Wednesday, January 26, 2022

160. Fun

 Fun

 

Fun happens spontaneously, and the Pandemic doesn’t like it. The pandemic wants people to be measured and careful, and the people who do not want to live this way, the people who want “normal” life and choose to disregard Covid’s seriousness don’t have much room for emotions we normally associate with fun. Oh, I guess they have fun—when they are not listening to or making tirades about vaccines and masks, when they are with others like them. But as Covid and the fights over vaccinations and masking become prominent in their lives, there is not much room for fun.

 

Those of us who are careful and serious about keeping Covid at bay don’t have a lot of room for fun either. And our politics—like that of those on the other side—show it. We want the other side to see the truth and help us fight the Covid. We want the Democrats to get their stuff together and legislate. We are strident, which isn’t much fun.

 

Back in fun days, when I was in the bookstore and Chuck Gavin, my old boss at the Extension Service, was retired and hid a pack of cigarettes among the used books in the back room, he would come to drink coffee with Jack Finch, the retired school teacher from Imnaha and before that the head of vocational education in Alaska—with a time in between to serve on Governor Rockefeller’s Arkansas parole board. Chuck couldn’t carry his cigarettes because he was hiding them from his wife—a 70-year-old hiding cigs; now that’s fun. 

 

Finch was the avowed liberal, whose best story was about Rockefeller desegregating the Arkansas prisons. A big, white, farm boy complained to officials that it was nothing personal, but that with his upbringing and whatnot, he could not be expected to live with black prisoners. The warden found the biggest, blackest prisoner in the system and made the two cellmates. Jack would light up with a barrel-chested chuckle as he told it. 

 

Gavin was a Republican, and told any newcomer to the coffee clutch that he had me only five years at the Extension Office. Another five years and he would have had me wearing short hair and voting R. I always replied that I would have turned him D.

 

But for real fun in the back of the bookstore, we waited for Max Bauer, a retired accountant and jazz player who had grown up here, served in the Army Band in WW II (where band members had the job of retrieving corpses when there was not a band gig), and become an accountant courtesy the GI Bill. He’d recently moved back home to take care of his aging mother, her long-time lover, and a discarded husband who’d gone off to train polo ponies when she’d chased him out for the younger lover. He was an old man now, and passed the bookstore daily on his walks between the Range Rider card game and his basement apartment in his ex-wife’s house. 

 

Forty years ago we could make fun of WW II, the President, and the ménage à trois of an aging saxophone player’s mom—together! I can’t remember hearing or seeing one funny thing about this pandemic. 

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