JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #8

I ran into a friend, Robin Baxter, yesterday morning as he was walking his dog and I was getting set to walk mine. He asked when Leslie and I were leaving Arizona for Connecticut, and I told him Tuesday, adding that it looked like we were getting out just in time. The...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #7

You can feel removed from the tumult convulsing the country in this small Arizona town, nestled in a valley between the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains, about 60 miles southeast of Tucson and 18 miles north of the Mexican border. No hordes of protestors surging...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #6

Today, June 4, 2020, is my and Leslie’s 32d anniversary, and we spent part of it, unromantically, at a demonstration protesting the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Considering that Patagonia, Arizona, has  913 residents and that...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #5

THE GLORY The Falcon 9 rocket rose with agonizing slowness from its launchpad at Cape Canaveral, then rapidly gained speed — cleaving the air like a giant spear trailing a pillar of flame. Within minutes, with two astronauts on board, it hurtled through the last...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #4

May 18 — This weekend, we attended – if that’s the right word — a virtual memorial service for our friend Karen Wessel Marcus, who died of Covid19 two weeks ago. It was streamed live from St. James Episcopal in Scarsdale, N.Y., Karen’s...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #3

May 13, 2020 We have been more or less sheltering in place at our winter home in Patagonia, Arizona, for the past two and a half months. I use the qualifying term “more or less” because in this sparsely populated region there is ample room to go hiking,...