76. Depths--and hope

This Christmas Holiday, some crazy in Nashville set off a huge explosion that rocked the city and the region—there’s speculation that his mad was for AT&T. The president, still fuming about the election, has refused to sign a bill that would  extended unemployment benefits to 14 million Americans for a few months—enough to get millions a bridge beyond Covid-times. In California they are running out of Covid ER beds.

 

And my granddaughter’s car, stolen on Christmas Eve in Portland, holding work clothes, presents, and a paycheck, has not been found. 

 

It’s hard not to focus on the meanness in the hearts of so many, the total lack of empathy and the black holes in their hearts, as we finish what has been a very hard year.

 

Calendars are just measuring sticks, but their days and numbers have meaning. There are paydays, workdays, holy days, schooldays, and the days that have been marked to memorialize the birth of a holy person, the end of a war, and right now, the end of a year. 

 

Years—the days that it takes for the earth to circle our sun, could start at any point along that circle, but in the distant past someone decided to start a few days after the shortest one, as the daylight—at least in our hemisphere—again grows longer.  

 

I have never heard so many say that they are ready for one year to end and another to begin. I too am counting down to the Wallowa Lake Plunge on New Years Day, the January days to inauguration of a new president, the days to the slowing of this pandemic and days to my own Covid-vaccination.

 

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It’s hard not to wish ill towards offenders: to want the people who refuse to wear masks to get sick; to want the Trump empire to fold and his family to be overwhelmed with a cascade of the legal tangles that have made them money and hurt others; to want the car thieves to drive off a bridge. 

 

It’s more reasonable to ask that all of the above be subjected to the law.

 

Small chance, big hope, that the president will turn magnanimous and sign the bill, and that the thieves will see the look on some poor child’s face, give her one of the presents, and drop the car off at a local church or shopping mall.

 

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