Yesterday, we marked the second anniversary of Karen Marcus’s passing; her death from Covid in May, 2020, motivated me to start writing these periodic dispatches from the pandemic front. It’s strange how, in times crowded with events, your perception of time itself dilates. It feels more like a decade since leslie and I heard the awful news from Karen’s brother.

So much has happened since then aside from the pandemic: The fraught 2020 presidential election, the January 6 insurrection, wildfires consuming half the west, hurricanes of unprecedented ferocity, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the leak (also unprecedented) of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Come to think of it, this entire century so far has been overfilled with events: 9/11, wars in Iraqi, Afghanistan, and Syria, the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, the chaotic and bloody withdrawal of U.S.forces from Kabul. I’ve probably missed a few lesser catastrophes. Of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,  War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, the only one who hasn’t ridden through since Jan. 1, 2000 has been famine. The bright spots, like the election of our first black president, have not been sufficiently bright to lighten this dark record. Looking back, the 1990s seem like a halcyon period in distant history.

Some random musings and observations:

Although the pandemic appears to be fading at last, it is still claiming lives (total of 6.25 million worldwide, 1,023,952 in the U.S). We just learned that our niece’s boyfriend caught the virus, but recovered in three days. Still, it made us anxious for a while, and drove home the necessity to take precautions no matter how comparatively “normal” life appears to have become. Here in Connecticut, mask mandates remain in effect in hospitals, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and in some restaurants and businesses. I suppose residents in Arizona, our second home, would regard us as blue state pansies and fussbudgets. Our country, our society has become so hopelessly partisan that not wearing a mask or getting vaccinated are political acts, badges of  a perverse honor.

When Russian forces poured into Ukraine on Feb. 24, I thought it would take them a week at most to subdue the country.  I’ve read that a number of military experts thought along the same lines, so I wasn’t alone. How it pleases me, and, I’m sure, them, to be proven very, very wrong by the fighting skills and spirit of the Ukrainian army, and the Ukrainian people. As of this writing, the Asov Brigade is still holding out in Mariupol, fighting at close quarters in the giant steel factory that’s become a Ukrainian Alamo.  If they can keep it up through he weekend, they will have denied Putin the triumph he so desperately wants when Moscow celebrates victory in WW II this coming Monday with displays of military might. This event, celebrated every year, is both a martial parade and a kind of quasi-religious procession. Forty-five years ago, in May, 1977, I and other members of the foreign press corps watched it from viewing stands in the Kremlin. It was an awe-inspiring sight — squadrons of self-propelled artillery and tanks and missile carriers, thousands of troops marching by in stern formations, jet fighters streaking overhead. When the troops halted and faced the Politburo high up in a reviewing stand in Red Square, they  bellowed a drawn-out “Hoorah!” that rippled from battalion to battalion.It sounded not like massed human voices but like a roaring wind, and I recall telling a colleague, “Hope to God we never have to fight these guys.”

That memory was the reason I’d believed the Ukrainians could offer no more than a token resistance when Putin’s legions crossed the border, 190,000 strong. But it appears that the Russian army is a Potemkin army, plagued by woeful logistics, low morale, and poor leadership. It’s one great strength is its firepower, which, as we have all seen on the news, has pulverized Ukrainian towns and cities. Mariupol has effectively been wiped off the face of the earth.So while I hope Ukraine will prevail in the end, I temper that hope with the Parable of the Eleventh Russian (mentioned in my previous post).