In The Cigar Box

Every week begins on Friday.  Remember when Fridays were the cusp of the weekend, two days free of work, for time at home, for sleeping in, for social gatherings, for honey-do projects, for golf or tennis or swimming with the kids?  Now every week begins on Friday because it was a Friday some twenty-one weeks ago that COVID-19 began to inkle its demands about staying in, staying apart, and changing everything.  Bubbles used to be something kids created with a plastic ring and a bottle of soapy water.  Now bubbles are the safe spheres of each person’s world.   Confronted with life in a tiny bubble of two human beings, I did the obvious thing.  Decided to teach myself to play the saxophone.  I did fail, however, to consider the potential effects on the other beings living in our bubble – our two labradoodles.  Winnie, my wife, has ample capacity to bury her head between two pillows in the room furthest from my office bu...

Everyone gets asked to name their favorite books.  It is often believed that the books a person likes is a window into his core.  Doubtful. For me, a book is a vessel - it is more like a cigar box that holds momentos of epiphanies, medals from challenges met and stubs of paper that marked moments of soaring high or when grief brought me low. Each book I've kept has characters who understand me or whose pain and joy I can feel. They hold stories that taught me the difference between truth and fact.  In the most fundamental sense, I'm indebted to every book that opened my eyes, lit my path or simply made me laugh, cry, cheer or rue. They truly comprise the signposts that mark the route that led me here. So... Even though memory is rarely trustworthy, I believe it was during the time of convalescence after the final surgery on my leg that I began to read books, mostly novels. Not only did the stories transport me to times and places I couldn't go, rea...

We knew things were changing.     Who among us knew what to expect?    March 12 th , Winnie and I were at the Chicken & Pickle, a pub built for games and a couple hundred people.  We met there for lunch and pickleball with about fifteen friends.  Yes, the earliest cautions suggesting social distancing, extra personal hygiene and not touching your face had already been hitting the news.  When we texted our daughter about our plans for the day, she returned a text featuring an emoji with a scolding, frustrated expression.  She thought the evidence was clear that her parents’ judgment had been mottled by senility. On that day, we didn’t think the risk was great.  We took precautions.  We wiped the pickleball paddle from tip to grip with a Lysol disinfectant wipe that claimed it would kill 99.9% of germs.  That COVID-19 is a virus and not a bacterium was already quite clear so anti-bacteri...