Has It Only Been a Year?

 Celebrated my one-year anniversary of being in isolation this week. Most of us are observing that one year milestone: isolation, quarantine, sheltering in place, lockdown, pain in the butt, whatever you want to call it.

Looking back at the year in review, I feel like 2020 nearly finished me off. The stress was huge: the life-threatening virus, the contentious election, and being isolated with only the dog and cat for company worked on me hard. It has taken me until now to recognize how hard it has been and see some of the cracks that have opened in my psyche under the strain.

 

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.” – “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

 

Good old Leonard Cohen.

The last year has been hard on everyone, even without job loss, business failure, and losing your home because you cannot make rent or mortgage payments. I hear that many people who have never been depressed before are now dealing with situational depression. Clinically depressed people also have situational depression. However we label it, we are all bummed out, for good reason.

My sincerest sympathy to all of you. All of us.

And that is before reckoning with the loss of people we loved, or the losses of our friends and extended family.

I have a whole new understanding of the meaning of the word, “plague.” I do not think I will be able to use it casually to say something is “plaguing me” anymore. Nope. Whole new perspective. I think I had an attitude that this was something that happened far away and long ago – the Spanish flu in 1918, or the Black Death in the Middle Ages – or Ebola in Africa, for example. Not that much to do with me, right? The Covid-19 pandemic has been right here, right now, and has everything to do with all of us.

As more of us are vaccinated, there is an anticipation of returning to normal. I can see the light in peoples’ eyes and faces, even on zoom

Oh, to go to a restaurant, a movie, a play, an opera, a church service – a choir practice!

Oh, to get together with that gang of mine over coffee or tea or guitars, mandolins, and violins, to laugh and talk like we used to back when there was no harm in it.

Oh, to have weddings where we do not have to worry about some or most of the guests contracting Covid-19 and dying.

Oh, all that normal that we took for granted all our lives, until last year.

We have Baby Boomers, Gen-X, Gen Y, Millennials … will the children of this time be known as the Covid-19 generation? I am talking about the children who are growing up with this plague as part of their lives. Many of them will not be able to remember the Time Before. How will their attitudes be affected by living with the virus all their lives?

The whole world is different now. It would be different than it was at the beginning of 2020 anyway, but not this specific kind of different, the one with 2,700,000 people dead worldwide from this virus and its variants, and about 550,000 people in America alone dead from the virus.

Those statistics count the people we knew had Covid-19. There were people who slipped away without anyone knowing it was the virus that took them.

Driving up to town this afternoon I heard a program on the radio of people talking about the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. They talked about the good stuff that had happened. They mentioned getting to know people in their neighborhood because now they were taking walks, with or without dogs. They talked about money saved and stress averted by working at home – no commute, no wardrobe to keep up, a tank of gas lasts for weeks or months. No high heels!

Okay, so parents are going out of their minds with home schooling, and many women have given up their jobs/careers to come home and take care of the kids, but this part is about silver linings.

They found they had become closer to family and friends far away because they got in touch more often, via Zoom or Facetime or video calls. We have had to try harder to stay in touch with people, and we have had more time to do that. More time to be human.

There are some changes I hope we will keep as pandemic restrictions ease up, like livestreaming church services and other events, and meeting on zoom. Some people are not able to get out, pandemic or not, and now there is technology that includes them, and this is a good thing. We need each other.

Thrown Under the Bus

 Many of us are feeling calmer these days. It is such a relief to wake up every morning and not wonder, “What’s he done now?”

It seemed like every day there was an attention-getting tweet or speech or impulsive action, each one designed to rile up the MAGA crowd, or endanger the country and the planet, or “throw someone under the bus.” A person gets tired of being goosed like that.

By the way, I have never heard the expression, “thrown under the bus,” so many times in my life as during the last four years. You wonder why anyone would want to work in that White House, knowing that your boss would turn on you.

Vice President Michael Pence was the last and most important Trump supporter to be thrown under the bus. When he opted to observe the rule of law after the election, he became the enemy. When he presided over the Senate on January 6 and the crowds marching on the Capitol were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” and built that scaffold with a noose, his commander-in-chief did nothing to protect Pence from the mob. This after Pence’s four years of unwavering loyalty and support for Trump. We have all seen the video of Pence and his staff being escorted to safety that day.

Granted, sometimes at press conferences during the last four years he would stare into space and bite his lip so hard I feared he would hurt himself. Quite a few people standing behind Trump when he spoke kept their faces carefully blank.

When Pence was asked to speak at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, he said yes at first, but then he learned that the guy who was going to allow him to be lynched would be there.

Maybe another year, he said.

I will be honest. I was not a fan of Mike Pence. His stand on abortion, which indicated a take on women as inferior animals who must be feared and controlled, and his weird relationship with his wife, put me off (still do). Also, he was chosen by Trump to be vice president and accepted the job, which I thought showed bad judgment.

During the last weeks of the Trump presidency, when Pence respected the outcome of the election and did his duty as Vice President, even in the face of a mob that wanted to kill him, my respect for him went way up.

He is, after all, a politician. He is betting that the unwieldy bureaucracy and infrastructure of the American government is going to last longer than Trump’s toddler behavior and the Trump cult. I hope he is right.

The cult is with us, and they have no intention of being pacified. I am on an email newsletter list that is a forum for Trump supporters to speak freely. If you say “unity” to these people, they are liable to spit in the corner. Or on you.

So I say nothing. I read. I do not wish to be in denial about what the angry minority is thinking.

From my point of view, their thinking and beliefs are backwards, inside out, upside down, and sad. The election was stolen; Democrats are Socialists/Communists; white people rule; disguised antifa laid siege to the Capitol on January 6.

Their email comments tend to be vitriolic, the rants of people who feel victimized. They are mad as hell. They seem impervious to reason. They are still believing and spreading lies and conspiracy theories, and they vote. Take heed, friends.

Think on this: these cult members, these scary people, are human beings, with hearts and families and tragedies and triumphs. They are just like you and me, except they are pissed, whiny, and dangerous.

While I am in the neighborhood, informal poll: how many of you have experienced the good-heartedness, hospitality, and generosity of conservatives? I have. It is confusing to be hated for being a liberal when I am treated well when seen simply as another human being.

America has a lot that needs fixing and healing. We get a lot wrong.

Racism is wrong. Sexism is wrong. Breaking up families and imprisoning and sexually abusing children is wrong. Bombing people in Eastern Syria, or anyone, is wrong, just my opinion. Seeing people with whom you disagree as not human is wrong. Throwing your supporters under a bus is wrong.

However much we want to criticize this country – and we do, and we are allowed – I am often in awe of how sweet it was to be born in America, where I have had freedoms, advantages, and blessings unheard of in many countries.

Of course, I am white. I did not realize what a difference that made for decades.

Slow learner.

Graze, Pray, Nap, Repeat – oh, and Curse

 There is a big snowfall here today, which is cheering, even though I will not be able to get up my driveway for days, not that I want to. Being snowbound is not that different from isolation, so not a change.

Coming up on my one-year anniversary of isolation. That is the paper anniversary, right?

Talking with my friend Lynn Carrigan the other day, she said her isolation routine is graze, nap, sleep, repeat. My isolation protocol includes “pray,” and then “curse.”

I added cursing, because, boy, do I. Here alone at home I observe how often I drop things, run into things, trip on things (or nothing), lose things, and forget things. So, cursing.

I do not mind breaking things, because I can throw whatever it is out and be relieved of that part of my burden. Sometimes that is what it takes to break the bonds of sentiment.

Despair has been knocking on my door a lot the last few months. Life is hard anyway, and now it is harder. I do not know about you, but I am experiencing Isolation Adjectives: I define myself with words like, “loony,” and “squirrely” and “depressed.”

“Lonely” figures large in there, too.

It was my belief last spring that the pandemic would not be over in six months or even a year, or longer, and I should settle in, but having a reasonable perspective on a situation is not the same as living through the situation.

This is what it is like to be in a plush solitary confinement for a year. So far. I could not possibly have imagined what this would be like, or how it would affect me.

I am thinking of the anchoresses in the middle ages, women who were walled into little rooms to spend the rest of their lives in prayer and contemplation.

They had a little window into the church so they could watch mass; they got food handed in (and waste handed out) through that window.

Then there was one window outside where people could come up and talk to them, ask them for spiritual advice or prayers, or shoot the breeze, I suppose.

That fad did not last long, and I can see why. First, wall yourself into a little room for the rest of your life? What? Second, you had to pay some servants to do the food passing in and the slops taking out, so only women of means were able to take this path.

There are people now who live in tiny houses, but those houses have doors and windows, and plumbing and kitchens and a heat source, not to mention the composting toilet and the sleeping loft. Not the same thing at all. You must haul your own slops.

But I digress.

Isolation life has been hard. I miss people. I especially miss making music with people and laughing with people. I miss hugs, and I miss real books because I get most of mine on kindle now.

People said, “Make yourself a routine.” I am more of a “variety is the spice of life” kind of gal. I do have a routine into which I have settled, but probably not what the advice folks have in mind.

My friend Alice told me that her biggest challenge was doing nothing. I get it.

I was pushing myself for months to be productive with the chores: do the dishes, sweep the floors, do the laundry, sort out stuff so I could send some things to Granny’s and some things to the transfer station. Now that I was isolating at home, I finally had the time to get all that sorting and tossing done, right?

I got some of it done. I will keep at it.

I am also at level 900 or so of a phone game to which I am addicted. I have the television schedule for weeknights memorized. Do not come between me and my British murder mysteries.

I have more of a “what the heck” philosophy these days and I am working on my doing nothing skills.

Productivity is overrated.

Yeah, when you cannot go anywhere or see anyone, or laugh with anyone, or hug anyone, or sing with anyone, eating, praying, and sleeping can make the time fly.

And cursing, of course.

How are you getting by in this pandemic world?

News: Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, which was expected. Republican Senators had two big reasons to acquit: they want to be re-elected, and death threats.

Watching videos of what went on inside the Capitol did not convince Republican Senators that they needed to convict Trump. It made them realize what might happen to them if they did not acquit him.

O, Republicans. How far you have strayed.

Requiem for a Contractor

 

In the late summer of 1975, a restaurant called Sound Food opened a couple of miles south of town on the Main Highway. The restaurant was funded by several partners, of whom the most visible was Frank Miller, who worked in the restaurant.

Linda Miller, Frank’s wife, also worked there. She had long hair and wore long skirts. Many women wore long hair and long skirts in those days.

Then, and I do not know the time frame or the order of these events, Linda came out, cut her hair short, stopped wearing skirts, announced that her name was now Lotus, and left Frank.

(She once told me that men were okay, but when it came to the quality of a relationship, women were beyond compare. When Rick and I married, Lotus told me that Rick was a good guy and all, but it was kind of a shame, because I would have made a great lesbian. I took it as a compliment.)

As a single mother she needed a means of support, so she became the best contractor on Vashon Island.

Seriously, she was.

In 1977 I came to live in the dilapidated former mess hall of what had been the Beulah Park church camp and Chautauqua grounds. The property had passed into private hands, and the mess hall and the little cabins on the property had become cheap rentals.

The mess hall had many deficiencies as a living space.

No bathroom. You had to walk up the hill to another building where the toilets and a shower were located.

No heat except the brick fireplace. Rick plugged several airtight stoves into the fireplace over the years. Remember airtights? All the structural integrity of a beer can and they burned out fast, but they were cheap, and they worked.

The building had two electrical circuits. There was a four-socket box with a breaker next to it on the kitchen wall. Two sockets, on the left side, were one circuit. The two sockets on the right were on the second circuit, and that circuit supplied electricity to the entire building.

If the lights were on in more than one room, and I was cooking on the electric stove, the breaker would snap, and the lights would dim. At which point I would go over and push the breaker back up. We lived with that until the night I pushed the breaker up, and sparks flew.

So I applied for a couple of King County loans, and in 1987 we signed a contract with Lotus to remodel our house.

Lotus had Kimmco come down and put a concrete foundation under one side of the house. Meanwhile, Lotus and her assistant Kate (mea culpa, Kate – I have forgotten your last name) got into the crawl space on the ravine side and put in supports that went down to bedrock.

Once the house was stable and level, Lotus and Kate stripped the interior of the building down to the studs and outer walls. Then they built a new house inside that shell, listening to loud country music on the radio while they worked. Lotus hired subcontractors to do the wiring, sheetrock, taping and mudding of sheetrock, and plumbing. Once Lotus and Kate started the job, they worked straight through to the finish. There were no “contractor gone missing” episodes.

The transformation took about four months, ending in January 1988.

Lotus and Kate did meticulous work. Everything was level and plumb and sound. There were no mistakes, no need for do-overs. Nothing turned up months or years later.

The house had all new wiring.

It had baseboard heaters. After relying on wood heat for ten years, Rick set down his chainsaw and never looked back.

It had insulation.

We had an indoor bathroom, with toilet, sink, and tub. Wahoo!

It was a great place to live and bring up the kids.

I do not know how many houses Lotus built or remodeled or what other projects she did on the island. I only heard good about her and her work and a lot of us were disappointed when she hung up her tool belt and started teaching at a community college.

I look around the house now and think what a fine builder she was, and what fine work she and Kate did.

She was a good friend. She was a person of integrity. She was practical, but she knew how to laugh. She was a fine farmer/gardener. She did a lot of volunteer work with several island organizations to make Vashon a better place to live.

A couple of years ago, she became ill.

A couple of weeks ago her bright light blinked out.

Deepest condolences to her wife, Barbara; her son, Sonam; and all other family and friends. Virtual hugs, and peace, and grace, to you.

Rest in peace, Lotus. You done good.

Relief

 

We were all hurt by the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6.

Honestly, I would like to ignore the seriousness of the situation. It is the time of year when I go out into the yard and tell the emerging bulbs, “Go back. You’re too early.” It is hard to think about our country’s troubles when spring flowers are coming up.

The violence springs from the large minority of people in our country who have been fed, and have believed, lies and conspiracies for years. There are plenty of real outrages and wrongs that need to be set right, but those do not seem to register with them.

Watching the Capitol building invasion I kept thinking of Fort Sumter. Is this the opening skirmish of our second civil war? A civil war with technology and automatic rifles; with no geographic boundaries; with millions of people willing to fight for what they want?

What they want is to sustain the delusion that they are better than other people because they are white.

This insurrection is not yet the death throe of that toxic lie, but the desperation of the invaders looked like the writhing of a wounded creature. Nobody seems to have learned anything from our Civil War, or from any war, for that matter.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” - William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the Civil War. Afterward Head of the Army committed to exterminating our native people.

Some of the post-insurrection reactions of the Capitol invaders have surprised me. It is as if they did not think it through or foresee that their actions would have consequences.

They did not like getting gassed.

The people who did not hide their faces and bragged on social media about what they had done, are now being identified, arrested, and/or losing their jobs.

Fur-hat-and-horns-painted-face-shirtless guy (nice abs, right? Sadly, he is pretty on the outside and bean dip on the inside) was arrested and went on a food strike because his jailers would not serve him organic food. His lawyer’s defense argument is that Donald Trump’s rhetoric led the puir wee bairn astray.

Many people were hurt in the melee. Did they not imagine the possibilities of being wounded, arrested, or fired? Or dying? The rioter who was shot and killed probably did not think she was going to die when she got up that morning.

Beyond all this, I am pondering who stands to gain from the overthrow of American Democracy. Where does the money lead? What do I not know, or see, or understand? Quite a lot, I am guessing. I know our struggle is not anywhere near over.

This morning I watched the live streaming of the Inauguration. Kamala Harris is now our Vice President, and Joe Biden is now our President. I did not expect the feeling of relief that washed over me. My whole body was relaxing in a way that it had not for a long time.

Oh, I know the situation is still terrible – pandemic, tanked economy, unemployment, division of the country as much as ever – but at least now we will have a President and administration that will be working to solve problems. It will be nice to hear something Joe Biden says and think that it is probably the truth.

We owe a debt of thanks to the journalists who have reported the news honestly the last four years. Thank you. You are my heroes. You have done a great service to this country, and the world.

In other news, the house finches are here, and like most of the cute little birds who visit my yard, they attack other birds when fighting for a perch on a feeder. Nice to know we are not the only warlike species, I guess. I got out my bird identification book and browsed through it, looking at all the feathered friends who come back year after year. Red breasted nuthatches, chickadees, spotted towhees, juncos, robins, sparrows, and various LBBs (little brown birds).

I would like to spend my days living quietly, uninterrupted, in my peaceful little world. No civil unrest or war, no fascism, no pandemic, no people without homes, no poverty, no starvation, no bad water, no lies. No sick conspiracy theories. No suffering of the innocent. Only music and writing and friends and family, my dog and cat, the birds. And books. And the internet.

Unfortunately, if I put my head in the sand, I will not be able to breathe. This is our world, and we are stuck with it.

Prayer, Exile, and the New Normal

 The pandemic has taught me how fragile and precious we are to one another. I am not alone in that realization.

On Christmas Day I was burning with cabin fever, missing my family, and not keeping up a good attitude about this whole lockdown/isolation thing. I work to adjust my attitude – I use gratitude, and deep breathing, and what I call the power of Positive Denial: fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

In this time of loneliness and strained hope, prayer has been remarkably effective in lifting my spirits. It’s like forgiveness: I feel a lot better doing it than the people I’m forgiving or praying for feel. It makes me better.

Still I pray, in hope of doing some good in this hard old world. I pray for family, friends, acquaintances, and people I really dislike.

I pray for the repose of the souls of the dead, and I pray for all who mourn, specifically and in general.

I pray for all who have no one to pray for them.

I pray prayers of thanks for all the many blessings in my life.

There is a bible passage that says you should pray in private, so that no one knows. You should not boast of your praying. I do not mean to boast here. I am telling you what helps me get through hard days. It is good to stop whining and pray.

I pray to connect with the creator, but still need to connect with people right here on earth.

Facebook is a connection to the world for me, but I wish someone would start up a social media platform for older people who have been in the house for months and need connection, without Facebook’s evil algorithms and election hacking. Maybe we could call it Boomerbook.

The gospel reading for January 3 is the story in the Gospel of Matthew of how Joseph is told by an angel in a dream to take Mary and Jesus and get the heck out of Palestine, because Herod the Great has been told that a new king of the Jews has been born in Bethlehem. Naturally, Herod sees the baby as a rival, and wants to eliminate him. He orders every male child two years of age and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity be killed. This is known as the slaughter of the Holy Innocents.

This is when I squint at God and say, why didn’t all the parents get a warning? Why did the Holy Innocents have to die? It takes only a little research to learn that historians who have studied Herod and his times believe this story to be folklore – a myth that never happened.

Maybe so, but we know that Innocents are slaughtered every day in our time.

Every.

Damn.

Day.

This is why myth and folklore teach us the truth, even if they are not the facts.

But I digress.

Joseph, Mary, and Jesus went down to Egypt and lived there in exile until Joseph had another dream in which an angel told him that Herod had died, and it was safe to go back home. The little family headed back to Palestine and settled in Nazareth, their new home.

As I pondered this story this week, thinking about that family living in exile, it occurred to me that we are all living in exile right now. We are living far away from the familiar lives we had – the jobs, the family gatherings, meals, school, classes, concerts, all the human closeness and interaction which is so necessary and sometimes annoying for us. We are fleeing not from an evil king, but a virus.

We cannot get out of exile until the virus is under control. Then we can head back home. Not the home from which we were exiled, the new home, where we shall rebuild the new normal life.

Let’s be honest, now: life is a series of building new normals. You get past an obstacle and the next obstacle says, “Hi, there! I’ve been waiting for you.”

When my husband died, my old life was burned to the ground, and I had to build a new life, piece by little piece. It was hard work and I felt like a stranger in my own life, but I did it. I did not give up on life, even though there were times I was tempted.

We miss the old times before Covid-19, a way of life that looks so easy in retrospect.

I encourage us all to build new normal times.

In closing, I ask, do you remember when people said, “Have a nice day?” Now people say, “Stay safe.” That is part of our new normal.

Stay safe, beloveds.

2020: Variations on Journal Entries

 I always have a spiral notebook on hand in which I write, mostly to clear my mind. I decided to review some of the 2020 entries. The notebook that had January in it is long gone, and it was impossible to get 2020 into 800 words. Get comfortable.

March 3, 2020 – Everyone is in a panic about the coronavirus now that there are deaths in the US. The first deaths are here in King County, at a nursing home in Kirkland.

Today is Super Tuesday, a day when several states have their primaries. Suddenly Joe Biden is considered a front runner.

March 4 – What with the coronavirus, the Trump virus, and the cowardice and hostility of both the Democrats and the Republicans, these are not happy times. I cannot understand why so many people are so happy to throw themselves off a cliff. So they can laugh at their perceived enemies on their way down?

March 13 – Self-isolating since Tuesday, and a boring business it is. The novel coronavirus has been declared a global pandemic.

March 14 – Jay Inslee is following China’s model. Lockdown. The state is closed.

March 19 – First day of Spring. Getting out of bed did not work for me today.

April 1 – Velvet called me about 10 a.m. to tell me that her eldest son, Troy, has died. It was sudden and unexpected.

Note: a few weeks later Velvet tells me the coroner reported that Troy tested positive for the coronavirus.

April 29 – Wednesday morning. Reading a lot. Dusted off my kindle because the library’s closed.

May 13 – Headline in today’s Seattle Times: “Health experts warn of resurgence.” What? I thought we were still in “surge.”

May 14 – My Joseph’s Coat rose is blooming in the middle of May. In case I doubted climate change, which I did not.

May 25 – An African American man named George Floyd was killed today, by a policeman named Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. The country is not taking this at all well.

Note: All of June and early July were taken up by a racial reckoning: Black Lives Matter protests, followed by police riots, vandalism, and arson. These encounters lasted most of the summer and included the occupation by protesters of several blocks up on Capitol Hill, in an area called CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized/Occupied Protest). It was cleared out by police after a few weeks.

It was not only Seattle. Protests broke out across the country. People are so fed up with racism in this country. Well, some of us are. The police and the militant right-wing groups (Proud Boys, Nazis, etc.) reacted violently to the protests.

Meanwhile Trump supporters blamed everything on Antifa, which is not a thing, but a position, and does not have a capital A, and they complimented one another on how peaceful and proper their demonstrations were.

Jesus wept.

July 19 – Drove down to Dockton Park last night at 10 o’clock to meet up with Becky and Roy to see the Neowise comet. Cloudy, but we hoped. After a while I saw what looked like a strange light in the clouds, and aiming my binoculars saw the comet. Way cool.

July 24 – News conference at 10 a.m. with Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, and Seattle Chief of Police Carmen Best. Durkan said she spoke with the head of Homeland Security yesterday and was told they saw no need to send federal troops to Seattle, and that she and Police Chief Best would be notified if troops were going to be sent. Meanwhile, Federal troops were arriving in Seattle.

August 3 (Monday) – Becky called me a little after six this a.m. to say she was up all night with chest pains. She does not want to call 911. Should she have Roy drive her up to the fire station? Well, YEAH.

(pause) Heart attack. By eleven this morning she had a brand-new stent or two in her left anterior artery. Recovery will take a while, but she’s ALIVE, and she will recover. Whew.

August 6 – coronavirus test.

August 10 – coronavirus test came back negative.

August 12 – reheated yesterday’s coffee. Drank it all. It did not have a dead fly in the bottom because I covered the mug with a Kleenex overnight. Only takes one fly to learn that lesson. FYI: a dead fly is about the size and shape of a raisin, but fuzzy.

The noise of the political campaigns is constant and unbearable.

August 29 – Second coronavirus test. Pre-admit test at Swedish. Having an angiogram on Monday (test came back negative).

September 2 – “You have the arteries of a 20-year-old!” my cardiologist enthused. I think he was exaggerating, but still, cool.

September 3 – It is a time for strange phone calls. Got a call from a scammer in southern California who pretended to be someone I knew. Said he’d been in a car accident, was in jail, and was too embarrassed to call his wife. Told me his lawyer would call in a few minutes and hung up. Sure enough, a call came through, and this guy said he was the lawyer and my friend needed $5,400 bail money, and I should help him. “How do I do that?” I asked. “Well, you go to your bank …” I stopped him right there and told him no bank was going to give me $5,400. THEN he said, “You could probably get him out for $2,000.” I laughed, told him I was an old lady living on Social Security and I didn’t have $2,000, and that’s when he hung up and I was talking to dead air. Shoot. I was just starting to have fun.

September 11 – The whole West Coast is on fire. The air is unbreathable. The pandemic rages on. The protests go on. With the internet, I feel like I am in a comfortable solitary confinement.

September 17 – Some people want everything to go back to the way it was after we have a vaccine. That will not happen. Some of the changes we have been forced to make have shown us that there are better ways than the way we have always done it. I am loving telemedicine. How much easier is it to have a phone call or a zoom session than driving into Seattle?

Then there are the terrible changes: people losing their jobs, and then their homes, and people getting sick and dying with Covid-19. Everyone is stressed out. There is talk of mental illness and the need for suicide prevention.

Here is the National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 800-273-8255. They are there 24/7. Write that down. You might need it.

As an introvert, I thought this isolation thing would be a snap. Not a snap. Sometimes I get squirrely, gasping for human contact and for singing harmony. I pick myself up and go on, and as crazy as the whole world and our country have become, I still have hope. But I will say that when Pier 58 on the Seattle waterfront collapsed, I thought, that’s it, this is the apocalypse.

September 18 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.

October 4 – Trump is in the hospital with Covid 19.

October 6 – Trump was released from the hospital yesterday and said Covid-19 was no big deal. People are dying for his sins.

October 15 – Cousin Charlotte texted me at 4:30 a.m. to tell me to pray for Amy. Amy Coney Barrett, that is, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. The idea is to pack the Court with conservatives who will roll back Roe vs. Wade, and put an end to the Affordable Care Act, thus depriving millions of people of health insurance.

I’m praying, all right. Why are all my family members Trump supporters?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

November 3 – Election day. I have been ignoring the news all day. Cannot bear the monkey chatter and meaningless speculations. Have a Hallmark movie on. Eating cereal and potato chips.

November 7 – Becky called at quarter to ten this morning and said, “Turn on the TV.” So I did.

The election has been called for Biden by the news networks, including Fox News. People are dancing in the streets.

Trump refuses to concede. Goes on TV to say he won. Big.

November 26 – Thanksgiving. Had a wonderful Zoom visit with my grandson, his dad, and his stepmom. A benefit of Zoom Thanksgiving: I did not have to wash every dish, bowl, and piece of silverware afterward.

December 3 – My older son called last night to tell me that one of his closest high school friends has died. Alcohol poisoning. This is a community sadness. Another island kid gone.

December 12 – Donald Trump is filing lawsuits to overturn the election, which does not seem to be working, but his followers are enjoying throwing their weight and automatic rifles around. We seem to have a cold civil war now, which is bad enough. If it becomes a shooting civil war, we will all learn firsthand what real tragedy is. As if the coronavirus is not killing people fast enough.

A vaccine has been approved and is coming this week, says the Seattle Times.

My microwave oven has died. Damned unsporting of it, in my opinion.

December 14 – The Electoral College votes Joe Biden into the presidency. Trump has lost, is still losing, and still insists the election was stolen from him. He may not overturn this election, but he has such a huge following, and so many are armed and ready to fight for him. Everyone who acknowledges that Biden won the election – including Mitch McConnell, who decided to accept the vote of the Electoral College and congratulate Biden on his win – immediately becomes Trump’s enemy, and “not a patriot.” Including the people who have supported him slavishly until now. They let in one little glimmer of reality, and pow, they are on Donald’s blacklist.

A Covid-19 vaccine has been developed and is being given to health workers first. There is hope. Our governor, Jay Inslee, wants to open up the schools.

I read this piece and think, well no wonder I’ve been feeling depressed. Suddenly it all makes sense.

Time goes on regardless, though. Let’s get ourselves psyched up for 2021.

Well, dear hearts, that is it for this year - so far. I close with the best wishes for however you do or do not observe the darkest days of the year and the return of the light as we roll around the Sun.

Special prayers for everyone dealing with cancer. I know so many of you.

Blessings, love, virtual hugs, grace, and peace be with you all. See you in the New Year, God willing.