I reflected this morning on the impossible tale that has been my life, so far. All the sights and sounds. All the people encountered, the lessons learned. All the places I've been.
I supposed that, in the hands of a master novelist or great filmmaker, it might be possible to construct a reasonably interesting story arc.
A prideful fancy, I grant.
The world enters our third year of pandemic. Authorities now refer to COVID-19 as endemic. "Pandemic" is passé. In the new reality, COVID is just another danger in a perilous world. Like heart attacks and car wrecks.
The plague has swept the world, as it were castigating humanity for our profligacy and promiscuity. It is the greatest catastrophe visited upon mankind in my lifetime and may I never live to see such another. Everything has changed, is changing.
War looms. Environmental degradation accelerates its world-ending career. Societies are falling apart.
This is not without precedent. This is part of the human condition. Yeats expressed the mood perfectly, one hundred years ago.
No answers.
I'm 60 years old, now. Being a man of an analytical and introspective nature, I always make note of these mundane facts. I have a distinct memory of walking home from Shasta Elementary School on a warm spring afternoon in 1969, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and saying to myself "I'm 7 years old, now."
Back then, my own little ecosphere was falling apart and the world beyond was fearful and unknown. Fifty-three years later, equipped with the experiences of a lifetime, I still find it so.
