Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Peeking Out from Under a Rock Friday Round-Up
Street Angels has its annual strategic planning sessions tomorrow morning. In the past year, Covid has weighed heavy on our team, hanging around our necks like tractor tires, making every part of our work a hundred times harder. But lugging those tractor tires around has made us a tougher, smarter, and more resilient group of people. It’s cause for celebration – successfully working around the incessant peril of the pandemic, never really missing more than a beat or two in reaching out to homeless people, and keeping our team together through thin and thinner. Being involved with Street Angels is a jewel in my life.
This seems to be the beginning of the end of the pandemic. All the indicators are positive (in a good sense). The CDC is relaxing its mask standards. We are going to things – like dinner and lectures. Soon, Zoom will be a convenience and not a necessity. But, sometimes I worry that I’ve got a titch of Stockholm Syndrome, that I’ve been held hostage by the pandemic so long that I’ll yearn for it when it’s over. That early urgency, the hunkering down, the making do – the pandemic had its little glories.
When I shovel snow, I wonder if I’ll know when I’m about to have a heart attack and stop in time. And then will I be able to make a quick deal with God or whomever is in charge that I’ll never shovel again if we can just forget about the heart attack happening. It seems a bit of a risk-taking thing, shoveling snow at my age, thrilling when I get done without dropping dead.
My husband’s people were from Ukraine. His story is that two brothers – one of whom was his grandfather – left Kiev (Kiyv) on foot to escape the pogroms against Jews in the early 1900’s. They walked to Palestine. One brother stayed and the other came to America where he later married a woman who had come from Ukraine to America by herself at the age of 12. That is an awful lot of fortitude and resilience. Watching the news tonight – for long hours, I might add – it seems those things are still flourishing in Ukraine.
A Black woman is going to be on the U.S. Supreme Court. It has taken forever. Still, I am grateful that a pretty old white guy figured out it was time.
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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