Life Has Gone On

 Back on March 22, 2020, I started writing a journal of this pandemic (titled “Covert Corona and How Chris is Coping”) (how clever). Over the past year, I typed nearly 50,000 words, most of which I never meant for anyone to read. As you know, if you’ve been faithfully reading this blog, I have shared some of those entries. Here are a few more of the earlier ones.

On Sunday, March 22, 2020, at 4:09 pm, I opened with:

You would have thought that I would have been all over this long before now, but every time I’ve sat down at my laptop over the last week, I instead got sucked into every news report I could find on the internet, as well as scrolling through everyone’s posts on Facebook, as if they would be sharing news found nowhere else.

So, here we are, March 22, a week into the full-blown reality that the pandemic which we thought would never cross our borders has insidiously infiltrated every one of our states.

 Later that same entry:

Here it is a leap year, and the first person to die in the US from COVID19 died on February 29. At that point, from an article I just read from the Atlantic journal, only 472 people had been tested by then.

Two weeks later, everyone was sharing, “this week we change the clocks, there’s a full moon, and Friday the 13th, it’s like the perfect storm.” I can’t make this shit up. On Friday, March 13, the shit hit the fan.

Entry on Monday, March 23, 2020, at 6:46 am:

I am sitting here in my home office, done surfing the net for now, done reading about COVID19 for now, and trying to psych up to get ready for work, not knowing at all what my day will bring or how long I will be there. Outside my window, four of my deer are mingling. Oh, two more just came along. They don’t have to practice social distancing. And they better not; they need each other for warmth and protection in the winter. Even though I see some of them bullying the smaller ones. Then there is my lame deer, who is not out there now. She knows she has to practice social distancing. Because she is lame, all of the others chase her off when she comes around.

I don’t know if this makes us luckier than the deer or not. Hopefully, we aren’t giving up on our elderly or infirm, or worse yet, just plain killing them off.

But watching the deer out in the yard, as the snow is gently falling, I’m reminded that life will go on.

 I guess the good news is that life has gone on.

 In addition to my random ramblings, I kept track of the running number of cases and deaths. On March 25, there were already 426,000 cases world-wide and 19,000 deaths. In the US, there were 54,816 cases and 789 deaths. In my state of Wisconsin, there were 481 cases and only 5 deaths.

Today, the numbers are worldwide – 119,000,000 cases, 2,640,000 deaths; US – 29,900,000 cases, 543,721 deaths; Wisconsin – 568,000 cases, 6,500 death.

It’s tough to imagine the year we’ve all had when you look at those numbers. But I’ll say it again, life will go on.

I still watch the deer out my window, and 

the lame one made it through last winter and this one. 

Here I am again

 I was going to title this “Yet Another Flashback Friday and COVID Update,” but I decided that was simply too long.

In addition to continuing to go through old pictures, scanning the decent ones, and pitching the bad ones, I’ve been working on my family tree—Dad’s side. Hence the pictures of one of his projects from back in the early 1980s.

My dad was born in Germany in 1915. World War I was ravaging Europe, and three years later, as the fighting continued, the Spanish Flu of 1918 reared its ugly head. More people died from that pandemic than from the war. Somehow, life went on, and my dad’s family welcomed another son that year, bringing the family up to three sons and three daughters.

I can’t imagine what their lives had been like. Dad never talked too much about his life in Germany. Sure, he was only nine when they immigrated to America, but he had a few memories he shared. His dad throwing him into the river to teach him to swim and how severe the poverty was for everyone.

I sure wished I had paid more attention and asked for more stories.

Hopefully, thanks in part to the internet – and maybe even this blog – our children and their children will remember the times we lived through in 2020 and 2021.

Not too much new on the pandemic front in my small town. The number of positive cases seems to be going down as the number of those having received the vaccine continues to go up. Our COVID shot clinic last Saturday went relatively smoothly; all our patients were appreciative and well-behaved. Though my hero’s cape is pretty threadbare, I was able to wear it for the entire nine-hour day.