Five Years Ago, My 80th Birthday Year Was COVID-Canceled.

I won't let Trump ruin my 85th.

My birthday is March 21, first day of the Zodiac year and sometimes the first day of Spring. Because my family and friends are far-flung, I had planned an ambitious travel itinerary for 2020: Partay! with old friends in Berkeley, explore Chicago with my daughter, hang with my sisters in Nashville and North Carolina, my younger son in LA, and my cousins on Cape Cod. Finally, a month in France, where my older son lives.

A week before I was to head out on the first leg of my 80th birthday year, we went full-pandemic mode; all of us would be housebound for the foreseeable future—assuming we stayed alive. [That’s when I changed the title of my newsletter to Alive! with Joy… we weren’t dead yet.] I celebrated that birthday with a candle-lit martini, a dozen feet from my masked best friend in Portland.

Do you remember the horrors of those early weeks? We didn’t know how the virus was spread—air-bound droplets? body fluids? doorknobs? Do you remember sterilizing the groceries before adding them to your stockpiles? We sewed decorative cloth face masks before learning they weren’t strong enough. We quarantined ourselves—sometimes unwillingly. I remember howling with laughter at this:

Seeing our courageous health care professionals, clad head to toe in protective garb, wheeling dying patients to the ICU or the dead ones out to the overfull coolers in the street, scared me to my core. Whatever sense of safety we once had, it evaporated and we were suspended in limbo. To make a bad situation worse, we had a clueless president, first denying COVID was no big deal, then pulling dangerous cures (inject bleach! ivermectin!) out of his butt, before finally embarking on Operation Warp Speed to create a vaccine (I credit him for that!). Still, as a result of his dithering and promoting bullshit cures and America’s high rates of “vaccine hesitancy,” Americans died at far higher rates than in any other wealthy country. And Republicans were 1.5 times as likely to die of COVID than Democrats because they are more vaccine-hesitant. (And now, guess what? Once pretty much eradicated, measles is resurgent and spreading…)

Grand-daughter in France is now 10!

Five years later: in one week I turn 85. My travel schedule will not be as ambitious, but it will be ever so welcome—the country and my brain have been hi-jacked by a a different kind of disease, one that could become deadlier long-term than COVID has been. I’m talking about the murder of American democracy & decency & science & education & equal justice & bodily autonomy & freedom of speech that’s happening right now under the vengeful regime of Autocrat-Wannabe President MuskTrump.

Dammit! I did not want to go there, yet here I am again. I told you my brain has been hijacked. OK OK. Breathe, Joy. Remember that Rumi poem you love so much? Yeah. Can I welcome in these unruly guests? Or, “of what future are these the wild early days?” What wants to be born out of this chaos?

The Rumi reminder…

Do you have a poem or quote that cheers you in these hard times?

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Put Yourself in the Way of Beauty

More epimedium!

And an elegant gate in the neighborhood:

There. Does that help? Yes. Yes it does.