Year, New, Happy

Yes, I know 2020 has been over for several days now.   At my age my literary reflexes are a little slow.  Besides, 2020 has been a Year like no other, a year that requires some examination before moving on.  Oh, it started out OK … my wife, Muri, and I in a beautiful new home in our new home state of Utah, a few miles from our daughter’s family.  Selling our California house then moving had been an ordeal, and we’d lost my beloved Tuxedo cat, Claude, to cancer but shortly after arriving in Utah, we adopted Tyson, another lovable Tuxedo,  So on January 1, 2020, Happy New Year just rolled off the tongue.   But February of 2020 brought the first news of a pandemic and in May, a breast cancer diagnosis for my wife.   There would be surgery and chemotherapy and radiation (still going on) for Muri, and an out-of-control spread of a new virus until, at the conclusion of the year, more Americans had died of COVID-19 than in World War Two.   An incompetent, divisive president who’d managed to stumble along for three good years could not (or would not) deal with the pandemic, and  what would follow was the most divisive election in my life time, a national scene that for the first time made me wonder whether democracy can survive.  That was 2020.

And so it’s a New Year in which many of the things that made 2020 so awful persist.   Amazingly, people continue to resist simple precautions that could reduce the spread of the virus as my new home state has moved up the leader-board to become the state with the third most cases per 100,000.   COVID exposures and cases creep closer through friends and family.   Our soon-to-be ex-president continues to act like a third-world dictator, trying to overturn the election he lost with increasingly futile gestures and gutless members of the party of Lincoln disgrace themselves and our country by following along.  My wife Muri continues radiation treatments, which, while nowhere near as bad as chemotherapy, leave her tired with nasty skin irritations.  So what is so new about this New Year?

Can 2021 be Happy?   Well, there are hopeful signs.   Several vaccines are slowly being distributed and hopefully enough people will choose to be vaccinated to stem the tide.   On January 20th, a new president will be sworn in, perhaps not the dynamic leader I’d hoped for but a decent man with the capacity for compassion.  It would be too much to hope for that Donald Trump will go away, but at least he’ll lose his bully pulpit.  My wife’s radiation will be done by the middle of the month, and, God willing, she won’t have to deal with cancer again.  We live in a neighborhood we love with good neighbors and family nearby and years of distant friends we keep regular touch with.  Hopefully as the year goes on, we’ll get to see them in person.   And Tyson is sitting here next to me on my desk, helping with this post.   As president Lincoln once said, Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.  So, Abe, it’s up to me?   I choose to have a Happy New Year, and I wish you all (a few days late) …

 

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Tags: family, feel, friends, holidays, new year, perspectives

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