intervening span of time, it has been changed, tiny bit by tiny bit. The conditions under which I am required to perform it continue to become more demanding, and I have had to learn to live with the repeated threat of it being taken away from me if I do not find a way to do it both faster and more perfectly. Soon I expect I will be required to work from home. I have not had to do this before, and I resent being forced to allow my work to intrude into my home, my sanctuary, my retreat. This will make it even more difficult to do this job.

And yet, I name the Name of God, and try to live my life as my Master tells me to. I fail, of course, but I am forgiven. I have accepted this disappointing chapter in my life because it is a tenet of my faith that God is in control, and He has a plan for me. Since time began, He knew I would be working here, at this time in my life, at this time in the lives of those around me, and in the history of my country and my planet. And so my faith requires me to believe that, like Joseph and Paul and Daniel, I must walk the sometimes-difficult path which has been set before me by my King, and find a way to live as He commands, or as closely to it as I can manage, so that I may be obedient to Him and to bring him such glory as I am able. So I do my best to accept it, and pray every day for His Will to be done in me, and through me, and not my own will.

Some times, some very dark and very early mornings, that prayer is harder to pray in my heart than at other times, other brighter, sunnier afternoons.

I recently came to realize that as miserable as this job is, at least I still have one. Right now the Coronavirus Pandemic, CoVid-19, has gripped the world. It swirls invisibly around us, threatening us, intimidating us with it’s unknown aspect. Because of the nature of the infection, and because of the poor choices of our current President, Donald Trump, we have wasted 2 months of valuable time, and are just now beginning -beginning- to prepare for this test of our nation which is already upon us, and among us. We are being told to practice something entirely new: Social Distancing. I suspect as you read this in the weeks and months to come, you will be quite familiar with it, but right now, it’s new, and we are as a nation (and a world) grappling with how to wrap and bend and twist and wrench our lives around it. We are, many of us, finding ways to adapt to the idea of spending week after week after week, stretching into an unknown number of months ahead, physically separated from other human beings.

No gatherings of more than 50 people are allowed, and most recently even groups larger than 10 people are being discouraged – or simply prevented form occurring at all by police and authorities, depending on which city or state you happen to live in. This means no professional baseball, basketball, hockey, no March Madness, no audiences at TV shows, no evening news teams on the same set with each other. It means many, many radio and TV programs are being broadcast by formerly high-gloss hosts and anchors and reporters from their basements, or their living rooms, or their kitchen tables.  No schools, no high school proms, no graduations, no St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. In many states most places where people formerly gathered like bars, restaurants, stores, coffee shops and clubs are all but closed. Stores limit the number of patrons who can be inside to handfuls at a time. Restaurants and dining establishments offer drive-thru and pick-up orders only; their lobbies are locked, the tables and chairs stacked mutely in the corner, or out of sight entirely. Businesses large and small will go under. And the people who formerly staffed these places, stocked the storerooms, waited on customers, rang up their purchases, cleared their tables and cleaned their glasses…they don’t have jobs anymore. By the grace of God…I do.

But despite all of this….we have yet to see the full effects of the virus. Statistics guess that before the virus is through with us, maybe a month or more from now, perhaps as many as two-thirds or more of America will eventually become infected. Due to timing and luck, I am in one of the most at-risk categories: 60 or older, with underlying health issues. These same statistics estimate that the vast majority of folk in my group will survive. But approximately seventeen out of every hundred will not.

That’s a frightening percentage. The kind that can keep you awake at night.

I’m used to seeing odds expressed in chances of winning the contest as one in a million or a hundred million….not in seventeen out of every one hundred other humans just like me – gone.

No funerals, either.

Part of me wonders what life will be like over the weeks and months to come, as Spring slowly turns to Summer, because that’s how I’m wired. I want to learn new things, to watch history unfold. How will our government adapt to this New Reality? How will we? What will go back to “normal”…and what will not? I’m on the front lines again, as I was for Watergate, and 9/11, and the dawn of computers and the Information Age. But part of me also longs for less – less details, less complexity, less fear. Simpler times where I can deal with what I want to, or am able to, and then let the rest go where it will. But -at least so far- I haven’t been offered that choice. So I continue with a job I dislike more each day, and at the end of the day I head home to watch the slow-motion train wreck that my nation and my world have become. And I will try and maintain my faith in God, that He is in control, that He has a plan for me, that He loves me and will not forsake me. May His Will be done.

September

For me, the month of September has always carried baggage. The four weeks roll in with an immediate holiday, which buys it good will. But Labor Day is the last signpost of summer, an unspoken acknowledgement that the good times are drawing to a close. All too quickly, thoughts turn in a different direction. Long golden afternoon shadows fade into cloudy darkening dusks. Cool days fade away into cold nights. Jackets and sweaters are made handy, against the certainty of damp days yet to come.

A month of change, of transition from summer to winter. A month of loss, and decay, of once-green leaves leaving their lofty perches, fluttering silently to earth behind our backs, forming gold and scarlet pools for children to splash in. Eventually forgotten, and left to darken and spoil, and enter the soil. Gone are the warm, carefree days of August; now come gray skies, gray days, and responsibilities. Rain arrives often, slender threads that rinse away color, and leave us gazing into monochrome mist. Liveliness drains from the world.

School begins for the young and near-young. Roads made treacherous by rain now congest with school buses, and parents pressed into duty as chauffeurs. Neighborhoods empty and quiet, as the laughing cries that formerly filled them are gone, stifled behind blackboard-prison walls. Christmas, still hidden beyond months of days, begins to loom. The summer-long contests of baseball are sorting themselves out, with the bright dream of a championship spurring some onward, and the bitter mutter of ‘next year’ consoling the rest. Football season, already nearing full stride, begins to swell with pride and anticipation of victories to come. Legions of fans cheer, and couch potatoes take root. Sunday afternoons become sacred times.

September has always had an almost-intangible prick of sadness about it to me, a sense of loss, of things slipping away. A feeling that the days ahead will not be so pleasant as the days which are past. A sense that the world which welcomed us in summer now starts to hem us in with the approach of winter. As the weather changes, so too do our routines. We have to dress ever-more-warmly, and must discard this cloth-armor protection when we reach our destinations: put it on, take it off. Cars seem to acquire quirks, or outright disabilities. Things must be thought about in September, must be planned for, or considered, or worked around. Anything outdoors becomes uncertain, because weather turns to enmity. Rain in July is not the same thing as rain in September.

It’s a time of transition, of change, from green to brown, from lively to lifeless. May-September romances reach their conclusion. Warm coats don’t attract the same appreciative glances that sundresses or khakis and polos do. Trees that provided shelter and shade now abandon us to the elements. Crops which fed us wither, and hide in the ground waiting for spring. Animals hunker down, and begin their preparations for what is surely to come. In the country, fields become bleak visions of emptiness, rows of turned earth like graves where life once thrived, or unending ranks of stalks like broken, useless fence posts that surround nothing, protect nothing. In the mountains, snow is on the winds. We begin bracing ourselves for the cold. Fireplaces become focal points again, for warmth or family or, if we’re very lucky, romance. We anticipate the chills of Halloween, and the contentiousness of Election Day. September is pensive, and the thoughts are too often about things we would rather continue to ignore. Summer seems to allow that luxury, but not September.

But no matter what it brings with itself, September always arrives on time, and we must face those days as they come. We can at least take solace in the turning of the seasons, the hope of good times, good weather, good springs yet to come. In our heart, we understand that we cannot appreciate good times unless we also experience their opposite. So we do what we must, and soldier on, and under overcast skies we tread the damp lonely woodland footpaths of September.

This reflection was inspired by “Forgotten September” by Two Steps From Hell. If you’ve read this far, it’s worth an additional two minutes and forty-four seconds of your time to listen.

 

Ending Points and Starting Points

My teenaged son left home this morning.

I got up early, before the sun came up, to see him off. I watched his mother organizing his departure, the two of them trying to think of everything he should bring with him. After too short a time, we hugged, and then the two of them drove off into the night to deliver him into the care of others. It wasn’t an overly emotional parting.

Until after he was gone.

He didn’t join the military, or head off to college. He rode out to take an unpaid accountant-cum-manager position with five other young men; a rock band, embarking on a national tour of mostly local dives, in a stretch van, pulling a trailer filled with musical instruments. On their own for a minimum of a month. Possibly for four months, if things go “well”.

. . .

When I was a young man, a year or two older than he is now, I took off on a somewhat similarly hare-brained adventure. The woman who would later consent to be my wife and I drove across the country one cold January. We took nearly four weeks to do it, out and around and back. We were young and crazy and in love. It was an adventure, and I do love adventures. I expect our parents were quietly horrified then in much the same way I was this morning, although they weren’t my first concern back then, any more than I suppose my fears were in my son’s mind this morning.

I understand the allure of the open road. I have heard that call many times myself. I still hear it. Though my ability to send up an answering cry has been muted by age and the weight of responsibilities, I understand his young desire to see what’s out there. But the times in which we’re living these days are not as open and welcoming as they were thirty years ago. There wasn’t the fear then, or the desperation with which we all live and even take for granted now. People weren’t constantly afraid of losing their jobs, didn’t wonder where next month’s rent or mortgage payment or grocery money was going to come from, hadn’t yet begun to feel the constant queasy stress that grows out of continuing to fight the good fight because you don’t know any other way, even while a part of you knows you’re not winning anymore, and you haven’t been for some time. We didn’t see each other as potential competition, or even as enemies, back then. Times are different now.

My son’s version of this journey differs from my wife’s and mine in at least one other important way: We were the masters of our own fate, as much as two people can be. We were in charge. We shared the driving, we shared the decisions, we shared our souls, and we answered to no-one. We were all we had. But we were also all we needed.  We didn’t have a large amount of money, but we had planned and budgeted so we had enough for gas, food and lodging each day.  My son and his mates have ten dollars per person, per day, to pay for all of these things, an amount obviously insufficient for the task.  My son is intelligent, but he is still young enough to place no value on experience.  His fate is largely in the hands of the band members, people he hadn’t even met until four days ago. They are all involved in a business relationship; while friendships may grow out of their shared hardships, none exist now at the beginning of their odyssey.  Once upon a time, I was a member of a band. I understand the lifestyle. The thought of my son’s fate intertwined with the choices and preferences of these footloose musicians, still young and bulletproof, none of whom knows him and any of whom could potentially harbor ill will towards him…..frightens me.

In addition to the possibilities for adventure, my son took advantage of the opportunity offered to him as a potential career step.  He knows he will learn an incredible amount, both about himself and about the business of touring and managing a band.  There is no better teacher than experience, and he will gain an enormous amount of that.  At times, I fear he will gain more of it than he wishes, but that, too, is part of the adventure.  It has been said, and I also believe, that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.  I have prayed many times in the past week, asking Almighty God to protect him.  If it be His will, bless him with success also, but first and foremost, grant him protection, as he has now both grown out of and physically passed out of my ability to protect him from the hardships life can inflict on him.

And this is the other emotion wrapped up in this parting, for me.  I recognize that this trip will most likely signal the end of my son’s childhood, certainly in the way he views me as his parent.  No longer will I be Dad, the protector, the buffer between him and the Real World, the arbiter of what he can and cannot, should and should not, do.  Once he returns…..if he returns………….I will be a fellow adult.  My role will have become that of adviser, and no longer that of middle-of-the-night comforter, tosser of balls, chauffeur to league games, vocal supporter from the sidelines, provider of video games, slayer of orcs and leader of the hunting party, prodder to take his schoolwork more seriously, questioner of whether he’s been drinking tonight………….

I will be none of those things, anymore.  I will no longer be his hero.  I will be something less.  Less capable, less wanted, less consulted, less needed.  I will no longer be his teacher; I may be the one who taught.  Or I may be the one who failed to teach.  But my role, in those ways and so many more, will be for most intents and purposes…..

Ended.

It is a truth that tears apart the heart.

It is a truth, though.  It is the way things are supposed to progress.  You raise your children, and then you don’t.  You set them free, and then they have their own life to live, their own course to chart, their own mistakes to make and triumphs to achieve.  I understand this, and I accept it.  But it greatly saddens me to live through this transition.  I know that my overall relationship with my son isn’t over (God willing).  We will continue to be part of each others lives for many years to come.  But my role will have changed.  I will see him less and less, and I will be diminished by that emptiness, that growing distance.

And so, I strive to grow past my aching sadness. I sense that change is in the wind.  My role with my son, in many ways, is moving through an ending point.  But also a starting point, as I embark on the journey to find my new place in his life, and as he works out the questions of, as George Carlin once put it, what he’ll do for fifty bucks, and what he’ll do with fifty bucks.  I also begin a new and different post-child-raising era in my own life.  As I find new activities, new pursuits, to fill the spaces that raising a child used to occupy.  My relationship with my wife will change, and that is also a starting point.  My son is of course passing though ending points and beginning points as well.  The educational portion of his life has ended, and now begins the experience portion.  His career is beginning, possibly the first of many different careers.  He’s learning how to live and get along with other people in an (extremely) intimate environment, something he’s never had to do before.  He may have many things he has to give up in the weeks to come, many new choices, habits, skills he picks up along the way.  Decisions he must start paying the price for.

Change is in the nature of all things, save for God.  We usually have little choice but to go through the changes that are presented to us.  We learn, we grow, we may mourn what we leave, or are forced to leave, behind.  But we change.  And so my son and I are changing.  I wish him the very best the world has to offer, and hope I can help him through the times when he has to face unhappiness.  Because dealing with both is a part of being an adult, and that is now his lot in life.  In the fullness of years, I have learned that as both a father and as a person, there are times in life where I must step back, and let fellow adults about whom I care make their own choices, for better or ill.  My son is now a member of that group.

I was blessed with a first-born son, I have had the privilege of helping to raise him, and I am now proud to know the young man he is becoming.  The very best of luck to you, son.  I love you.

Rain

I awoke this morning to the soothing and gentle patter of soft rain.

Now, for you, Gentle Reader, that may be a sound so familiar that it isn’t worth thinking about, much less writing about.  But here in the desert, rain comes rarely, and when it does, it tends to come in brief, violent thrashings.  The clouds move across the wide-open spaces, dragging beneath them an irregular oval of dark, thunderous chaos.  Rain doesn’t fall so much as it is thrown down at the passing ground.  Lightning strikes can come so often that they can resemble weapons fire, landing every five or ten seconds.  I can recall gliding across the emptiness of northern Arizona one night, absolutely fascinated by a storm that was pummeling a mountain with such urgency as to seem bent on destroying  it.  The vastness of the desert allowed me, even at seventy miles per hour, to watch the show for more than twenty minutes.  It was time well-spent.

So the quiet, sibilant hush of light rain is a welcome rarity in these arid climes.  I recalled that there had been intermittent rain the previous night as I lay my head to sleep, and so waking up to that sound meant that it had probably been raining all night, and that, too, was a comforting thought.  I spent a time just listening to it.

Wherever it falls, rain gives life.  The desert is better at hoarding that treasure than most places, but even here, too little rain means too little life.  As I write to you, the deserts of the American Southwest have been in a drought of one degree or another for more than a decade, and relief is not yet in sight, according the the experts in such things.  So a long, soaking rain is indeed a favored blessing here.  But rain can be a blessing in other ways as well.

I’ve written before about the nature of understanding, and the ways in which our perspective can change the ways in which we understand a thing.  Rain is a mechanism through which meaning can be changed.  How far away something is can change, if you are compelled to put on a coat and hat to get there, or are forced to deal with other complicating factors in order to reach your destination.  (Living in a place teaches you things that visiting that place doesn’t.  Desert drivers are generally terrible at driving in the rain.  They either drive too fast for wet surfaces, or else drive so slowly and carefully that drivers around them are forced to adopt their their fear-filled attitude.)  Rain also changes the availability of things.  Many places in the desert are built to welcome the outdoors, because we are so frequently drenched with sunshine.  But substitute rain for that bright light, and all at once restaurants have half their available seating, as patios become shunned.  Shopping centers empty as their uncovered walkways become less inviting.  Open-air venues become filled with only the echoes and ghosts of past events.  Identities become masked under umbrellas and hats.  Gutters become moats.

Deserts are arid places, and dry air carries scent much more poorly than does moist air.  So when it rains in the desert, the air changes, and scent becomes once again a joyful experience.  Eucalyptus trees become intoxicating.  Roses become beautiful to more than just the eyes.  One of my favorite scents is simply the desert after a rain.  For only a day or two after the rain, the desert becomes a fragrant place.  And then, once the humidity of fallen rain returns into the atmosphere to be taken off to other places, the once-again dry air, stripped and cleansed of it’s dust and particulate clutter, becomes crystal clear.  Mountains become so easily visible that their actual distance away can astonish visitors.

But perhaps the most important way a soft rain can affect desert dwellers is in their mood.  When I came to the desert decades ago, I was amazed at what a change was wrought in my general attitude.  I found that I truly loved waking up to sunshine virtually every single morning.  My mood brightened almost immediately, and the change was noticed by folk who knew me from my old digs.  Yet many desert-dwellers, perhaps over-filled with the monotony of gruesomely-predictable sunny days, yearn for the quiet grey isolation of a rainy day.  They enjoy the change in mood which such a day brings.  In a realm always brightly lit by the sun, they relish the somber reflection brought on by the soft hiss of hours of rain.  Under a grey, enclosing ceiling where normally open blue skies reign, rain brings contemplation, a chance to think about things, perhaps an opportunity to remember the ways things were ‘back there’ or ‘back then’.  Along with such remembrance and reflection come the memories of friends they left behind, or have fallen out of touch with.  Places they once haunted that they may never see again.  Relationships still filled with emotion but rent by distance.  Perhaps a consideration of regrets over things left undone, words said or left unsaid, decisions that did not lead where they were supposed to.  Such a day provides a chance to ‘hole up’, to not put on makeup, to retreat from responsibility for a time, to wear slippers and a warm sweater and drink coffee in the afternoon.  To perhaps be just a little less adult than we are normally required to be.

. . .

For my part, I lay in my bed and listened through the open window, simply enjoying the quieting white-noise shush of falling rain.  I heard the tap of it on the roof, the splat of it on concrete, the splash of it in puddles.  I thought about all of these things, about what those I love or cared about might be contemplating on this rainy day, about the differences between people.  I thought about what I had to do this day, decided that yes, I would have time to write about it.  And then….a little while later……I got up, and went about my day.