HEAD IN THE SAND: DAY 246

  At William Jewell College in 1964, growing the whole person was the mission rather than focus on career training, that was what distinguished us from the state university down the road. I was a 25 year-old freshman. The only degree offered was a classic Liberal Arts, BA. It was presumed that students would continue their education with graduate degrees from other institutions. For me, it was perfect. My cloistered little world opened up like poppies in the meadow and I’ve been on a journey of discovery now for 57 years. 
In that first year I had to take two semesters of world history. Medieval History was the class that fit into my schedule, from the fall of Rome to the Reformation: it breeched two semesters and I could have dropped the second half for something else but I was hooked. The professor was my age, an ordained Baptist preacher, a baseball player, a great storyteller and my next door neighbor. I had absolutely no interest in anything Baptist but otherwise, we clicked. On the first day he held up our text book, nearly 600 pages. “Your reading assignment is this book” he said, “Read it.” His lectures didn’t follow the text but he always asked for questions on the reading; there were none, ever. He assumed, if you read the text then he could ramble with his own words, same story but on a parallel plane. 
After our first class, leaning against the porch railing outside our apartments, I asked him, “Is it possible for me to make a B without reading the book?” I was a slow reader, it wasn’t my major and I didn’t need an A. He knew I was married, a veteran and a baseball player. There was a need to keep the teacher-student distance but in private, we were peers. His answer was surprisingly quick; “Sure, be in class every day, take copious notes and study them religiously.” Tests would be mostly essay questions so I needed to have full command, my own version of the story and I could do that from lectures. 
I had never been a good student but at 25 I knew how to work. Unlike my classmates with academic credentials and study skills, I was on a trip like nothing I had ever experienced, like a parched sponge in a gentle rain. That shower saw me through those four years, through graduate school, through a career and hopefully through a few more years of putting one foot in front of the other. 
This morning I listened to a local radio program where the host interviewed an expert on White Supremacy groups. Interestingly, the typical white supremacist is not a poor, uneducated red-neck who feels disenfranchised. Typical “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” more likely have engineering degrees or something comparable. They can afford travel expenses to Washington D.C. to participate in an armed insurrection against the capitol and congress. Trying to pigeon hole the profile is difficult. What seems to be the common thread is a sense of presumed legitimacy and no reservations about using intimidation and violence. Where it comes from is hard to say but for sure, it has little or nothing to do with a lack of intelligence, education or affluence. I was not terribly surprised but at the same time found it particularly disturbing. Repeating something I have written recently, we all want to live in America but certainly not in the same country. 
Today I chose to bury my head in the sand and think about better days. Racism was rampant in the 1960’s but my experience there was one of naive ignorance, intellectual awakening and great hope. I find it uncomfortably disarming now, taking comfort in those days when such evil designs prevailed, like feeling good that your house had escaped the bombs when all of your neighbors homes had been leveled. Still, my experience and my story have led me to this moment and I’m in as good a place, both literal and figuratively as I can hope to be. There is no magic red or blue pill, I don’t live in the Matrix, don’t have to make that choice here and now. So I vacillate between the myth of freedom and tribal hegemony at its worst. Hate is so seductive, so empowering, so easy to fall into its snare. Ironically, those groups are well represented by militant, self described evangelical Christians. Words fail me, I don’t know what to say. 

I GET IT: DAY 344

  I can’t imagine a worse job than jailor or prison guard. Day after day they exercise harsh authority over human failures and sociopaths, but also against unfortunate victims of an error prone legal system. What would give me second thoughts is knowing that some prisoners were wrongly convicted, but not knowing which ones. What is more common in the courts than a man of low birth and no means being advised by his appointed attorney to accept a plea bargain, even though he be innocent? It’s not that difficult to persuade an unwitting, penniless person to take the lesser punishment if he believes he will be found guilty regardless. Theoretically, the system works and the innocent go free. But there are prosecutors who put winning and career ahead of ethics and justice? How much does it take to harden the heart against criminal stereotypes, with or without evidence: not much I’m afraid. To that end, a self perpetuating prejudice is guaranteed.
Last summer was a time of discontent with the killing of unarmed black men by police. I hope the resulting shift in both public awareness and opinion reaches critical mass. It’s not just individual officers who respond with inappropriate, lethal force. It is a flawed system where law enforcement as a body identify as entitled warriors, where self righteous purpose justifies arbitrary intimidation and violence against people they are sworn to serve. Those individuals are instruments of a contagious culture. A 14 hour workshop will not change the culture. If you keep dong what you’ve been doing, you keep getting what you’ve got.
Like a kettle of boiling water, the bubbles trace back to the bottom of the pot, to the end of the Civil War. In both North and South, fear of unchecked movement and organized activity of freed slaves was viewed as untenable. Government (state and local) quickly adopted policy and practice that have prevailed ever since. Racial profiling, Jim Crow legislation and extreme punishment served one purpose, protecting affluent white people and their property. Housing codes were specific to protect white neighborhoods and minimize contact between races. Common sense would seem to dictate that crime and violence flourish wherever people of color intermingle with whites. What else might one expect from unrestrained, morally challenged, subhuman black men in particular and from their culture in general? 
At the root of all white men’s fears has been the threat of a black man’s sexual appetite, the “Mandingo” factor. That fear was compounded by another presumption. Since the first slave ships arrived, white women have been viewed as inherently unable to resist the black man’s libido. That myth is so long lived, so completely integrated into the national fabric, it rages like undiagnosed cancer within the privileged white culture. 
For me, all it took to to jar my conscience was the peaceful demonstration at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama in March of 1965. The retaliatory violence was then, will forever be unforgivable. On that day, MLK Jr was elevated in my judgment from a controversial preacher to a champion and a hero. Then, recently, a very long list of blatant killings has come to a boil with Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor & George Floyd. Like salt in the soup, absorbed within the White Privilege paradigm, I still didn’t really get it. I had never been called on to bleed. 
For a long time, I have quoted some acquired wisdom that applies to culture: “. . . change comes slowly, one funeral at a time.” I don’t think racist bigots will ever experience a change of heart. More than we want to believe, there are many respectable white people who would embrace a return of slavery. But for now, clinging to the curse of white supremacy, a repugnant, mental illness, they keep on. The arc of history has been slow to move but it has been leaning in the direction of accommodation rather than subjugation. I’m thinking the funerals would be for old, narrow bigots, of natural causes, replaced by new generations who are not married to old, evil ways. Wishful thinking, maybe, but I keep wishing and I keep leaning. I don’t believe for a moment that my views will influence anyone’s thinking. What I’m saying here is just so I have it formalized, put down in words. I get it.

WHEN LIFE WAS SLOW: DAY 342

  I wrote a piece, posted it late yesterday and took it down this morning. I titled it ‘Numbers’ but ‘Scatterbrain’ would have been more like it. When I talk about people at large, I want to step back for some perspective. ‘People’ would be the subject and I would be a neutral observer but we really can’t do that. You can’t arbitrarily alternate between being and not being. People tend to believe and behave as if one’s mind is totally accessible and controllable. Good science tells us otherwise. Turning the mind on is like walking the dog without a leash. If it comes when you call and sits waiting for the next command, it’s not about one’s command. It’s about the dog. Another analogy would be, we seem to think we manage the weather when in fact all we do is carry an umbrella. 
I tried to link the idea with ‘Stream of consciousness’ which was akin to nailing jello to the wall. Soon after I posted, the word ‘Scatterbrained’ came to mind. That would be ‘unorganized’ or ‘lacking concentration’ if you believe Merriam-Webster. Right now, in the moment, I am experiencing some stream of consciousness, it’s off its leash and all I can do is tag along, calling out wistfully, “Here boy!” I think scatterbrain fits. I would remove negative, insulting connotation associated with Scatterbrain. Better to embrace the flaw as part of the human condition than to deny it altogether. Truth is that truth outs and I would seem even more scattered. Once off its leash, I stop writing the story and it starts guiding me. Then it might take hours framing a narrative, reaching a cogent conclusion, or maybe not. What do I know!
What was really driving my need to write was reaching the half-million milestone with Covid fatalities. With three hundred fifty million citizens, half a million doesn’t sound so dreadful, only a small fraction of a tenth of a percent. What came to mind is that anything/everything becomes more and more difficult to visualize as more zeros fall in between the number and the decimal point, on either side. I can imagine a stack of 100 or even a thousand coins but each additional zero compounds the sum exponentially and try as we might, half a million doesn’t visualize very well. Imagine half a million people standing side by side along the road, separated at arm’s length, finger tips touching. What would it look like? Put it in a relatable, visual context. The line would be 570 miles long, from Miami, Florida to Charleston, South Carolina. It would take 8 hours to drive by at 70 mph. It totals more lives than American military killed in World Wars 1 and 2, and Viet Nam combined. 
At its root is partisan politics. Many politicians want to minimize the devastating loss of life with Covid. Their sins of omission are too many, too much to rationalize with; it’s not all that bad - most of them were sick and would have died anyway, or - the economy is worth the sacrifice. The party that took great pride in personal responsibility is looking the other way. They put material gain and party loyalty ahead of a sacred trust that comes with public service. Even though the ring leader has been sidelined his faithful followers, 81 million voters, are still addicted to his hateful, self righteous rhetoric. They are doing what makes them feel good, what makes them feel right. That makes me sad. Whether we like it or not, we don’t get to choose how we feel. Sometimes I can focus on better days: Try to remember the kind of September, when life was slow and oh, so mellow. But sometimes the dog gets off its leash and all I can do is to go where it goes. 

12 MINUTES AT 375: DAY 336

  Back in the early 1980’s I was teaching Biology in a small, rural village in SW Michigan. For the most part my students would fall into one of three categories. There were overachievers who expected A’s on everything. From me, all they wanted were the questions so they could memorize the right answers. Then there were youngsters who figured, good enough is good enough. They hoped for A’s & B’s but could take a C home without getting grounded. Bringing up the tail end were marginal survivors who, for one reason or another, struggled to stay afloat. They just didn’t want to fail. The A-at-all-cost group preferred true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank questions. I included them but also a few story problems. They do it in math, why not biology. It vexed the overachievers but everyone else seemed to like it fine, it opened up all kinds of possibility; if you don’t have the right word, explain something you do know. Occasionally, over that 13 year gig, a curious, open ended mind would blow through like an itinerant sassafras leaf through a maple grove. The marriage of curiosity and The JoyOf Discovery is a marvel to behold. 
Studying arthropods (exoskeletons & jointed appendages) the grasshopper was our generic insect, both in the text and the lab. Lubber grasshoppers are huge, big as humming birds, maybe bigger. Dismembering, dissecting and identifying anatomy was easy, even if the formalin-preserved insects fell apart and got messy (formalin is toxic and they don’t use it anymore. Actually, they do virtual dissections now, you need a mouse or touchpad, not tweezers or magnifiers.) 
After we finished the unit, I assigned a paper: 2/3 pages, 300 words, hand written. Pretend you are a young adult grasshopper gone off to Arthropod University for your college education. Write a 3 day G-hopper diary. In it, include biologically correct details of grasshopper anatomy, nutrition, growth, reproduction, locomotion and behavior. You can anthropomorphize the story line but the biology has to be grasshopper correct. The stereotype-A students complained, said it was stupid, said it is a science class not writing, etc.  But everybody else welcomed it. Several influential, connected parents parroted their kids complaints but my principal backed me up. I contended, life isn’t going to present your kids with multiple choice questions. They will need to respond to prompts with an articulate, rational narrative. It required they create the story, couldn’t copy it from the text or an encyclopedia and that was the rub. They had to use content in a different way than they had acquired it. Cheating would be difficult, copying somebody else’s work would be betting that I wouldn’t read it closely. I knew very well, everything that required written content, I had to read carefully and leave footnotes in the margin as proof. I burned lots of late night hours reading biology essays and they knew it.  
Once, I thought I had an answer-sharing, cheating problem. I gave both Bio 1 classes the same multiple choice, 15 question quiz. With time to spare at the end of the hour I suggested, if they agreed not to share answers with the next class, we could exchange papers, check them and know how they did immediately. They all thought that was good, agreed to play fair. We did that, collected papers so I could record scores and they went to lunch. The next class did the same lesson, ended with the quiz but not enough time to exchange papers. What they didn’t know was; I made two different quizzes; same questions but shuffled in different order. No (a, b, c, d) answer for any question would be correct on both versions. The best students in the second group failed miserably and it was my fault. Got some pushback from parents on that too but mostly to learn just what I had done. Kids told them the quizzes were different but not how so. Once parents knew, I was off the hook. Even then, kids knew that in the real world, cheating is tolerated, getting caught is not. 
I do not miss teacher stuff and I don’t think I would want to be in the business now. The hard edge between standardized test expectations, prescription instruction and teacher culpability leaves teachers in the lurch and it would be stifling for someone like me. They get paid better now but the job is more like operating a machine, raw materials in, piece-parts out. By the mid 1990’s I was teaching in another time zone. The shift to standardized assessment was in the air but we had also moved on with the assumption that all kids can learn and we had to meet them where they were, academically, emotionally, etc. If the cookie recipe calls for 12 minutes at 375 degrees you still check on them. If they’re not the right shade of brown at 12 minutes, you leave them in until they get there. I don’t miss the teacher stuff but I do miss hanging out with my teenage friends. 

WELL-DIGGERS ASS: DAY 334

  I like to believe that I am patient and forbearing, especially with nature’s fickle (capricious, unexplained, erratic, mood changing) personality. For years, Conservative, Republican leaders have forbidden government agencies and departments from using environmental language in their reports, memos and press releases. Words or phrases like, global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, greenhouse gasses, energy web, etc., they think such verbiage suggests culpability and American Exceptionalism doesn’t want to deal with with transparency. Just like Covid-19, deny it, ignore it and it will go away. The worm has turned in Washington D.C. and accurate, literally correct language is appropriate again. Nature doesn’t come begging with its hat in hand, it makes its own rules.
It is mid February. For the past two weeks, temperatures have been running 30 degrees below normal: in the midwest it is colder than (be creative, you fill in the blank). From my early-years irreverent-vernacular I recall expletives about the cold, well-digger’s ass in Montana and a witches’ tit in a brass brassier but however one wants to portray the moment, it is too cold to be making light of it. It was -3 degrees at noon, up 5 degrees from sunup, headed down again to a predicted low of -11 tonight. 
The village idiot begs as if he knew something; “If this is global warming, why is it so cold?” They suckle from the tap at PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric’s propaganda office. Global warming is measured as the average temperature rise over the whole planet for the year, not about the weather at your house on a particular day. If it is unusually cold here in winter it is even more unusually hot somewhere else. Around the world an average rise of .2 F (two tenths) of a degree is huge. The V.I. doesn’t get it because he’s been programmed, “If I don’t notice it, how bad can it be?”  
We live in the earth’s biosphere, the thin surface layer of seas and continents. Roughly 3 miles thick, the biosphere is, by comparison, thinner than an invisible film of water vapor, condensed on the surface of a basketball. Outside of that thin layer, there is no life; none. Add to that, the survivable temperature range for mammals (humans) is barely 100 F degrees, from below freezing depending on available shelter to a little over 100 degrees. Keep in mind, temperatures on other planets range from absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) to (+ 880 degrees F) on Venus. They make our little 100 degree window look dangerously narrow. In spite of what the V.I. and his heroes say, collectively, we (civilization) are very capable of fu@#ing it up. Repeating the lie and making it familiar can not sanctify it. 
But if you make a living off of PG & E stock dividends or if you have already taken shelter under religion’s umbrella there is another option. You can submit to an all powerful, all knowing, angry, peace loving, war waging, forgiving, vengeful, punishing (male) deity that created earth on the 2nd day and mankind on day 6. According to that story the planet was created as your doormat to do with as you please. But you can never question the dogma of righteous authority. Preachers absolutely love being the middle man so keep the money coming. If you pass judgment you go to heaven (a wonderful place) but you have to die, dead, first. Nobody has come back from heaven (not lately, not from this life) to corroborate the promise but Faith (believing the unbelievable) would be sufficient to feel better about your doubts, at least until another time. 
I don’t complain when nature takes the path of least resistance, gravity works and so does inertia. It is cold outside but I have shelter and wool socks. Maybe somewhere, the god of tectonic plates and continental drift, of typhoons and lightning strikes, spring flowers in high meadows and bears waking up hungry in early March; that god would be easy to please. That would be the god of Two Commandments: Fix what you break and take care of each other. The all knowing, all powerful Lord of the church is at best, it fits the old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, . . . it is absolutely, too good to be true.” I don’t believe the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow either.
When I started writing I had no idea it where we would go or how it would unfold. I put down what the voice inside my head gives me and most of the time, it works. Without this bitter cold, brilliant fall colors on a warm autumn afternoon would be just another day.

SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT: DAY 326

  I read a self-help book back in the 1990’s, “Do It!” by Peter McWilliams. It was a primer for, Realizing Your Dreams. A good book up front, the last half was mostly Buddhist hyperbole. Not that Buddhism is bad but neither an I ready to chop wood and carry water. Anyway: what stuck with me was his premise, Do It! Realizing one’s dream certainly requires some forethought and planning but at some point you have to literally do something, even if you fail, even if it hurts. Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ is an awesome sculpture. Rodin actually struck a first blow to the big rock which led to another, and annother. That’s the idea. ’The Thinker’ has been thinking about it with chin in hand for over a hundred years. That’s why Rodin is a hero and ‘The Thinker’ is just his famous creation.
People mean well. They (we) move along with best intentions. But the smallest distraction can send us off in new directions. Human nature would have us attend fo familiar, simple, low level tasks rather than take on a high priority challenge: go shop for a new toothbrush rather than repair a broken friendship. In college, my mentor made us write a little adage in the margin of every assignment: “Do things in the order of their importance.” Maybe the best advice I ever got still, kicking the can down the road has always been easier than meeting the summons. 
The book’s best example, for me anyway, was: if you want to be a writer, you don’t need an agent or a publisher, don’t need a computer, a desk or a file cabinet. You don’t even need a good idea. All you need is pencil and paper. That is where you start, don’t think about it, do something. When you become a writer and want to get better or to sell a story, you raise the ante, set a higher expectation. I had been keeping a journal off and on (mostly off) for 20 years, first longhand, then typed, then it got sidetracked by something more important. O.M.G. - Something more important; that’s another story, too important to kick it down the road. McWilliams did a good job with the ‘Either-Or’ argument. Like the fork in the road, you take either one path or the other and life is full of ‘this or that’ demands. Processing that dilemma requires a presumption that, at the time, the action/inaction employed was more important than the other option.

     A simple rule of thumb would facilitate the task. If I sleep late and miss my job interview, then my sleep was more important than the interview. I can be angry with myself but had the interview been more important than my sleep I would have set an alarm or had someone check to be sure I was up in time. Obligations forgotten are simply less important than whatever was on your mind at the time. It is schematic, like math. In this case importance is determined by rank order. The brain can alternate and switch tasks rapidly but it doesn’t do very well, literally, multitasking more than one thing at a time. Whatever you set aside for the moment, something else takes its place. When you get back to it, it depends.
Tying my shoe had become more important than keeping my journal. So I took McWilliams at his word and started writing again, on my computer. I’m still writing. My goal is to be the best writer I can be. I’ve never made $1 profit from my writing but by definition, I am published. Selling your work is more work than the work itself, more than I’m willing to do. I pay someone to print my books so I can give them away. My career has come full circle, adventures in the learning-place rather than the marketplace. Writing has always been an avocation. The upside is that it belongs to me, not me to it. All things considered, it meets my need. If I want to be free and happy (and I do) then carrying deadweight baggage, material or otherwise is out of the question and Happy is like peace, whatever I’m willing to settle for. 

DANGLING CAVEAT: DAY322

  I love words. Without words, no stories. As much as we rely on body language it can only bridge a narrow rift. From rift to saga, we need words, lots and lots of words. I tell Story, I write and I read. For me in every case, things move ahead slowly with re-thinks, go-backs, re-dos and do-overs. Someone strings their story-words together on a page, from another generation, another continent, another century and you get their words exactly, not some other-one telling you about their words. Before the ink there was a pen or a keyboard and beyond that were hands and fingers, a working mind. Who ever might have imagined, I can close that switch and access their mind. From Marcus Aurelius to Charles Schultz, we can share the same page, in the same moment. Language framed far away or long ago, something clicks and it's magic. So I collect sound bites from many sources, quotes for any situation, words so right I wish they were mine. 
With pandemic still unchecked, stay-at-home has made YouTube a good place to dig. The longer this plague lasts, the more I have to contend with spam and propaganda. It calls for a new skill set, avoiding scam and deception without sampling the bait. But this morning I clicked on a link, “Greatest Quotes Of All Time” and it was irresistible. Would the cyber-quote-collector and the storyteller agree on what needed to be shared? Will any of my favorites be on the list and will others beg grace with appeals for faith and obedience? 
Straight off, an Amelia Earhart quote caught my attention with decisions and the path you follow. It was too long to be profound, more like a lawyer’s argument, . . . you can do anything you want to do, sort of a precursor to Nike’s, “Just do it!” shoe commercial. I agreed in principle but with a dangling caveat. Life is so interactive, so integrated, so vulnerable to random chance, nothing boils down to a single string of choices; to be or not to be. But this life, with all of its myth and protocol requires of us to live as if that were true. 
How about Leonardo da Vinci, not a bad source: “Learning never exhausts the mind.” Wow! New to me and that by itself is worth the read. Then, finding Will Rogers on the list was no surprise but the quote was unfamiliar. He said,“Good judgment comes from experience, and lots of that comes from bad judgment.” OMG, wonderful. How many times have I needed that advice and not been privy to it!  There were ‘Ho-Hum’ offerings, mostly spoon fed, condescending, wannabe wisdom. On the other hand, George Washington was a lot of things, some good, some not but he was a good judge of character, able to match the person to the task. His quote would be good for all seasons, all reasons. “Better to be alone than to be in bad company.” I think every young person should have that tattooed on the back of their hand. Monkey see, monkey do; you don’t need a compass to get George’s drift.
Samuel Beckket was born Irish, died French; a writer but otherwise unknown to me. Stumbling onto his quote I imagined a soft Irish accent that belied his words. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again, Fail better.” A good carpenter can drive a 10 Penny nail with three strokes of the hammer. Beckket here took six to make his point and it works; really powerful. The fact that I already hang my hat on the “Fall down, get back up” hook suggests we were likeminded. 
Certainly, by now, the YouTube, quote-collector has satisfied my reservations. Passing over lots of great offerings without second thoughts, being great wasn’t enough with this exercise. It needed to light me up. Notably, Helen Keller spoke of, . . . one door closes, another door opens: and Margaret Mead, another of my heroes commented, . . . never forget that you are unique, just like everyone else. 
I have a computer file, page after page of compelling quotes that I default to, reread, rethink, trying to gauge my measure. I never feel able to raise the bar but then everybody falls down and even if they all forget my falling down, I remember. Somewhere between irony and fantasy I pause to think maybe someday, someone will remember something I said and if it doesn’t light them up it might glimmer just a little. Sometimes I throw something up against the wall and it sticks. There is one line that keeps coming out of me. I haven’t been able to reference it and I’ve tried, wanting to know who to give the credit. Nothing new about ‘Journey’ being a metaphor for life or the idea that struggle supercedes success. But in that conversation I often end with; “Sometimes you have life and sometimes it has you.” It feels better every time and if I’m not the source, I want to know how it found me. 
Once you get started with quotes it’s hard to stop. Just when you think you have the right closer, a better one turns up. I should have rediscovered this straight off, could have used it for the opener. He uses the absurd to say one thing and leaves us to reason for ourselves, what be the case and what is not. Lots of famous, savvy, cool people could have sent this message but none better than Bob Marley; “Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”

NASCAR MECHANNICS: DAY 321

  Making it out of January is its own reward. I can tell, even if I hadn’t done the math; daylight comes a little sooner and lasts a little longer. Depending on the latitude, the change from season to season may be subtle or profound but the plants know. That little shift in the in the angle of the sun’s arc is a kickstart for spring. Underground, roots are working overtime like NASCAR mechanics on the night before the big race. January is extremely necessary, then comes February, don’t sell it short. Mom always said, “Don’t wish your life away.”
Groundhog Day, today, it marks the beginning of winter’s 2nd lap, then comes March and a sprint to the finish. The movie with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell turned out to be a classic. Remembered for its slapstick humor, there is more to appreciate than just the laughter. Murray’s character, Phil Connors begins the story a rude, egotistical, self serving jerk. Throughout his string of 38 déjà vu wake-ups he grows weary of his wretched self. Then comes the evolution, introspection, change and his emergence as the selfless, considerate, lovable Phil Connors. He gets the girl, they go back to Pittsburg and all is well.
What escapes you is that all of the other characters only experienced one of Phil Connors recycled days, the last one. On the screen they show up for every do-over but that’s all from Phil’s experience. There is only one night where they bid the asshole good riddance and goodnight, then wake up to the charming, gracious, way-cool gentleman it took nearly two hours of movie to reengineer. What a shock. It would be like DonaldTrump morphing into Tom Hanks overnight. I think of Murray rushing, time after time, to catch the kid falling from the tree. Then he tries to save the homeless old dude but can’t. That was where Phil discovers his humanity. His transformation was profound but the moviemakers were there for the laughs and that was all I took away.
Thinking about Groundhog Day I couldn’t, not see the Covid connection. Every day seems so much like the day before. For at risk, old people it is wash, mask and distance, stay at home. All the way across the spectrum, pandemic is unescapable. Even those in ‘Hoax’ denial are compelled to defend their bias over and over, again and again; dead isn’t really dead. The movie’s plot leaps from one pratfall to the next but it turns out that dead really is dead and the protagonist couldn’t buy another day for the doomed old man. 
Today is Ground Hog Day, 2021, the real one. I won’t wake up next time to Sonny & Cher (I Got You Babe) nor will I get yesterday’s news on the radio. It is a sunny day and according to legend we get another six weeks of winter but that’s alright. This is the month tree buds start growing. They won’t burst open with tiny leaves until April or May but they need February. It is their wakeup call and we all need that kind of good news. For us now it would be a safe, effective vaccine. Its roll out has been clumsy and troubled but nobody in this lifetime has been tasked with such an undertaking. Its development came sooner than expected but getting it into people’s arms has been a challenge. When it’s ready and available, so will I be. 
Valentine’s Day will fly by and March will have its bluster but better days are on the way. Masks and better hygiene will be with us for a long time. After all, the nature of nature is change. I have no illusions about “Good Old Days”. They weren’t that good. We were young and that’s what felt good. So, rather than good old days I’m going to feel good about February. Without it, March never comes and spring is just a daydream.