MARK TWAIN MAKEOVER: DAY 376

  I have been revisiting earlier blog posts back a decade, wanting to glean something that would give me a better feel for who I am and what I’ve become. After 4 years of Trumpublican overreach and a year of pandemic, I meet myself coming and going. Whatever it is that I’m doing, I don’t know what it means and that is disturbing. In my backstory, important (earthshaking) events have slipped past me without registering on my Richter scale. Correspondingly, grand scale human suffering can rivet attention on global tragedy only to drop out of the headlines the next day, making space for a quotable despot’s outrageous tweet. 
What would Mark Twain do? His humor, his wit and uncompromising integrity allowed him to roast his critics with scalding effect and a gentleman’s chuckle. Feeling good while feeling bad is no easy trick. Still if I could, I would emulate Mr. Clemens. If I could manage a Mark Twain makeover, it would make me feel better. 
But life is long (in my case) and good times have been many. So I can take some comfort in those better days, I just have to suck it up and do it. I have some absolutely great memories, awesome stories but storytellers need to keep updating our material. It’s a task, digging in old holes, remembering simple little stories that are just as rich, maybe more subtle, not so polished.  In August of ’03 my daughter got married. We rented a big house on the beach near Muskegon, Michigan, the whole family was there for a long weekend. I was the wedding planner: I know! All of the women thought I would screw it up but I spent a lot of telephone time with my daughter and we managed.
For about a year, I had been fooling around with a guitar. No lessons, just a friend who showed me a few things and a book. I wanted the guitar for a prop and just a few melody lines to go with my storytelling. About a week before, daughter Sarah dropped a bomb. She wanted me to sing in the wedding. “I know you’re not very good but I’ve heard you fool around and that’s good enough. I want my dad to sing at my wedding.”
At the time, I had a drama queen, daughter in law, self designated smartest person in the family. From a small, rural, 4-way-stop town, she was the best musician-singer in her school, in the church choir and very proud of it. The idea that I was the choice to pluck guitar and croak like a shore bird was received as a blunder of great proportion and a personal insult against her. In a subdued voice just loud enough to be heard, back turned but near enough, she repeatedly expressed her disbelief and embarrassment that Sarah would do such a thing and that I would go along.
My son and his wife were both deceitful, selfish, unforgiving and convinced they could control the other. I never bought into her cunning, coy-ploy and she wrote me off as an enemy from the start. At she and my son’s wedding rehearsal her grandmother asked us, “Does he know what he’s getting into?” My wife and I shrugged, compared them to happy drunks who would wake up with a long suffering hangover; a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Her father, a pillar in the Pentecostal Church, had sung at her wedding and that, in a convoluted way, figured into the politic. I never cared for him either but that’s another story.
It was a steep drop-down to the beach with a cold wind coming in off the water. I tuned the guitar at the house, not thinking about how cold weather upsets the instrument. My Taylor Big Baby was way-way out of tune and I never got a chance to warm up. The first chord was a ‘D’ but it sounded like metal being punished. My voice failed as well. Without a good note to follow, the words were lost to begin with but it ended and that was a good thing. The difference between my daughter in law and my family, we knew it was about family, not the primadonna. The song was, “The Wedding Song” (The union of your spirits here has caused Him to remain. For whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name,There is love,There is love) What I understood was; we all loved my daughter. She wanted me to sing at her wedding and I did. 
Thinking back on that day I smile, even laugh. It was a great day in so many ways. The primadonna’s union with my son self destructed two years later. As much his fault as hers, he is my son and I love him in spite of his mistakes but she doesn’t get that consideration. I would think every family has its lumps and bumps, and we’ve had ours. But none of us have ever not cared. Nobody has to fake it. So I remember a day in August, 2003, in front of God and everybody, I sent my fractious daughter-in-law a message and she got it. 
Eighteen years later: I have a much better guitar. Not trying to be something I’m not, a musician, I don’t play it, more like play with it. I don’t sing, rather I talk my songs and somehow it works, through a decade of professional storytelling. I still take comfort in making the strings ring, in framing lyrics to a forgiving rhythm. You can’t fool an audience and they have been kind to me. But that woman I don’t care to remember, something has to remind me or I don’t remember: and I do feel better than when I sat down here. 

SIT-DOWN-THINK-ABOUT: DAY 372

  When my birthday was more cake than candle, I took comfort in the fact that my hours and days were equal to the demands on my time. When that balance goes rogue and the weight of responsibility chokes off the moment like a cork in the bottle neck, all you can do is prioritize and push. Some things get done, some things don’t but you manage. Then there is another way, waking up with nothing to do but be thankful for another day. You do your morning ritual, text cute emojis to people you love and listen to music. 
Leon Trotsky was a Russian, communist revolutionary. He was never a hero of mine; most of his quotes sound like lame excuses, lending credence to bad behavior like recalcitrant slurs that escaped Donald Trump’s mouth. But one quote wasn’t bad, “Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.” The most unexpected, I wouldn’t go that far but you do notice it in ways that you didn’t anticipate. Still, I am bridging it better than expected. In my 50’s I was sure another decade was about all I could count on. After that would come decline and concession. At (80+) I hold hope another good decade could still be in the cards.
In his late 80’s my dad lamented to me, “I feel useless and I hate it.” He was very good at some things but like Trotsky, totally unprepared for old age. He was a good role model but the most important lessons I learned from my dad were, how not to grow old. His operating ‘normal’ was a very narrow, unforgiving path. When it went away, he had nowhere to put his feet. I figured, don’t be afraid to stray out of bounds, keep an open mind and wander a wide path. A glass half full, even a quarter full is cause to take courage. 
Forgiveness is wonderful medicine , it heals both the victim and the offender and, if fairly spent, forgiving the self is a double dose of mercy. With the best fairness I can fashion, I do that. So in that state of grace, even by myself and nothing to do, I keep good company. 
Tedium can be boring as hell and I can not overcome that. It’s like a bullet, maybe unbeatable but not unavoidable. Dodging the metaphorical bullet has evolved into a skill set. If I have a plan it is to stay in motion, keep moving, pay attention and treat people like I want to be treated. Material wealth facilitates privilege and a sense of control but without good health and rich relationships, it’s a hollow prize. For decades, psychology research has kept busy with happiness, what makes people happy. By itself it seems, selfish greed is not a good precursor. ‘Happy’ is not an Either/Or thing. It’s like the weather, with its seasons and hour to hour changes. My ‘Happy’ meter registers on the high side of ‘content’. I would nor refuse an upgrade but if not forthcoming, the life I have is good enough. 
I noticed a link on YouTube yesterday, there was another mass shooting, this time in Colorado, 10 fatalities. It comes on the heels of  8 shot and killed last week in Atlanta, Georgia. I don’t watch the news. I get more than I need without shaking the tree. Such violence will set off a predictable response for more, better gun control. But that outcry will be countered by firearms zealots. We live in a gun culture, no less than Afghanistan or Somalia and it isn’t going to change soon. After every mass shooting, the gun lobby rallies ‘round the 2nd Amendment and the NRA, waiting for the noise to lose its sting and so far it always has, lost its sting. They believe the solution lies in more guns. Everyone should carry, then good guys with guns would shoot the bad guys with guns. Arrested development, stuck in the 1800’s, vigilante justice, Billy the kid and Doc Holiday; how did that pan out?
I am rolling with the punch, aware that I can’t change anything that falls outside my reach. I can vote but we’ve all seen how divided government serves only half of its electorate. Again, with a long view of history, what resonates with me doesn’t make the news. Not a doom’s day prophet, not at all, but stuff happens and we shouldn’t be surprised. An E.O. Wilson quote here is more appropriate than Trotsky’s. “The problem with Homo sapiens is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and Godlike technology.” Too many people with competing, overlapping, incompatible cultures and weapons of mass destruction. More important, we’re all equipped with brains that are geared emotionally for a slow motion, culturally isolated, brute force reality. True around the world, it also typifies the U.S.A. Some countries do better than others and at our best, we would rank around the middle. If you are waiting for reason and good will to step up, good luck. That fragile possibility leaves the door open for hope; but that’s all it is. Today’s sit-down-think-about has arguably been a ‘navel-gazing’ reflection, maybe a little jaundiced but it comes with the territory. I could forgive myself but as both benefactor and beneficiary, it would seem redundant. 

A LITTLE NUTS: DAY 368

  I have been writing, off and on, for several days now. I have two pieces finished that are not ‘Bad’ as bad goes but neither are they stories I care to share. Come to think of it, this one could go off the tracks as easily as the others. I do not think mental illness is a problem because, whatever it is that I do have, it doesn’t diminish my quality of life or disturb anyone around me. Maybe using narrative will make this easier. The ‘Ugly Duckling’ fairytale should be familiar. Early on, neither parents nor siblings raised a concern but the ugly one sensed that something was, ‘not right’. In time, the mystery was resolved happily. The bird’s premonition was correct, something was not right. How about a true story: I have a long time, close friend who is short, 4’ 9”. To a casual observer, her life appears to be normal but not a day goes by that she is not reminded, “You are different. Something is not right and it involves you.” From reaching the gas pedal without having the steering wheel planted in her chest to needing a step stool to reach the back-bottom shelf in her kitchen cupboard, something isn’t right. They could build a car and kitchen cabinets to suit her but that's not how civilization works.
In my own way, I am like both the ugly duckling and my friend. I sense that my peers and cohorts are different from me, that I don’t mesh, don’t fit and that this world isn’t going to realign anything to help quell my uneasy feelings. A wise, psychologist friend told me, “Normal is an idea, a data point on a distribution curve. It has neither mass nor volume but we still try to assign it a measure. Truth is, we’re all a little (Nuts). So live! Be happy.” So I try; I live and be happy. 
That was nearly 40 years ago. Things change, people change and if you can’t update your hardware (brain) to meet the increasing demands of new software, you go sit on the porch and make small talk with a geranium. Over those 40 years, a simple (incomplete) understanding of human behavior has evolved into a much deeper quest. I already understood the role of (+ potassium ions) in the transmission of nerve impulses and how a fatty myelin sheath on nerve cell axons facilitates the process. There was no mystery there. Yet the fragile, easily polluted ground between real science and human behavior is a different story, and that’s where I needed to dig. From truly shaky beginnings (Sigmund Freud) to credible, reliable science (E.O.Wilson) the study of human behavior has become a science. 
What good research has uncovered and continues to reveal is that old, universally accepted, common sense beliefs were full of holes. The myth of ‘Free Will’, if not blown up is seriously fractured. Old school religion and politics argue passionately in their own best interest but, the writing is on the wall. Our brains function as two interdependent parts. One, the cerebrum, gives us the conscious awareness of rational thought, we think. The other, midbrain, is absolutely unavailable to the conscious mind. Everything it does, it does without our permission. We can not think our way into it or monitor what goes on there. What theologians/politicians hate is that, the subconscious, inaccessible midbrain is critical to decision making, either yes I will, or no I won’t. Before the conscious cerebrum can decide anything, the midbrain has to give its permission and there is no avenue for conscious input to the midbrain. You can not lobby for its approval in advance.
The best science can offer any argument is a probability ratio, not a universal constant. After tens of thousands of years of human civilization, we want universal constants. Even if they are grievously flawed, humans prefer the myth of universal truth and will believe about anything that validates us in that belief. What is more human than betting against the odds?     
Here I’ve spent nearly 700 words just framing an introduction. Telling the story would fill a book and I want to keep this under 1000 words. But with an open mind, ‘most anyone could appreciate my sense of not belonging, of something being, ‘Not right.’ In sports or business, competition is a good thing. Normal=average=mediocre and you are a loser. But in the cultural setting, normal is our ticket to the dance. "When in Rome, do as the Romans. . ." Extreme belief or behavior is certainly a weird, bad thing. 
So far I’ve followed the psychologist’s advice; Live and be happy. But it ain’t getting easier. I have written before at length about the differences between individual decisions and collective, cultural determinations. The properties of a falling raindrop change incalculably once it becomes part of an ocean; water is still water but something changes in a profound way. In the same way, our individual decisions unfold easily in private but are consumed by a greater force as we are incorporated into a larger demographic, community or nation. I look around my community/nation and feel, ‘Something is not right.’ In this world, (Monkey-see-monkey-do) is the prevailing dichotomy. That’s not such a bad thing in itself but with God-like technology and split second reactions, believing we are divinely inspired, rational intellectuals, fully capable of fixing what needs fixing; that is scary. Going there publicly, with my writing, it runs the risk of appearing too far out of the mainstream, weird for sure. My psychologist friend was right, we’re all a little nuts. If I roll with the punches and take comfort where I can, maybe I can appear to be normal. With a clever little quirk, I might be accepted as an interesting character. This is approaching 1000 words, a good place to stop.

WORTH THE INSULT: DAY 362

  “Frank, are we not of the same parents, raised in the same house?” He wanted an answer so I agreed. “Our father, was he not an ardent son of the South, true to the Confederacy; and our brother, was he not also a true rebel at heart?” I concurred and he continued, “How in the world then did you end up a God damned Liberal?”  
In the spring of 2009 my mother’s brother passed away, the last of his generation. My younger brother Wes and I flew to San Francisco, rented a car and drove to Turlock, out in the valley for the funeral and a long weekend with our cousin Alex and his family. That night, after the formalities and reception, we sat around Alex’s kitchen table reflecting, soaking up the glow of family bonds. His wife had retired for the night, leaving us to make ‘Man’ talk into the wee hours.
We were sipping Tennessee whiskey. Wes was on a roll, back for reloads at a pace we could not match. Alex side of the family did not have the Southern connection but he is certainly Republican and conservative. Out numbered, they had me at a disadvantage. Politics had never spoiled our appreciation for each other but even so, ’Jack Daniels’ had loosened up whatever inhibitions still remained with my brother and he wanted to have fun at my expense. 
I agreed with him, yes we were and yes he was but Wes wasn’t going to let me off the hook until I either confessed to treason or pushed back. He was loving it and even though Alex wasn’t engaged, he was loving it too. After several shots of Jack Daniels, Wes was giving a performance worthy of a Tennessee Williams script, of a devious, lawyer-like inquisitor. “Do we share the same genetic profile, you and I, or do you think maybe Mom fooled around with some sorry-ass yankee and you popped out?” The grin on his face was worth the insult. 
“My God man get serious,” I said, “you have a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology. You should be explaining ‘Haploidy’ to me rather than me to you.” The smug, wide eyed look on his face was familiar, I had seen it before when big fish had bent his rod tip bent down like a snow-laden tree branch and he began to reel it in. “God damn” he said, “tell me all about it.” and he drew another long sip. I skimmed over the genetics; “Sure, our genetic package came half from Mom and the other half from Dad but for you to think we both got the same two halves is an insult to your education.” I knew the biology but biology wasn’t his intent. He was shamelessly inflating his cultural bias. 
“Knowing you” I said, “I bet you slept through your classes and had your wife write all your papers.” I could see clenched teeth through his tight lip smile. I didn’t wait for a reply, “We both know the biology, genetics does control early development but by the time you go off to college, peer group influence carries more weight than Mom or Dad’s DNA.” He was slow to jump in so I went on. “For all of his socially conservative bias, in the work place Dad was a progressive, liberal, union man and he would still be today. Otherwise he would have died a sharecropper and neither of us would have ever cracked a book inside a college library.”
“So what are you trying to say; he said, “spit it out.” By then, we were both chuckling: we had danced this dance before, many times. So I spit it out. “You picked a back-woods, redneck college thinking KKK was Greek for an exclusive, Southern fraternity.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “and you went to a snooty, elite school where you took foreign language and philosophy. You guys had your noses so far up in the air you would have drowned in a hard rain.”  I had to say something, “That’s right and you guys were jealous because we knew how to use an umbrella.” If we hadn’t  been laughing, Alex might have thought we are ready to fight. Wes set his glass down, waved his arms and shouted, “That’s why I love you man, it was you taught me how an umbrella works.” He slid around the table, grabbed me around the neck and was rubbing knuckles on top of my head. Alex thought we might break something but the rough house and mock insults were well practiced ritual.
Two years later, Alex called to apologize, he couldn’t make it to Wesley’s funeral. I thanked him, told him not to worry, he didn’t miss much. Wes didn’t get to tell any off color jokes or insult anybody. After a bone marrow transplant, he died cancer free of a hospital acquired infection. My dad was right, the curse of long life is that you lose your best friends. You can make new friends but filling the holes left by amigos you grew up with, that’s not so easy. I have no sympathy or affection for Southern tradition. Southern culture resonates with me like chocolate covered shit. It may smell good but you sure as hell don’t want to consume it. We would argue that issue but like all of our arguments, it would unfold with hugs and back slapping. I do miss him. 

'ROUND THE FIRE: DAY 359

  Homo heidelbergensis, sound it out phonetically, like the city in Germany. These archaic hominids are generally accepted as the predecessors of Neanderthals and of course, to human beings. Their fossil record suggests an active time line about (give or take a bunch) 400,000 years ago. Keep in mind, the absence of evidence does not prove anything so you go with your best stuff and continue to pursue new, better stuff. But for sure, once upon a time, about the time our ancestors learned to control fire; I think it a safe bet they sat around a fire wondering, “. . . what the f#_k!” Why: and how does that work? I consider them to be the two most important questions ever asked: not the ‘What the f…’ but the ‘Why & How?’ 
Recently, from 1675 comes Isaac Newton’s famous quote; “If I see farther than others it is that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants who came before me.” Those long extinct, primitive, proto-humans would be in that column of thinkers Newton alluded to, stacked feet on shoulders, shoulders to feet, giants in their own rite as we examine the human pedigree. I am more interested than most in the long evolutionary stretch that began in the treetops, eating raw fruit and evolved to living in loft apartments, eating chicken fried rice. It took a while to stretch my comfort zone, to comprehend and imagine the mind boggling time span, millions of earth years. But I did and the payoff is grasping an undeniable reality. If the data were available, there is a continuous, unbroken, link to link chain that connects all of us with those giants, sitting together 'round the fire, making meaning. 
Genealogy is big business. Trace your bloodline back 7 or 8 generations, you get serious and want to know more. ‘Why?’, and ‘How does that work?’ becomes a personal challenge. Who am I and how did I get here? Send in a swab with some cheek cells and a check for a few hundred $$ and you get back an interesting story, maybe accurate, maybe not so much but good story none the less. Still, I don’t need ancestry.com, I know that an unbroken sequence of DNA donors has to exist. It goes back a thousand generations, nearly 20,000 years, to the middle of the last Ice Age. My one thousandth great grandmother had a name. She was born, grew up, replicated, gave birth and died. The fact that I can’t produce a photograph or certificate, that she has no documentation does not diminish her place in time or the significance of her being. 
Twenty thousand years is just an arbitrary number. Our paleolithic ancestors stretch back many thousands of generations and they all modeled the same legacy. No credit cards or smart phones but they were born, grew up, replicated, bore children and died. Their DNA may have been culled out of the gene pool by now but their link in the line is both profoundly inescapable and critically necessary. 
So I imagine a time when glaciers were melting back from the last Ice Age. Modern humans were crossing the Siberian land bridge, immigrants looking for better lives. They sat around their fires too, like their ancestors the Homo heidelbergensis, keeping warm, philosophizing, making meaning. They would all be blood related, suspicious if not hostile toward strangers. That predisposition was necessary. Strangers were few and far between and you would be competing with them for the animals you depended on for food, clothing, etc. Cooperation between strangers would have been unprecedented. 
Fast forward those 20,000 years: We pause here in the 21st Century to hold doors open, wait our turn together in line, invest in the stock market, all with people we don’t know. But there is the presumption that they are like us in some significant way. Not a great shift in human nature, just a lot more of us in the in-group with fewer commonalities. But it doesn't work if there isn't something shared; it fosters not only tolerance but also accommodation. Even at that, one simple divergence can upend the balance and create conflict. 
I keep asking why, and how does that work? I can’t take credit for the research or its meaning but neither can I reject the premiss. Civilization has evolved exponentially faster than species Homo sapiens itself. Are humans out front, stretching the envelope to a shape a better world or are we being dragged along behind, kicking and screaming? I think the latter. We (humans) really don't like change, a Stone Age attribute that we can't seem to let go. I can imagine those 3 or 4 paleolithic dudes sitting 'round the fire, trying to make meaning from what they see and what they believe. We in the here and now, we are standing on shoulders, on top of shoulders, on top of their shoulders like Isaac Newton, seeing farther than any of them could have ever imagined. Certainly, sooner or later, one of those Stone Age thinkers would do the math. Concerning the threat they perceived from strangers they had seen at a distance, one of them would have experienced a revelation: “Why don’t we build a wall?” 

DON'T YOU THINK: DAY 354

  David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times and a guest commentator on the PBS evening news. This is not the first time I’ve credited him. I’m sure he has chinks in his armor and makes mistakes, he is human after all. But his writing is meticulous and his opinions leave no loose ends. So said, I trust him as a source of information, of thoroughly researched and thought out reporting. Add to that, I find his moral compass and civil disposition to be close aligned with my own. A self described Moderate Conservative, he has changed the way I view labels. If the playing field was level, if Liberty and Justice were in fact, for all, then I could be a moderate conservative.
His March 4 post in the Times, ‘How To Love America’ has language that cuts to the quick and I want to share some of that here. He opens with reference to a child’s sense of patriotism, the feeling that we are not only special but also powerful and wonderful. That childlike feeling, that naive pride should follow a growth curve the same as flesh and bone but too often it suffers arrested development or fabricated denial. Quoting Brooks: “That kind of patriotism tends to play down shameful truths. It tends to bloat into touchy and overweening (excessive) pride.” He recalls a core American creed, ‘E Pluribus Unum’ Latin for ‘Out Of Many, One’. It was born of Founding Fathers, a ‘Self Respect and Common Cause’ that supersedes pride. 
But that sentiment doesn’t seem to resonate with the far right. They have adopted, ‘Build a wall.’ They identify as patriots but their narrow views demonstrate Nationalism rather than Patriotism. Brooks observes that it depends on a bitter rivalry with internal enemies, a tribal thing. “Nationalists base their loyalty not on our common creed but on common clan, in which you’re either in or out.” I like the piece because it is concise, pointed and I already believed it, he read my mind. I recommend David Brooks anytime but this piece in particular. 
It’s a great day. With the weather beginning to turn and Covid vaccine available, I think I see light leaking in. I got my first shot last week, feel like a puppy, nose pressed against the window, anxious to be off the leash. I keep telling myself that everyday is a great day, sort of defense against bad news. It reminds me of a fellow teacher back in Michigan, a devout, born-again believer who prayed for me, “Hey, I prayed for you this morning.” I let it pass and he would push the bubble. “What is it about the promise of salvation and a loving, merciful Father that is so hard for you to believe in?” I could ignore his proselytizing indefinitely still, he felt obligated to go forth and spread the gospel and I give him that. His last-straw effort, peaceful and well intended as it was, “You know, even if you were right and it is all a myth, it would be a wonderful way to live, don’t you think?”
That is my ‘Great Day’ argument; even if it’s not that great, it’s a wonderful way to live, don’t you think? People tend to find in each other and with life in general, whatever it is they are looking for. So I’m looking for the day to be good. Karma says; whatever it is that you put out into life’s mainstream, it will circulate forever and in its own good time, come back around and nest in your lap. What you put out there, it comes back to you in spades. When you look for the best in others, they see you at your best. Throw poop and find fault: don’t hold your breath, it’s out there somewhere, on its way back around. 

DRUNK SAILOR: DAY 350

  The Ides Of March, almost a year since I began this ‘Hunker-down’. In that turning I’ve lived alone, socially/physically distanced from almost everyone. A full year in limbo is a tremendous price to pay for someone like me (80+). I remember a clever metaphor that relates to something that has been taken for granted, then restored, revalued and cherished like never before, “. . . like a drunk sailor with his last dollar.” Mind boggling how one can take for granted, piss away a precious thing without a second thought. It adds another layer of meaning to the familiar axiom, 'That was then and this is now.' I remember every year from age 4 or 5 and they all ring of ‘Precious’. 
Life expectancy; at some point we all address mortality and weigh probability against possibility, knowing at the other end, there is an end; no redos. On this journey I bemoan neither the bad road nor the destination. Still, like the drunk sailor, I’m down to my last dollar and want to still have the last penny when I reach the other end. Do the math: a - b = c. You can calculate (b) today’s number which for me is just shy of 30,000. But without knowing when the last day (a) will fall, the days you have left, (c) is unknowable. That is a blessing; it makes every, single day so very special, so important. Winnie The Pooh and Piglet were walking. Pooh asked, “What day is it?” Piglet,“It’s today.” Pooh,“My favorite day.” Certainly today, and Tiny Tim or someone like him added, "God bless them everyone," (every day). Spending a year, hobbled like a pony in the barn, it cuts deep into a shrinking window of possibility. So this year on a short leash is a bigger deal now than it would have been forty years ago in1981. 

March 17 coming up, Saint Patrick’s Day. It will mark my one year, red-letter-day of Covid-lockdown. The next week or so will also mark Universal Human Beings Week, National Pet Sitters Week, National Women of Color Day, National Peanut Butter Lovers Day, Zero Discrimination Day, not to mention, Plan A Solo Vacation Day. It seems every day has has its own purpose.
Kicking the can down the road comes natural. When you are 20, you kick it as far as possible, caring little where it lands. By the time you log 29,790 wake-ups, you kick it just a short way and take pains to leave it with a good lie. The can is metaphor for this life, the lie is where and how you end of the day, the launch pad for tomorrow's journey. The kicking is for the living. Tomorrow is an unopened treasure, maybe even a mystery but in any case, I don’t want to miss it. I can’t speak for anybody else but for as long as this life is worth the waking up, I want to keep kicking it forward, even if just for a few feet and at the end of the day, leave it with a good lie.