We’ve been hit with a pandemic, just as many of us have feared would happen. It’s been worldwide. It’s still spreading. Even when we close this chapter with the help of a vaccine or herd immunity, it’s becoming clear there will be more to come. And it all seems to be tied to changes in the world we inhabit.

I’ve always known it takes Herculean ego to accomplish major feats, to reach that level of success. You can rise, well enough, by following rules and doing all that’s expected and always pushing to achieve not only something better, but any moment’s idea of what could be best. But to “take control” means leaping in such a way that elbows often get thrown, taunts leveled, or others’ needs ignored.

We were all inching apart before Covid. The husband’s new since last September. The nephew and his girlfriend are beginning careers, leading adult lives that make my being an uncle no longer as important as it once was. My sister and I reacted to the passing of our parents in different ways, and we’re still reacting to that.

We spent several days sleeping in an orange grove in Trapani, home town of the man who wrote Pinocchio, then ferried across the Mediterranean and got a cheap hotel in the Tunisian casbah. Mitch decided to head back to Rome. I lent him the last of my money after a secretary at the embassy assured me that a loan could be arranged for me to continue my trip. Mitch left. I didn’t get the loan and set off for Fez with about a dollar in my pocket.

Driving out Wittenberg Road from Woodstock for our dinner reservation, we zipped by an overgrown driveway. In the driveway was a small pickup. In the back of the pickup, hood up, was a couple making love. Butt naked. Missionary position, as if modeling one of those lascivious early-1970s zodiac calendars.

I’ve started noticing the way my friends live, especially those following artsy paths. I found the courage to ask them about their money. It’s not something we spoke about much. It turned out that wealth doesn’t accumulate from the work one does as much as I’d been taught.

I hear a growing number of towns have citizen pandemic patrols. Some jeer at such fears, but wallow within their own worries about the potential of a return to an Obama-like past. Or even the bad old scary days of the Clinton presidency.

My parents were born during the Great Depression. They passed this fact on in stories, habits, and objects. Until her passing, my mom would keep washing sponges until they disintegrated in her dishwasher, or the dishwasher would break from all the sponge detritus it had collected over the years. My father would take back Christmas presents he’d given and  then regift them.

The woman could make a friend of anyone. She knew the old families throughout Ulster, who dated who when, and who drank a bit too much or just plain couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t afraid of mixing in the down-home info with her coverage of meetings and politics.

I’d sensed rain’s power when I was young. At the moment the 1969 Aquarian Festival in Bethel became a mudpit, my parents got caught out in that same storm’s southern origins as Hurricane Camille. My mother ran our Virginia county’s welfare department at the time. My father had a motorcycle and was called in to duty reaching mountain hamlets cut off from regular vehicles. We took trips through the devastation in the family car well into 1970.