I have just had my second booster shot, and fantasize that the next half-year will allow for more activity and interaction than the preceding months. But who can predict what dangers the next variant will bring. There is no way I can become sanguine, though I can dream of a time when COVID will just be a memory.
I don’t want to retreat to spending my days just watching Netflix and reading The Times. If I had the energy and will, I would try to break the daily pattern of my life at least three or four times a week, and either wander the city, attend a film or play, and visit a museum or the Chelsea art galleries. However, I still spend too much time sitting, reading and talking to friends in Washington Square Park, finding a relatively serene spot amid the cacophony and parade of drummers, beggars, bicyclists, drug dealers and addicts. It’s a park that is simultaneously alive and repellently chaotic. I used to see beauty in disorder, but public anarchy and dissolution just feel dangerous now.
I am aware that I‘m now 82, and I have lost one of my two closest friends, and another close Berkshire friend of more recent vintage. (Not through COVID, but in both cases cancer). Of course, when you reach your eighties that’s normal, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t grieve for those who have died, and remember the shared moments where we deeply connected.
At 82, I would like to see a public world that is no longer dominated by political and criminal mayhem. But that seems to be the way of the world — Russian soldiers raping and murdering Ukrainian civilians, and, on a different level, American cities witnessing countless shootings that seem gratuitous or brought on by real or imagined personal slights. (We are only around three months into the year 2022, and already there have been more than 107 mass shootings in the U.S.)
I am not asking for utopia, just a few years where there is relative peace and civility. Of course, I know it won’t happen, so I will have to satisfy myself with good films and plays, and some transcendent museum exhibits.
