Post-pandemic reentry

Reentering public life after 15 months of quarantine is a process. It is as process we are going through, one day at a time. Each day we ask ourselves and one another what full reentry will be like. Each day gives us a new piece of an answer.

My friend, Eric—incarcerated for 28 years—often pondered his reentry into society, and prepared for it, prior to his release in January.

Astronauts, trained and practiced as they are, must nevertheless ask themselves that question as they prepare for about their high-speed, high-risk, earth-ward dive back into our planet’s atmosphere.

Everyone who has been in the thrall of this global pandemic must wonder what it will be like to reenter a world more or less safe from COVID-19. I know I am.

Will I ever be sure the pandemic is fully over? (News that some are saying we will not achieve “herd immunity” may answer that question.) When and how can I safely return to where I hope I still belong? Who will be there and how will we react to seeing one another, maskless? What structures and institutions and schedules that were the scaffolding of daily living will still stand, and will I ever again have the luxury of taking them for granted?

We may be sure things will not be as they were, or feel as they used to feel, nor will we. More than human hesitancy will make everything somehow different and our responses to it all different as well. For how long will everything seem strange—foreign even—including myself as best I know myself?

My wife and I have eaten in two restaurants since pandemic restrictions began, and have ordered out only about a dozen times. But, after a couple of early attempts at online grocery ordering, she decided the risks of in-person, early morning, grocery shopping were worth taking. We last attended a live concert in August of 2020—an outdoor event, socially-distanced, masked, etc. A couple of weeks ago, we were actually excited to walk into Target, not to casually “shop,” but for specific, planned purchases. No wandering the aisles, just looking—something I have never been very good at anyway.

Being a cautious person serves me, if no-one else, quite well. Now the challenge is not to be overly judgmental of those who more easily throw caution to the wind, even if that wind might carry a virus my way. It would best to get through this reentry together, somehow.

We are watching our daughters for clues, just as they have been watching us for the past year, albeit from a distance. Liz’s unvaccinated school-aged children are back to in-person classes, being as careful as children can be. (But when they both had the sniffles over the weekend, they had to be tested, and were back to online learning until their—thankfully—negative test results came back.) Rebecca flew to Miami Monday for her first singing gig with a non Philadelphia-based group in 14 months. Though fully vaccinated, she must now quarantine for a week. We are talking about all getting together this summer, but where and how and under what circumstances must be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, and could always change. We will not rush headlong into family reentry. We are a fairly cautious family, I guess.

We will reenter slowly because we don’t want to be like the deep-sea diver who rises to the surface too fast and gets “the bends,” or like the chunk of rock from outer space that flames out when it hits the atmosphere at many multiple times the speed of sound. We want to make it home safe, and we think we will, given enough time.

But there are unknowns out there. In the one world we all live in, no one can ignore the horrendous toll COVID is taking on far-way India or close-by Latin America. Borders are porous when it comes to diseases, and COVID’s variants scare us. We move forward, slowly.

And then there was that email from our retirement community’s Executive Director late last week telling us that four people—two residents, two staff members—recently tested positive for the virus, and that three of the four of them had been fully vaccinated.

Reentry may be tougher than we’d thought. And slower than we’d hoped. What will reentry be like? How will we know when we are there?

Friendship and the delicate business of composing a self

The following paragraph from Megan O’Grady’s essay, A Shared Devotion, speaks to me. It was published in the April 18, 2021, New York Times Style Magazine as a reflection on the magazine’s theme—how friends who are creative people (or, creative people who are friends) bonded during the pandemic.

“I’ve come to believe that friendship—not the Facebook kind, but the real kind—is a kind of romance, and that its resilience to … unadorned truths is its test of strength. (“Better to be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.) At the same time, a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self—an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice—standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity—can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you. I think of Margery William’s 1922 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a young boy’s devotion makes the titular stuffed animal believe itself to be real—despite what the rabbits in the forest, the kind that hop nimbly about on their hind legs, might say. We all know the pain of having our dreams dispelled by pedestrian day jobs, student loans, family obligations and amiable philistines. An artist’s self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, our sense of the possible ignited by those who believe in it, and in us.”

A Prayer

 Last night, as my restless mind was wrestling with one of our world's many challenges, I picked up a little book of "Prayers for Peace," and happened across the following. It is captioned, "Those who frequented the air-raid shelters in Hull, Birmingham and Westminster (England) made wide use of this prayer." It is appropriate in our own time of testing: in seeking shelter, do not forget one another.

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in calamity serve one another, in suffering tend one another, and in homelessness, loneliness or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, till the disciplines and testing of these days be ended, and Thou does give again peace in our time.

Amen.

Guns, guns, guns, I'm so sick of guns

The peace and equilibrium of my home town of Grundy Center, Iowa, were terrifyingly upset last weekend when a 41-year-old man barricaded himself in a house near the center of town and began shooting. He was finally wounded and arrested after several hours.

During the standoff, the man shot and killed Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith.

That’s a short summary of a much longer story. I am telling it because you probably didn’t hear about it. I have not seen it in any national news sources, though I am sure it has appeared somewhere.

Who cares about one fatal standoff in a small town in the heart of fly-over country when there are so many other stories of gun violence for us to follow, right up until this very morning, out of Indianapolis? Even if a law enforcement officer was tragically killed? Maybe because both the murderer and the murdered were white, just like when Black people kill Black people? Who cares?

I care. I care deeply, but I fear we are on a train no one can stop.

That train’s engineers are the gun-rights’ crowd that never saw a gun it didn’t adore and thinks everyone has a god-given right to own. Their argument is that the only way to counter the danger posed by all the guns in this country is to have more guns in this country, an argument that flies in the face of facts and common sense.

And it seems quite clear that many law enforcement officers, who should be the best-trained among us in properly handling firearms, mess up with them, too. What confidence can we have a millions of armed civilians getting it right?

The Supreme Court’s (intentional?) misinterpretation of the Second Amendment provides unlimited ammunition for the gun-defenders. Not to mention that former president who encourages them every time he can. Or too many of our representatives, whether in Iowa, or Ohio, or Washington, D.C. Who or what can stop this run-away freight?

Don’t respond by telling me that I don’t know anything about guns, because I already know that. I don’t own one, and never will.

But here’s a thing I know for sure: I felt a lot safer out in the world when there were far fewer gun-toting “patriots” around than there are now. Will I drive home after our trip to the grocery store this afternoon, or will an ambulance take my body, bullet-riddled and bloody, to the morgue? I never used to have to think about that. Now I do, at least somewhere in my subconscious. Hell, I not only felt safer, I was safer.

And we are not a better nation because of it—whether we live in Indianapolis or Minneapolis or Grundy Center.

Republican election "reform"

I have been voting for sixty years, and I am not willing to watch our free, fair, and secure election process get dismantled in pursuit of fixing a problem that does not exist.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square, an election for which there is no credible evidence of massive voter fraud or election tampering. The Republicans lost the US Senate in the same election. Republicans won many of the House seats they won, and they won or continued control of many state legislatures, through gerrymandering largely engineered by them.

Every single person who claims interest in improving our elections must be willing to publicly articulate their conviction that the ideal election system allows and encourages every single citizen to vote, and that at the same time assures our nation that our elections are as secure and trustworthy as they can be.

Every single person who works to improve our election system must publicly foreswear any partisan interest in any changes to it.

The person, whether a citizen or an official, a Republican or a Democrat and something else, who cannot state and honor those principles should get out of the way and shut up. They have no business involving themselves in this matter. None.

Our democracy is at stake, and you know it. Fight for it.

Better than planned

In the summer of 1970, I drove east from Oregon to Pennsylvania. Packed in my baggage was my absolute certainty that the next summer I would drive back to settle down in the West for the rest of my life.

I had been a Westerner for only five years—three of them as a theological student in San Anselmo, California, and two as a youth pastor in Medford, Oregon. Compared to my native Iowa— home for my first 22 years—America’s West Coast was exotic to the point of feeling forbidden, a lingering remnant of Eden. My change in geography had begun the creation of a new me.

I’d be in and out of Pittsburgh in twelve months, yet another degree packed in bags stuffed into my little brown Cougar.

In twelve months, I was driving out West again…this time to pick up the things I’d left there and bring them back East, to Pittsburgh, my new home.

Things had not worked out as planned. Partially because of my own shortcomings, getting that degree clearly would require more than a year. I had successfully completed the class work, but the dean discouraged the thesis project I proposed and I fiddled away hours buried in Hebrew Psalms. I took on a new church job in the spring, considerably sapping my waning energy for academics. My new call was fun and challenging—the scholarly work, drudgery.

I had even begun to appreciate Pittsburgh,. I had made friends, and I was discovering and enjoying southwestern Pennsylvania’s natural beauty. The changes in me kick-started by living in the West were being refined and secured in the realities of America’s rust belt.

Then, in the spring of 1973 I met my wife-to-be. In a bar.

Our meeting had been planned. Another woman I’d seen a couple of times decided I would be better suited to her college friend, Maxine. She and I had arranged to meet for a drink at a spot near Duquesne University, where Maxine was taking a graduate class. When I arrived, Maxine was in the booth with my date, whose plan turned out to work perfectly.

Maxine is a native Pittsburgher. Our courtship introduced me to more of Pittsburgh than I had yet discovered. As I fell in love with her, I fell in love with her city, experiencing it through her love for it. We married in April, 1974.

Life and call soon took us further east to the D.C. area, then back west to Illinois, and finally, in 1989, east again to suburban Cleveland. Those who know professional football will appreciate how difficult it was for Maxine to agree to call Cleveland home. But she did, and we are home here forever.

Along our way we bore and raised two precious daughters for whom northeast Ohio is home, as in, “home is where you grew up.” They have not lived here for years, and likely never will again.

We considered relocating in the West for the first year or two of our marriage. But its lure was moderated by our growing sense of satisfaction with where we were. The birth of children and a deep desire for them to be able to know their grandparents and extended families soon quelled thoughts of moving any further than we already were from our roots.

Though the years, Maxine and I have often traveled out West. We have revisited my old haunts in the Bay Area and southwest Oregon, and expanded our shared geography to include other parts of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In the 1980s we discovered the desert southwest, particularly northern New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. We will never get enough of that landscape and culture. We once talked—for about five minutes—of moving to Santa Fe.

The West remains exotic and almost forbidden. I have convinced myself that if I had moved back, I would surely have lost my fantasy of its being Eden reconstituted. Home is real, hopefully beautiful, but often disappointing, wherever it is.

Every time I revisit my personal Eden—including our Eden-in-the-desert—I remember the time I thought I could live there.

Out of Town: a two-minute scene

 Out of Town

Ralph and George, two late-middle-aged white men, meet almost daily in the same booth at the local coffee shop to catch up on each other’s activities and the news. Ralph has missed the last three mornings because he had to go “out of town.” He is already in the booth when George comes in and slides into the bench facing his.

GEORGE

Hey, Ralph…sorry I’m late. Got tied up on the phone.

RALPH

That’s okay. I just got here myself. Ordered your coffee.

GEORGE

Thanks…you came back to town just in time for some nice weather.

RALPH

Yeah…I even walked over today.

(Pause)

GEORGE

So, where ya been?

RALPH

Oh, I just had to go help Dave and Sue with some home repair projects. I tell you, these kids don’t know how to fix even the simplest things.

GEORGE

Yeah, I know. How are they? Sue’s expecting, isn’t she?

RALPH

She is. Doing great. It’ll be a boy in May.

GEORGE

A boy! Way to go, grandpa! You’ll like that role.

(Pause)

But what a screwed up world that kid’ll be born into. I am so worried about our future.

RALPH

That’s for sure. You don’t know who you can trust…especially the folks in Washington.

(Both sip coffee.)

GEORGE

Yeah, and after everything we did to get Trump re-elected, Biden and the Dems are about to take over. They’ll ruin everything. I guess Wednesday night sealed it for them. Or Thursday morning. Either way, we’re screwed.

RALPH

Sealed the steal, I’d say. Trump didn’t lose; his election was stolen. That’s for sure.

GEORGE

I guess…but you know that I’m still not sure it was. A lot of things about it are questionable, but not enough to change the outcome. Biden promised the world, and lots of folks bought it. We just have to accept what happened, go on from here, and work hard to get Trump re-elected in four years.

RALPH

Hard to wait four years when we know he won last year. Everyone knows it. Look at all the accusations of fraud and cheating. You just can’t ignore all that!

GEORGE

I’m not ignoring it. But whatever may have happened with the election, you can’t justify what happened at the capitol Wednesday afternoon. That bunch of crazies who thought they would get away with attacking it, destroying stuff, and everything. Plus threatening senators and representatives… even Pence! There have to be other ways to make things right.

RALPH

Like what, George? The swamp is so deep and so dark. We can’t trust what seems to be in plain sight. We can’t get what we need by being nice.

GEORGE

So you think storming the capitol was okay, was right? I hope not.

RALPH

Well, no…not really. But when Trump gave that speech—did you hear it?—it’s not hard to see why people got so riled up. I mean, he’s our last hope of taking America back from the libs, and we aren’t a bit ready to let them take him from us.

GEORGE

So, you do think Wednesday was okay? I know you pretty well, but you’re surprising me.

RALPH

Okay or not, folks heard about the crap coming down in the capitol, marched up right up to it, saw people breaking in to try to stop it…well, it was—it must have been—hard to stand back and watch. Too much at stake…

(Pause. Waitress stops to offer refills, but they wave her off.)

GEORGE

So, Ralph…where have you been the last three days…?

RALPH

Not in D.C., George, if that’s what you are suggesting. I wouldn’t do that. My heart was there, but I wasn’t. Call Dave and ask him…

GEORGE

I won’t call Dave. I have to believe you.

(Blackout)