No, Thursday's Out....

Quarantine ended! We moved in with the family. Life went from very slow to very full. In lockdown mode, England had no open pubs or restaurants, and only stores selling “essentials” could operate, so we were pretty home-based. But outdoor exercise was okay, so we walked around the neighborhood and to the park. (Rainbows everywhere! I thought they had found the Bristol equivalent of Portland’s Hawthorne district, but no, here it means, ‘We appreciate the NHS.’) We visited forests and National Trust estates and stunning (outdoor) historical sites. They all felt very safe and breezy and underpopulated, many with timed entrances and one-way loops on the paths. We went to the allotment and admired the view of the city, and picked chard and herbs. Most days were lovely. A few were cold, or wet, and still lovely. We searched for mushrooms, and found them nearly everywhere, and left them for the squirrels. We were made supremely welcome. We ate well. We hung out. We loved on the old do...

Time passed, ve-ry slowly…. We had a week of quarantine still to go, the election was hanging in the balance, case counts in the US were exploding, everything was frustrating. I wrote a couple of blog posts, and then I stopped. Partly, I wanted to avoid writing about our Sore Loser in Chief (also a Sore Winner for the past four years, as my friend Gary pointed out). Having lost, he should by rights be starting to recede in importance, to leave some more oxygen in the world for the rest of us. I wanted him out of my brain, my gut, my clenched jaw,   my nightmares, and my blog, which he had occupied for far too long. He didn’t deserve the column inches. But what else to write about? Well, I could write about being in England! But it turned out I couldn’t deal with the feedback. If someone expressed horror that we had performed non-essential travel, I knew they were right, and I fell into a shame spiral. If they said that we had inspired them to travel too, I was wracked w...

We left Portland on November 1, spent 5 hours on a layover in Atlanta, and landed in London on November 2. We were double masked (cloth over vented N-95s) and laden with tiny, precious bottles of hand sanitizer. The planes were half empty, everyone was masked, the air was circulating every few minutes (if you believe the airline propaganda) and every little air vent was on full blast, and the only sardine-like moment was exactly what you’d expect, those minutes before people could de-plane, when they all smooshed into the aisles like they always do. The whole rest of the flight, everybody distanced, but that smooshing up in the aisles instinct must run deep. We sat still, and left at the end of the line. Five hours in the international terminal in Atlanta was weird. Every once in a while, a few people would straggle by, and it appeared a plane must have landed. Otherwise, the place was all but empty. There was a display of local children’s art (extremely good), and another of pop c...

  I’m having a very Happy Thanksgiving - free of all historical context and colonial horror, just purely being Happy and Thankful– and I wish the same to you and you and you.   Thanks for being my friends, and my family, and my classmates and choir mates and students and teachers. Thanks for providing entertainment and distraction (and recommendations for entertainment and distraction) and good music and good reads, and online Trivia and a listening ear, and the occasional amazing fact I got to ponder, this bizarre year. Thanks for writing back! Thanks for saying I Feel the Same Way.   Thanks for walks and bike rides and safe hellos in the park or on the porch or the patio. Thanks for a new Administration! Health and hugs to you and yours.

We're in the UK, in quarantine, for two more days, and then we will graduate and be in LOCKDOWN. WooHOO.   Being away from home is often surreal, even without pandemic, quarantine, and the US election season, all of which feel surreal as well. Quarantine is painless, and the food is excellent, thanks to the groceries and takeout dropped off by our family, and we have a small outdoor space we can use, when it isn't raining, though, again, the rain makes the tree bark pretty spectacular.  But I would very much like to say hello to a random stranger, or maybe admire someone's dog in the park. There's a lot of time to play poker and read and rattle around inside one's own head, a perfectly congenial place, but still.  And here inside my head (or my gut?) I can't land on how I feel about the election aftermath. I feel vastly relieved by the election itself, and would like to have felt jubilant, and we did open a bottle of Prosecco, but there were no parties here wher...

We are in quarantine in a converted garage. We are warm, dry, safe, well fed, healthy. We have WiFi, books, pastimes, and a TV I can't seem to turn on any more.  It's neither despair nor rage - it's something about the remote. I am TV impaired.  We are in limbo. (Anyone with an interest in the US election is in limbo, so we are in double limbo, with quarantine added on.) OR perhaps we are in Hell. I submit to you that these cannisters are from Hell. They may be a sign. I have put them in the cupboard.  

When phones were attached to the wall, and answering machines were but a dream, the surefire way to get someone to call was to get in the shower. It was a pain, and inconvenient, and chilly if you grabbed a towel and ran to pick up before your caller hung up, but getting in the shower worked.     A friend joked that since I was 8 hours ahead over here, maybe I could just let her know what had already happened. Perfectly innocent little joke, but I thought for some reason I should sigh about how I might be 8 hours ahead, but I wasn't in the future. So then she had to explain to me that it was a joke, and I had to say I knew that, and we murdered the poor little thing. Okay, I murdered it. My bad.   BUT!  Feeling all contrite, I realized that I do have the power to bring things to a head! All I have to do is go to sleep, and give the perverse little election a way to push one more of my buttons. I can do this for all of you. It will be my gift to a grateful n...