Month: December 2020

Good rrrrrrriddance 2020!!!  Am I right?  Wasn’t this just the worst year of our lives?  The new virus, the pandemic, the masks, sanitizer, hand washings, ‘social’ distancing, school closings, toilet paper shortages, grocery store runs, mandatory shutdowns, mass unemployment, two-week quarantines, hospitalizations, culminating in nick-of-time vaccines … and with all that precaution, still so many deaths?  Earlier in the year when we were learning about the novel coronavirus in New York City, Texans including yours truly thought such tragedy could never happen here because we’re spread out with lots of land, unlike cramped, stacked tiny NYC.  By year’s end, Texas now ranks first in Covid-19 cases and second in Covid-19 deaths, right behind New York.

The whole situation seems so … unnecessary, like it could have been prevented, at least cut short from spreading worldwide.  Yet history tells us humanity has lived through many plagues, most more gruesome and deadly than our novel coronavirus and certainly without the comparably comfortable modern hospitals, medical procedures and medications.  It’s just that this being the high-tech 21^st century, where our sights were more in outer space than back here on earth, we thought plagues were a thing of the past.  With our space-age bio science and vaccines, surely modern man could ward off a new bug.  Were we so wrong!  And by we, I mean those of us most fortunate to live in the First World.  This kind of panic, pandemonium, and inability to control the spread of a new disease is common in Third World countries, not the awesomely powerful ‘We’re Number One’ USA.  Americans thought we had become immune to pandemics.

A pox on all our houses

Some blame China for not telling the world about the new virus in the beginning, which may have prevented the worldwide financial devastation and health crises of a pandemic.  China is to blame in that it is a communist nation.  Why do we keep forgetting that?  Yeah, there are communist nations still on planet Earth, and they’re not going away.  Contrary to American popular belief, communism did not die out in favor of capitalism.  Communism is China’s core thought and instinct.  Communism means the government takes priority over its people.  Therefore, a communist nation would treat the rest of us with the same disregard.  We humans are not important to a communist nation.  China has no need to tell us anything, and its leaders have no shame about it.  How many “Twilight Zone” episodes do we need to re-watch to understand authoritarian government?

The bottom line is it doesn’t matter who started the pandemic, how, when or even why.  When it comes to this historic costly deadly health crisis, as the TV stars tell us, “We’re all in this together.”  What a strange motto considering we’re warned against hugging each other, shaking hands, standing closer than six feet or even spending time with friends and family who do not live in our home?  Each of us feels utterly alone during this pandemic.  Social media and video calls are a poor substitute for human contact.  Even the dying cannot be comforted by their loved ones face to face in the same room.

The breath of our life

The word ‘disease’ is metaphysically broken down into the syllables ‘dis-ease,’ the belief being we tend to experience illness when we are emotionally and/or spiritually uneasy about issues unrelated to physical wellness.  Hmm.  But the New Age philosophy falls apart when so many healthy people get sick and even die from a disease especially a new one.  A pandemic is unfair.  Or is it?

Take the philosophy a step further, however, and consider the new disease: a lung infection that affects our ability to breathe.  The affliction can become so severe, it engulfs the lungs, leaving them frozen and unable to function without a respirator.  The ill are suffocating, and some will surely die.

Hasn’t the slogan of a large protesting segment of American society been “I can’t breathe?”  It’s on T-shirts, caps and now face masks.  And didn’t that chant start a few years prior to the novel coronavirus?  “Think!” John Lennon sang in a song long ago.

Well, enough hippie mumbo jumbo.  Who knows why we got here and have to endure another pandemic, formerly known in the olden days as plague?  Now that many of us will be taking the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021, we can start to view the pandemic with 20/20 vision.  The biggest take-away is we should never become so arrogant to think the world cannot be knocked down to the ground by a virus, because obviously it can happen again.  Our government leaders and citizens must rethink what or who is more important when it comes to surviving hard economic times.  Whether communist or capitalist, a country is just dirt without people.

In another song, Lennon wished us well with a Happy New Year, the chorus concluding: “Let’s make this a good one without any fear.”

Cheers!  To you and yours, all the very best!

I’m gonna miss the folks this year on Christmas.  Thinking about it, I’ve spent this holiday at their home in Oklahoma since, gosh, 1997?  And before that, my parents were the only ones I spent Christmas with pretty much every year of my life.  Somehow we’ve made a big deal of this holiday, not always celebrated technically on December 25 due to work, illness and the availability of each of us to come together the same time every year.  For the past two decades, my husband has been gracious to spend the holiday with my folks, dropping by before or after to visit his folks.  Although he is an in-law, he enjoys my parents’ rather odd tradition of gift giving.  They call it ‘Chinese Christmas.’  I cringe a bit at the racist term, but my parents—born in the Depression Era with childhood Christmases of no gifts save an orange, handful of nuts, comb or pair of socks—light up during this after-dinner festivity when piles of wrapped and sacked low-cost and debatably useful items are opened and scrutinized.  The game starts with the oldest person in the room, my Dad, taking a turn and then followed by others sitting clockwise.  Each person picks a gift from the pile and unwraps it so we all can see.  The next person can either steal an opened gift or take a chance choosing a present from the holiday pile.  This game takes hours … because despite my pleas to limit each of our contributions to five or ten gifts a year, we prove to be a generous bunch and during the year get carried away purchasing little things here and there, laughing to our spouses when spotting an item unsuspectedly at a store with a wink saying “Chinese Christmas.”  [We gotta come up with another name.]  I am the only one in my family who will not miss ‘Chinese Christmas’ this year.  Ahem.

20^th Century Christmas Past

My childhood memories of Christmas are colors of bright red or green foil wrapping paper, satin bows, name tags with string, the smell of Scotch tape.  My mother being a teacher was off for two weeks along with my brother and me.  We always opened our gifts a few days before Christmas so we could travel to Oklahoma and spend the holiday with Dad’s family.  Maw Maw and her daughters crowded her tiny kitchen with a high ceiling and tall windows and commenced to cooking, baking and roasting until the room was miserably hot.  Maw Maw made the most delicious yeast rolls—soft and warm as her heart, made with love.  There was a huge turkey; sliced ham; assorted cooked beans and vegetables; dressing; cranberry sauce spilt on a plate, its can shape intact; sweet tea; and then assorted homemade pies and cakes.  The desserts were set on top of Maw Maw’s washer and dryer which were in the dining room, a walled-in back porch.  It was a country meal, unpretentious, and everyone left full. 

Each year the growing family, from Maw Maw & Paw Paw’s original eight children, surveyed the feast set out on the kitchen table, counters and stove; scooped our servings onto paper plates; grabbed a plastic glass of iced tea or pop; and found somewhere to eat throughout the small house.  We ate in the living room, in bedrooms, outside if the weather were nice, and the lucky family members got to sit at the large dining table.

After I left for college, Maw Maw had a debilitating stroke, and all those big dinners at her house were suddenly filed into our family’s collective memories.  The eight families started celebrating separately with their own in-laws and grandchildren.  The country Christmas dinner continued in the families with better cooks.  My family never wanted to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  We either ate out or arranged a take-out turkey meal with all the trimmings.  My parents, it turns out, are fond of barbecue and mustard potato salad for their holiday meal. 

Welcome Christmas 2020

Talk about a hard candy Christmas this year!  We’d been advised by our national disease control experts to keep gatherings low at ten and under then six and under, now celebrate only with people we live with.  Don’t exchange air with people with whom we do not reside.  That would be all our loved ones for most of us.  But with hospitals filled to capacity (and no adjacent field hospitals for some reason), we who are healthy are begged to stay home, wear masks, don’t travel (60% of holiday travelers are not flying this year), wash hands, don’t touch our face and wait patiently for the vaccine.  For many of us that will be a wait in intervals for two doses.  Summer 2021 is looking good.  Be here before we know it.

What I really am gonna miss about my parents is their era.  They are decidedly not 21^st century, not online, without computer or smart phone.  They remain 20^th century, mid to late, the epitome of.  For a blue-collar suburban family-of-four formed in the 1960s, we were representative of a precise time in American history, even much lauded in retrospect.  It’s funny because back when I was aware of growing up in the ’70s, the times seemed so boring.  They also were full of fear: a Cold War with the USSR whereby both nations believed nuclear annihilation was imminent, OPEC and the energy crisis, gas lines and oil spills, Middle East crises, shooting deaths by hand guns, and fear of the future due to certain overpopulation and projected environmental crises.  My memories growing up are more of cold weather than warm.

Despite all the perceived boredom amidst worldwide turmoil, Christmas every year was a beautiful time for everyone, a moment of rejuvenation and renewed hope, universal happiness that warmed our hearts.  Why couldn’t the spirit of Christmas last throughout the year, as children wonder in my favorite holiday song Christmastime is Here?  For my part, I loved being in the school Christmas concerts and plays and when older enjoyed caroling.   As a music teacher, I took students caroling every year … except this one, inhibited by the virus and health experts who maintain singing even with masks spreads the virus faster than talking.  OK.

It’s just that … singing lifts the spirit.  Many people enjoy holiday music, but singers experience a whole other level—deeper in the psyche, passion, spiritual perhaps, a human need.  This year at a new school, my choir presented our first virtual concert.  Each student recorded themselves from home singing the concert songs.  A sound engineer linked their video and audio.  At school everyone watched the presentation on our laptops.  Seeing two dozen students, each in a box, singing seasonal songs, unmasked, was so normal, many of us adults were teary eyed.  Feeling dormant emotions at last.  Silently longing.  Senses aware of our past this time of year and all that humanity has lost … from not touching one another.