Adios, 2020

          2020 was, in so many ways, "a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad" year, to quote Judith Viorst. I hate to say I'm glad a year is over, especially as I'm now 70. But adios, good riddance, au revoir, don't come back, 2020!

          And yet...blessings abounded. There was a pre-covid part of the year. On 1/1/20, we were camped on the water at Port Townsend, WA. We'd spent wonderful holidays with Doug's children, daughter Katie and husband Javier in Seattle, and son Andrew and wife Devon in Bellingham. It was our first trip in the 2019 Promaster we'd bought and had converted in Fort Collins, CO.  It performed brilliantly in the ice and snow. 

          And yet...little did we know that December 2019 was the last time we'd see our Washington children in now over a year.

Inspired by an Unposted Two-Year-Old Bit, But for How Long Will Inspiration Last?

     It's 12/31/2020, a "terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad" year, to quote Judith Viorst, that 99.99 percent of the world is relieved to see end. I sat down at my computer to check texts and emails, then decided I should write that post for our travel blog I've been sorting photos for, then thought, you know, you should take a stab at writing something in your essay blog. 

    Apparently I last had that idea on 12/19/2018, but never finished the post. It's actually okay. It's short. I tweeked it just a bit. Tweeking has always been one of the big inhibitors of my writing...among others, but I won't go into that, or the post will more than likely remain unposted as I get lost in revisions and additions then leave it to finish for another day—or year or two. 

    Herewith the two-year-old post, and perhaps next, a current one. 

     So we're putting on our Christmas card that we love for people to follow our travel blog. Then I wonder should I refer them to my essay and poetry blogs, too? Yes. But no, takes up too much room on a card we're trying to keep short and sweet. The rest of it is notes of our kids' professions, with a comment that they are stupendous in other ways, too, of course.
      I've discovered that I haven't posted to Riddle's Glenn in four years, when I celebrated having made it a year past my traumatic cervical spine surgery. There is some good reading. There are some valid thoughts, in my humble opinion. 
     I was listening to City Arts and Lectures on NPR station KQED out of San Francisco yesterday and my psyche perked up when I heard the interviewee, poet Eileen Myles say, and I paraphrase, "A poem is like a party. The poems on the page are the people at the party." That was it! That would inspire me to write!

A Year in Body Version 63.0

Safely under the watch of Guard Lamb.

Time. Scientifically, it doesn’t change. But it seems so variable, as in how can my sons be married, thriving adults, when there were interminable minutes when they were children? A year ago yesterday I became paralyzed several hours after surgery to fuse my cervical spine. I underwent a second surgery to drain a large hematoma that was pressing on my spinal cord. The anticipated three-to-five day hospital stay stretched to twenty-three days. Neither those days nor the year since passed comically fast or quicksand slowly. They weren't gone in a flash or interminably everlasting. It was a bumpy lumpy trail whose signposts I didn’t even recognize, let alone know how to interpret. 

Four Grandparents and a Baby

          I have a granddaughter! Since I still look at my sons, now 32 and 29 and on their own since college, and can't fathom where they came from, having a grandchild is truly confounding.

          A few weeks ago, Leah and her parents were coming to the Valley, as Andrew and Emily were going to a banquet. Andrew's best friend since middle school, Joey, er Joseph, was being inducted into their high school baseball hall of fame, as Andrew was last year. Grandpa John, Leah's daddy's dad, and Bonus Grandma Andrea, Leah's daddy's bonus mom, were going to babysit, and Doug and I were to show up the next morning for Leah time. However, as we were just getting back to the Valley from a visit in Seattle with Doug's daughter, Katie, and her husband, Javier, rather than going home to Visalia, forty miles southeast of Fresno, and driving back to Fresno the next morning, we asked John and Andrea if they'd mind if we stopped at their home for the night.

Fear

            I wonder what it’s like when real fear grips you. I’ve experienced fear, but never an all-encompassing, potentially life-changing or life-threatening fear. I hope never to experience that. In my limited exposure to fear, I seem to have a pattern of brain freeze, extreme myopia, and an absolute need to control, which tends to come out as anger. I don’t think I’d do well with real fear.

            My younger son reminded me this past weekend of the time we were driving in Missouri and it began to rain so hard the windshield wipers were useless. The shoulder of the next underpass being already packed, we turned off at the next road, then off that road onto a farm lane. I began yelling at my husband that not only couldn’t we see but we’d be stuck forever in the mud. I didn’t ask which part of the episode my son remembered.