After a week-long, 2,700-mile drive from Arizona, we arrived back in Connecticut last Tuesday, on time to mark my 80th birthday on Thursday, the 10th. Considering that 600,000 Americans, most in my age-demographic, have died of Covid19 in the past eighteen months, this birthday really was one to celebrate — though I’m struggling to think of myself as an octogenarian. Exactly forty years ago, on the occasion of another milestone, I took a test to determine how long I was likely to live. It determined that my departure would occur at 77; so I’ve beat that forecast. Quitting cigarettes 25 years ago most likely helped.

During the drive, we stopped off for a day to see my sister in Cave Creek, Arizona, then pressed on to the San Luis valley in Colorado to overnight with an old friend and colleague, Tony Oswald, and his wife, Jan. Oswald had been a free-lance photographer who joined me on an assignment in Mexico in 1993 and another in 1996 — a five-week journey through the Alaskan wilderness. From his place, we drove to Denver to see Leslie’s cousin, and then spent three days crossing the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the Pennsylvania hills before finally pulling into our driveway in the early evening of the 8th. I mention this brief, unremarkable travelogue because it was unremarkable. Masks were required in some places, but for the most part life felt much as it did in the Before Time, which is to say, almost normal. We are in the final weeks of the pandemic, at least in this country. (Inshallah, as is is said in the Middle East — Allah willing). Sometimes i feel as I imagine GIs in World War Two  must have right after Germany’s surrender and just before Japan’s: All over but the shouting.

Normal is a relative term. Political conditions in the U.S. are anything but, what with millions still believing that the 2020 election was stolen, that the insurrection of Jan. 6 was really a patriotic rally, that QAnon is a Delphic oracle of truth. We seem to be living through another kind of pandemic of irrationality. And still another — a surge in gun violence. I don’t see a vaccine for either one. Facts cannot cure people who insist on believing outrageous lies and conspiracy theories; nor will state and federal legislators pass meaningful controls on firearms (And even if they did, we would have to contend with a society in which drug gangs, extremist militias, and psychopaths view shooting people as the solution to their various problems).

And yet…And yet, I’m glad to be here, upright and breathing and looking forward to however many weeks, months, or years I have left.

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