Further thoughts on yesterday's subject...

A single daffodil is in full bloom outside our back windows. A sign of spring, and call to hope. Fragile and vulnerable, yes. But also persistent.

I understand the desire of many to hear stats about how many have survived COVID-19. I think the problem is that we don’t know that number. For starters, we don’t know how many have had it or have it now. For another, someone may have survived it and not really known what they had. For a third, what is a survivor? How long do you have to live after being exposed to it and/or having been diagnosed with it to be counted as a survivor? Sadly, one real stat we can have is how many have died whose death certificates state COVID-19 as the cause of (or perhaps as contributing to) their death. In the meantime, we can take comfort from and find hope in knowing that the vast majority of those diagnosed with COVID-19 do survive it. Is that not enough?

Every morning I watch a semi whose sides are brightly painted with Sysco Food Service graphics back up to the loading dock of the Health Center less than a hundred yards outside my window. Its driver is delivering food to people who are eating it by themselves, alone in their rooms, all these weeks. It reminds me of all the people risking everything to keep us fed, warm, safe, as healthy as possible, and all the rest. This morning we watched teachers in Breckenridge’s on-site day-care center (now limited to the children of employees, I believe) march their charges around the circle in front of our house. These all give me hope for us as a nation and as human beings. Thanks to each one of them!

My regular practice of reading the Psalms daily is really paying off during this pandemic. The Psalms are so honest, so truth-filled, and so encouraging even when their authors are discouraged. They give me hope.

A single daffodil is in full bloom outside our back windows. A sign of spring, and call to hope. Fragile and vulnerable, yes. But also persistent.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you.

COVID-19, etc.

Like everyone else, I have been paying lots of attention to the COVID-19 crisis, but in addition to not having time to comment on it, I’ve also felt there’s little need for more commentary than we are already being subjected to. But for the record, here are a few of my random personal thoughts related to it.

“The elderly should stay home and keep safe, yet at the same time accept the fact they are expendable.” Maybe because I am 17 years on the far side of the threshold to elderly-ness but don’t often feel that old, I am having a hard time accepting either proposition, much less holding them simultaneously in my mind. But I am/we are doing as we’ve been advised to do, and our children have not had to hound us about it, too much.

We moved to our new home at Breckenridge Village (a community for people of a certain age) looking forward to a promised and enticing array of exciting activities and new friendships. Within three weeks we were pretty much grounded. Probably won’t get a refund, however: they/we are paying security folks to take our temperatures every time we come back from a thrilling shopping expedition to buy toilet paper or get prescriptions filled.

FOUR PERSONAL RESPONSES TO AMERICA’S LONG-STANDING DISTRUST OF SCIENCE, MUCH OF WHICH IS GROUNDED IN FUZZY AMERICAN POP RELIGION, WITH NO SMALL DOSE OF FUNDAMENTALISM THROWN IN:

1. It is okay with me if you don’t believe the science of evolution. You even have my permission to think the earth is flat, although I rather you not pilot my next flight to Europe because we might end up headed toward the moon.

2. It’s not nearly as okay with me if you do not believe the science of climate change, but maybe there’s yet time to change your mind — maybe.

3. It’s not at all okay with me if you do not believe the sciences of infectious disease and epidemics and pandemics and your ignorance supports decisions that result in COVID-19 being even more deadly than it already is on the way to being. I am expendable, and am willing to be so, but won’t be happy if pollyanna politics is the reason I get expended. (Thank you, President Trump, for abandoning your plan to set some of us free by Easter.)

4. Once this crisis is over, we need to get back to changing minds on climate change, based on peer-reviewed and generally-accepted science.

Yes, we have moved. So why have I been too busy to share my profundities about COVID-19? For one thing, there’s always another box to unpack or picture to hang. For another, I trust I am in the final stages of getting Ghosts and Gold: My Story of Ghost Ranch off to the printer. Maybe it will be published (will “drop”) and Ghost Ranch will reopen about the same time. That would be so cool!

I wondered as I packed several big old books for our move to a much smaller home — as I packed my Hebrew and Greek texts and language tools, Calvin’s Institutes, and the like—I wondered why? Why keep them at all? I hardly ever refer to them, and doubt I will do so very often in our exciting new life here. Yet, they remind me of the most intense time of learning and growth and change in my life. They recall me to what has really mattered to me all my life. From their shelf behind me, they say far more to and about me than the diploma I long ago took off my study walls: It’s really not the destination; it is the journey.

Be safe, stay safe, and keep others safe.

Our old stereoscope: entertainment and education

Sometimes we come across something that reminds us how fast things have changed in the relatively short period of time that we call "modern." In preparing to move to our new home (moving day is two weeks away), I came across the old stereoscope pictured here. I had forgotten I had it.

It was in my paternal grandparents' home from my earliest memories of that place. Then it was in my parents' home. It is from around the turn of the 20th century, and I remember viewing the cards that are with it and being quite impressed by the 3-D pictures. Of course, we had "ViewMasters" by then, which represented a large upgrade in 3-D capability, so this device was way out-of-date when I was a child in the 1950s. We were more drawn to the latest thing.

Most of the pictures in the collection that survives with it are of places and people from around the world. But nearly two dozen of them are of the construction of the Panama Canal, and they are quite spectacular. I can imagine Myerses sitting around in a small living room, more or less Victorian style, being awed by that engineering marvel, studying the pictures carefully to try to figure out just how people could build something like that, no doubt doubting they'd ever be so lucky as to travel to see it for themselves.

It takes a lot more to entertain us these days, and we are much more entertained, and I suspect that the vast amount of entertainment we do ingest is far less likely to educate us about things that matter.

I checked online for asking prices for these devices, thinking I'd sell it. And it looks as if I could get pretty good money for it, particularly for all the Panama Canal pictures. But I am going to keep it. It has a value beyond money, the value of happy memories of time spent at my grandparents' farm, learning about wonders near and far.

Random Observations

The impeachment trial feels a lot like a worship service in which the preacher says things everyone expects to hear from the pulpit and no one expects any of what they hear actually to change them.

Regarding whether the charges against our current president “rise to the level of impeachment”: shouldn’t the phrase be, “fall to the level of impeachment”? Impeachment is about as low as you can go, isn’t? (Yes, “rise” is probably legalize.)

Speaking of legalize: Alan Dershowitz’s argument yesterday for why a president cannot be impeached simply does not pass constitutional muster, not to mention the requirements of Logic 101. I fear that Ruth Dodd, who taught me high school civics (remember civics?), is surely rolling over in her grave.

I am really, really, REALLY tired of being accused of hating our current president. I would not enjoy having a beer with him, and think his policies threaten disaster for our country and the world, so I have to admit to liking him very little. But that’s as far as I will go. I thank you for respecting my boundaries.

Just read that the Secretary of Commerce thinks the coronavirus—not to be confused with the beer—could be good for our economy. Let’s hear it for uncontrollable viruses! Yea! And raise a glass to the stock market!

“Strong winds blow over new section of U.S. border wall with Mexico”: I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house down, as the old story goes.

Our current president decried climate "prophets of doom" in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where sustainability was the main theme. A good many of scripture’s prophets of doom proved to be right. Such folks may be worth a listen, don’t you think?

Our local paper often headlines that a “dead body” has been found somewhere. Isn’t it enough just to call it a “body” unless, perhaps, you are referring to “the world’s greatest deliberative body”?

Ghost Ranch, Ghosts and Gold, and getting it done.

After more that a decade, I have finally finished the manuscript of my short book about Ghost Ranch, the Presbyterian Education and Retreat Center just north of Abiquiu, New Mexico. Ten years is probably some kind of record for a book of around 6,500 words, hardly enough to be called a book were I not planning to include pictures. My “excuse” is that I have allowed many interruptions along the way, and furthermore, I had no idea I was writing a book for the first few of years of the ten.

Anyway, Ghosts and Gold: My Story of Ghost Ranch, is now in the design stage, and I hope to self-publish it by mid-year. That, and sell the house we’ve lived in for 30 years and move to a new one in a retirement village. Talk about looming interruptions.

I have loved this project because I love Ghost Ranch. But it needs to be finished, to be shoved off the edge of my desk, in part because what I really enjoy writing (besides this blog) are short stories and I need to make room in my life for more of them. Once Ghosts and Gold is out there (“dropped” as seems to be the term today), I can get back to short stories...after (INTERRUPTION ALERT!) we get settled in our new house.

I know you who are Presbyterians and who have at least heard of Ghost Ranch will want to be among the first purchasers of my book. I also know those of you who have no idea what I am talking about are now so curious that you will soon follow with your purchases of it. Thank you all in advance.

And so, I’ve made my first foray into marketing Ghosts and Gold, something all authors are constantly told them must be very good it if they wish to be (financially) successful. It won’t be my last marketing attempt, but I will try to avoid becoming annoying. Fact is, I don’t think of myself as one who does well at self-promotion, so the marketing phase of Ghosts and Gold will no doubt be often and easily interrupted.

(By the way, I, Keith Dean Myers, am not to be confused with very successful author Walter Dean Myers...unless, of course, such confusion results in a sale of my book.)

One important lesson I have learned in my work on this book is something all not-yet-discovered authors surely face: no one (well, except maybe your spouse/partner, maybe) is as interested in your damn book as you are. So you just have to keep slogging along until it’s done. At least then people can find out what they were not interested in for all these many years, but now they will have to pay for it.

How’s that for marketing?

A Czech’s caution to our New World

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s most famous work is his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” He wrote it while living and working in the New York City (and vacationing in Iowa!) during the last decade of the 19th century.

Many hear in Dvorak’s 9th his wonder and awe at this “new” world, as well as his longing for his “old” homeland. Some suggest that Dvorak displays in this work an unusual-for-that-time awareness of the music of both Native Americans and African Americans.

I listened to the New York Philharmonic/Bernstein performance of the New World Symphony yesterday afternoon while walking the track at our gym. I drove there pondering America today in the light of the possibility of major war in the Middle East, and the often-unhelpful role our nation has played in that region for decades. (“It’s complicated,” as we often must conclude, and who am I to sort it all out?(

In any case, here is what I heard Dvorak saying about us in that symphony. Whether he intended to say it or not, it is what spoke to me as I walked:

Movement 1: America can make, create, fabricate, and dominate anything we put our minds to, and we will fight and dance through any obstacle along our way.

Movement 2 (the famous Largo/Goin’ Home movement): But I miss my homeland...or maybe I miss the agrarian life that seemed both simpler and slower, oriented more to growing things than to creating them.

Movement 3: Let’s dance furiously, forgetting the past and charging to the future...enough of longing and nostalgia!

Movement 4: The New World’s empire is heralded, replacing the empires of the Old World. America is No. 1, and the main minor theme transitions into a bright major in the last few bars...until a long, quiet chord ends it all.

It’s that final chord that always gets to me. Why doesn’t the New World Symphony end with a bang? It deserves a loud, dramatic, final statement in place of the slowing dying and decaying whisper it receives from its composer.

Long-time Cleveland Orchestra commentator Klaus Roy posed the final chord matter this way in the liner notes on our hometown band’s 1959 recording of the New World: “… Dvorak must have realized, as he wrote the words ‘From the New World' across the title page just before the first performance, that he was implying a tragic side to the vitality of this country, an atmosphere not to be explained away by ‘homesickness’ on his part.”

Is Antonin Dvorak, proud Czech that he forever remained, expressing second thoughts about his celebration of this New World? Is he, whose homeland has been subject to empire for centuries, uncomfortable with the prospect of American dominance of the world? Does he consider how white America has subjected the people of color who share this continent with it, and wonder if we would ultimately sacrifice our ideals in pursuit of wealth and power?

I think Dvorak composed that final chord for us Americans. He put it there so that, before we stand up and cheer our New World, we spend a quiet moment reflecting on who we are, on how we are seen by others, and on what we want to be remembered for in history.

That last chord invites us to think before we shout, to reflect before we react, to ask before we answer...practices tragically lacking in our New World, and almost everywhere, in these tumultuous times.

A generation of Christmases

This is the last Christmas during which our Myers family tree will shine its colorful lights upon the quiet wooded scene in the background. Shortly after the first of the year, Maxine and I are due to move to a retirement community a few miles north of here. No window in our new home will look out on a scene quite like this one.

We’ve celebrated thirty Christmases here. That’s about a generation. Our children grew up in this place, and are now in their own places, completely immersed in pursuing careers and nurturing their own families and friendships. We grew old here, and are now making the kind of move old people make on the way to the final good-bye. We are sad to leave this house, but eager to be settled in our new one. We look forward to making new friends and to exploring new experiences.

So, the generations come and go. The Jewish and the Christian scriptures are absolutely clear about that. No particular generation or time or era or epoch is the final—the forever—one. By God’s design, each is a way-station to the next, charged only with leaving this temporal world in better shape than it had been.

Maybe that’s why, at Jesus’s birth, the angels sang a song that embraces both the uncreated and the created, and that touches each human being. Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to all is a hymn that celebrates all universes and universalities, yet at the same time it is a tune as close to us as our next encounter with worldly reality.

Praise God, live in peace, and be good to all. That’s about it.

Okay, I can expand on it: Trust love, grace, and peace; live day-by-day truthfully and justly; and forgive yourself and one another when anyone screws up so you and they can get back to the high calling of trusting love, grace, and peace.

Our family will gather around this tree one last time in the days after Christmas. We have different ideas about glorifying God, but we are almost always very good to one another, and to the many other people we meet upon our various journeys. Because none of us claims perfection, we know a thing or two about forgiveness. The generation succeeding us contributes enormously to the common good as educators and musicians and neighbors and citizens. Something good started flourishing under this roof, whether we knew it or not at the time. We are grateful.

If you are used to looking for a Christmas card/letter from us, it’s not in the mail. You will hear from us when we are in our new home. Meantime, there’s this house to sell, and a move to negotiate.

So, one more time, from this home to yours, Merry Christmas to you…and to all.