Thursday December 24, 2020

They don’t write songs like the ballad of “El Paso,” by Marty Robbins anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zBzZJd-nfw
 Leastways I haven’t heard any since I used to get out in the world, then I retired in 2017, and the onslaught of a pandemic of in 2020, has kept me pretty much home-bound, ‘right around in here’ within these United States. I have to go to YouTube for my music preferences.

 I don’t even go out on Facebook (as if I ever did) nor pay too much attention to who was elected President, for I’m still stinging from the election of the last one as though what I think matters at all. Further regret is not worth my study nor oxygen.
 

 It’s not like life is passing me by; my wife does enough worrying and stressing about all that stuff for both of us and I just leave her to it. We’re not going to change the world, though we strive hard to avoid it changing us too much. We deflect pandemonium that is spread by naysayers and doomsday prophets, daily;  that is, she does. I busy myself ensuring the farm tractor, pickups, and cars all run good; and the little walk-behind, and the tractor-driven snowblowers function as designed. She cannot do these things, so it’s a equitable trade off.
 

She talks on the phone every day to most of her adult kids, a younger sibling, and several of the grandchildren so to stay close to them as our together times have been so very limited this year; a sentiment experienced by families and friends all over the world. Our youngest grandchild of them all: ‘Ginny,’ lives some distance away, we observe on almost-daily postings and videos sent by her mother, my daughter, so our days usually start off with a genuine laugh.

 

Yesterday. December 23rd, a group of us four friends participated in a Zoom call initiated by one of them. This is second nature to three of them who are reading Ulysses together and meet once a week, but me, being the odd duck (same old, same old) has had but one poignant interaction with Zoom during my daughter’s babyshower, prior to Ginny’s birth. I recall being absent for much of that event too, even while I could see and hear everyone else; no one could see or hear me.
 

WTH, the absentee issue assaulted me again on Wednesday; though long afterward, with determined assistance by my wife, I think we resolved the problem after I uninstalled Zoom, shut the phone off, restarted it, turned off the Bluetooth connection, and reinstalled Zoom. Now I had important icons that weren’t there before -- and I could see myself on the screen. I have high hopes that I was awaiting recognition by a host, who was unfortunately called away, but promised would help resolve said issue before the next meeting.
 

That being said, seeing the other three participants and them not seeing me, seemed similar to stalking i.e., ‘hunting’. I was represented by a symbol, as seen above, much like what outdoor hunting experts suggest deer see when they look at us hunter-types dressed in fluorescent orange. (Best fact check that. It could be a "Really Dad" statement.)
 

Something I may have failed to recognize in the past that I recognized then, was that one of them was wearing a bright pink knitted ‘pussy hat.’ (Hey, that’s what they called it.) It practically leaped out from a background of dark knotty pine paneling, illuminated like a flame by the stark-white glow of the computer monitor. Conversely, his wife sprawled luxuriously, (presumably fully clothed), on their hand-hewn four-poster bed, the snow-swept tree-lined lake shore her background; she happily waved at symbolic-me.
 

The third participant, his hearing aids on ‘amplify,’ was at his TV room computer, a handmade Swedish hunting knife and sheathe at the ready in case he had to, quick-like, open any blog post fan mail that happened on the scene.
 

Switching to his iPhone to capture his always-busy wife in action, he showed us the several dozen Swedish krumkakas she had made that morning, in addition to all the bags of lefse she had baked. Then, walking to the back door of their house he pointed out the dozen empty wooden kegs that once contained a few hundred pounds of lye-infused lutefisk that his little woman had baked for the Roseau and Greenbush nursing homes. She can’t help but keep the culture alive, that one. Skål!
 

So it is, this Christmas eve day and night of 2020, all of us here are marked in some respect by this year of years. We lost Jackie’s mother, Delphine Kummer White, age 96, to Covid in April this year, such sadness; and two months later rejoiced over a new grand-daughter, Ginny Reynolds Erickson in June. I wrote about her in the almanac on June 11.

Happier holidays and tomorrows.