The Buried Giant

27 February 2021

 

Early Saturday morning has come.  We are almost at a year of life in quarantine.  The past year was much akin to the year between my ninth and tenth birthdays.  Back then time stretched easily and seemed to go on forever, it had an aching elasticity that frustrated constantly.  Ms. Joni Mitchell kind of captured that feeling in The Circle Game talking about promises of someday filling a young child’s dreams.  From the start of the lockdowns the hope of some future day has been a key part of every conscious thought and of most every dream.

 

Snowed last night, t'was to be expected really. But the bridge of these next few days between February and March is supposed to be warmer, four days in the forties. Like most people in norther climes, I will use this mild weather to venture out and see what damages the harsh weather has wrought to date.  Went out yesterday and the ice dams at my main roofs edges hard melted without damage to the interior of my house. The deck in my side yard is still under ten inches of hard crunchy snow, I will just let nature dissolve that. My guess is that I will find some branches to pick up here and there and without question I will find some damage under the snow somewhere because no winter passes without leaving a mark, not here at least.

 

Finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant the night before last.  Such a lyrical book about hatred and deception.  Like his other work that I loved so well, The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s used the last forty pages of this relatively slim volume to beautifully bring the narrative to a wrenching conclusion. Beautiful, lyrical and yet heart-breaking, this book is well worth digging out and reading. Got Book?  Books are the antidote to isolation induced antsyness. 

While I was writing this I thought I should have a song about knights and kings and the like wrap up the piece.  But if you exclude the Moody Blue's Nights in White Satin there isn't much out there.  And Nights really isn't a good match with my commentary on The Buried Giant.  I then thought I would go for something that touched on mystical things.  The first song to come to mind was Into the Mystic.  But Van Morrison is being such a twit about the lockdowns I could not use his version.  I have loved Van's music for so many years but I cannot listen to him right now for all his selfish prickness about not being able to tour and rake in the cash.  Thus I found somebody else who does a really nice cover of the song. Enjoy. 

 

Thursday, 25 February 2021 ????

 

 

Thursday?  Yeah, it is Thursday. Thursday? Absolutely. You put the recycling out together with the trash yesterday and you brought both bins back in empty.  Trash happens on Wednesday.  Thursday…uh?  Did I really do the trash yesterday?  Yes, I am sure.  Absolutely, it is Thursday.

 

Thursday confusion does not stand alone.  I retired thirteen months ago.  The pandemic swung into full force eleven months ago.  As a retiree I no longer have the requirements to go to work. Given my age and health I don’t go to church on Sunday.  In fact, I can watch this week’s sermon anytime on YouTube.  As a result of these things, I have no mandatory appointments. Thus, the demarcation between weekends and weekdays and weekdays one from another have all kind of melted away.  In the before times, I might have had must see viewing on TV.  But we gave up on cable about five years ago and instead watch streaming services for content.  No real days of appointment there.

 

My days are marked with sunrise and sunset; also they are marked with snow.  If it has snowed, I have about ½ hour of communing with my SnoJoe battery powered snowblower in the dawn’s light.  Occasionally I have to try and break up the ice dams formed at the roofs edge. Time measured in terms of days, weeks and months has faded for me.

 

Time measured in things I must do each day has become more acute.  I must get up.  I must take my morning medication.  I must take my 45-minute walk (at this point midday because of the cold weather).  I must empty the trash, do the dishes, do the laundry, make the bed, etc.  Each of these tasks has a time during the day when routine dictates I do it. 

 

Truth be told I am not unhappy measuring time in this manner.  I don’t get antsy or anxious because we are not ready and, in the car, heading off to work so as to be there by 8 AM. Might be a New Jersey or an east coast thing but I always wanted to be going to where ever I had to be with way plenty of time to spare, just in case.

 

The pandemic will fade.  I am not sure my attitude about time will.

500,000

Five hundred thousand people are now dead (at a minimum) from Covid-19 in the United States. Out of our population of three hundred and twenty-eight million this number comprises about a fifth of one percent of the population.  This seems like a small number, a small percentage, but…. 

People dying from this disease tend to be older, more likely grandparents than not.  Given the roughly two kids per family we have here in the U.S. you are talking about people who were important to a spouse or partner, to two kids and most likely to four grandkids. A single death’s impact thus touches about three and a half million additional folks. Assuming each of the dead had two close friends, friends they would have coffee with, folks they would vacation with, people who were their children’s godparents, you are adding in another million people impacted very directly, very viscerally. In one year, we have had one percent of the population directly touched by death from this malignant virus. I am not even talking about those who live, the long termers, the permanently incapacitated

 

Covid-19 deaths in one year have exceeded about ten years of America’s deaths from automobile accidents. Covid deaths have outdistanced the deaths from multiple of our nation’s most horrific war loses. The numbers are gut churning.  The reality is unnerving and sobering,

 

I am not going to lay blame for this on anyone.  Others do that all the time. What I am going to do is say there do appear to be good things on the horizon.  The vaccines are starting to get out there. What else I am going to say is that while we wait to be vaccinated let us continue to practice, although we are so very tired of these practices, the best health preventive measures.  Mask, distance, isolate for a little while longer. We owe it to each other as citizens of this great country.  We owe it to each other as decent human beings. We have the willpower to do the right things.