Lessons from grief

 

I was cleaning my car today, and looking for a second key. I had been leasing two cars, which was fine until my wife passed away, and I was trying to return one to the dealer.

Anyway, I couldn’t find Renie’s keys hanging on any of the hooks, and decided to look in her bag, which has been on a peg near the front door since I brought it home from the hospital, a week before she died.

I never touched it. The same way I didn’t touch most of the other things in the house, because every picture on the wall and every jar she left on the counter belongs there.

Some of my friends who have lost a husband or wife after a long marriage tell me that is a normal reaction. It’s good to know - I guess that if enough people act crazy, it means it has become normal.

Anyway, after a month or so, I’m trying to expand my world a little bit. I get out to stores, and shop alone of course, but I am talking to some friends and my children have been wonderful and caring, which makes me pretty lucky.

Still, when I hung her purse back on the peg - and yes, the extra key was right there - I said “thank you, darling,” and started to cry.

Which gets me to the subject of grief. I’ve been getting a master class in grief, especially the part where people tell you how much they sympathize and then confess that they just don’t know what to say

Which isn’t their fault. Somehow, the great, ever-changing and vast English language - and probably German and Dutch and Russian and Chinese too - don’t have the words.

I was an English major in college,  and know how language changes over time, as new people and new skills and new needs come up. There weren’t too many words to describe roads in the 1700’s when most roads were dirt paths.

Of course, life and death have been with us forever, but death is something we usually spend our whole lives avoiding. We mention it, of course - Ecclesiastes told us there is a time to live and a time to die - and it was written sometime between 200 and 450 years before the birth of Christ.

Avoiding the topic has left us without the language to really deal with grief.

Even at funerals, we find it hard to give comfort. And I have been to a lot of funerals, some of which I covered as a reporter. The people left behind - the spouses, the children, the friends - take comfort from each other, and hug or sometimes joke. And, they all share a quiet grief. Or, at times, simply cry.

So, what’s the point here? Do I have anything useful to say?

Definitely yes. You learn things in life, and you learn things bitterly from loss. Here’s what I have learned about grief.

There are levels of feeling when it comes to loss. And it seems your sorrow depends, almost precisely, on just how much you loved the person you have lost.

It seems simple to say, but we often forget it. The more you loved someone, the more you will go from sadness to grief to despair,  and you can’t control it.

It’s not a contest. There’s no reward for suffering more, and it doesn’t prove how much you loved someone. No one is measuring feelings of loss.

There is no good part to this, of course, but there is hope. It’s the realization that while it is normal to grieve, the simple act of sorrow is really complicated. Part sadness for what you have lost, and sadness for the things you never got to do. Sadness for being alone and sadness for not being able to share things any more.

But you can never be sad for what you had. Loving someone is a gift. Loving them over decades, changing with them as years go by, even arguing over silly little things have given you some wonderful memories.

And as time passes, other things should start filling your life. Simple things like going to the supermarket, or complicated things that involve doing favors for other people.

Some day, the memories that make you cry today will make you smile. The warmth they bring will never cool down. The stories you have, and the ones that will suddenly pop into your head, will be there to tell over and over, and a lot of people will never get tired of hearing them.

I know Renie would not want me to be eternally sad, just as I would not want to be the cause for her sadness if I had gone before she did.

Maybe this blog is for me, too. When I write something the words that come out on the computer obviously come from the back of my head, and maybe it is time for me to take some of the good advice I pass on to others.

At least I got to turn in one of my rental cars. Something accomplished, and that is a good thing.

The car I am now driving, the other rental, is a bigger one, a Toyota Rav 4. We used to take long trips in it, and Renie often slept next to me while I drove. I could reach over and touch her hand, or just talk to her even though she didn’t answer.

And, I can still do that. Trust me, it helps.

No Words

 

Lots of things have been going through my mind since my wife died a month ago.

As you might guess, those thoughts are jumbled. Really jumbled.

Many of them are sad, with flashes of pain and loss and hopelessness. Yes, I cry a lot.

But, there are flashes of great joy. Happy memories and an appreciation of what Renie and I shared for almost 50 years - an appreciation that I didn’t fully have while she was here with me.

I’ve also been talking to myself. Or to her. Or to the world in general, although no one is in the room with me.

I understand that this is normal. Some of my friends say it will get better in a year or two. A few speak from their own sad experiences, a few more because they have read about grief for some reason or another.

The joy and the curse of being smart - and I think I am - is that nothing is ever simple. Everything is complicated, and by nature and because of my career as a reporter, I have this compulsion to see two or three or four sides to everything.

Now I know Renie loved me as much as I loved her, and she wouldn’t want me to be so unhappy, although she would understand it. If she were here, she would give me an understanding hug.

And she would ask me a question. “Why do you keep saying ‘we don’t have the words over and over again?’.”

That’s a phrase I go back to in my monologues, a realization that our our society seems to have the right words for almost everything. A banker can describe a loan in a dozen different ways, a sports announcer can talk endlessly about a single play. Every Sunday, critics write endless columns about books and plays, recipes and government spending.

But when it comes to the biggest and most dramatic event in most people’s lives, what we have are a lot of sweet sayings on sympathy cards, or talk about God’s unknowable plans. Doctors can be clinical, friends can be supportive, and the burial is always the same.

How can I say that? Well, I’ve probably covered more than a dozen funeral services for my paper, and gone to another dozen or two because of deaths in the families of my friends, or Renie’s friends.

And it is final. The door is closed. This part of your life is over.

No one ever said how hard that is to accept. It is.

And yet, life goes on. I get up every morning, and when I don’t want to get out of bed, Chili and Leo - my two 65-pound Standard Poodles - help me do it. They push me, and I thank them.

Good memories come, too. Pictures that we saved on line, videos that bring back the past. The near past, the times long ago. It gives new meaning to one of the Harry Potter books, where he found a mirror that brought back images of his dead parents. I know part of me wants to just look at those pictures, forever.

But, Renie would’t like it. She would probably encourage me to work through this terrible time. Maybe even tell me to write about it.

So, consider this blog a kind of therapy, for me as a writer and you as a reader.

Go out and make some good memories - more than you have now - and you will have something really valuable. I have some flashes of very good times with my family, and I wish I had a lot more.

All my memories of the plane crashes and hurricanes, snow storms and late election nights, fatal fires and riots that I covered are in a different part of my brain.

Those things paid the bills for us. Going down to Washington to cover protests, or waiting at an airport for the President to land was fun, in a way, but I would happily trade a lot of those things for more memories of holding hands in front of a fire in a bed and breakfast in Pennsylvania or walking along the beach in Orient collecting beach glass.

And I will have those memories forever.

I wish I had better words. But, our society had done its very best for centuries to deny death, or avoid death, or put it in a little box so you don’t have to think about it too much. Not until it is time.

Now, it is a fact that language evolves. It is a living thing. It changes. I learned that when I was an English major in college. 

The corollary is that what we don’t talk about doesn’t grow much or change much. In short, you become like me - trying to say something and not having the right words.

Go make memories. They’re better than words anyway.

Sadness

 This will be very short. It is hard for me to write.

My wife, who I loved very much for many years, died two weeks ago after spending almost two weeks in the hospital. The doctors were good, and - in the end - there was nothing they could do.

It has changed the way I see things. What used to be important to me just isn't any more. I am not myself, because half of my life is no longer here.

Things may change for me again. I suspect they will. But, I don't think I will be blogging very much for a while, at least.

I'm Hooked

 

I was watching my grandson play the other day, and it was really interesting.

There he was, in a room full of toys, focusing intently on just one thing. Lego. He is a wizard at putting those plastic blocks together, and can do more with them at six than I can.

He played for close to an hour, then picked up his Switch, a Nintendo game, and was piloting a submarine to explore an alien spaceship that had crashed into the ocean.

He showed me the underwater plants, the exotic landscape, the sharks and other ocean life, and the little man he controlled in the game hopped and bounced and jumped as fast as he could press the control buttons.

My point? Well, he played and played and played. Two hours, three, four.  No crying. No fighting with his sister, just jump and swim and do all sorts of things on his tiny screen.

Which, I slowly realized, is what has happened to lots of us, including me. We’re not video game addicts, of course, just news junkies. Gotta see what’s happening. Gotta see what’s new. Gotta see how the other networks are reporting it.

We sometimes check the headlines on line. We could read the whole story in print, of course, but that always takes too long. A lot of us don’t really believe what we read, of course, so we do our research - let’s see what my friend has said about it on twitter.

That might not always be accurate, but it’s better than having to read two or three long stories and all those sidebars that tell us more than we really want to know.

Get it fast. Get it punchy. And, throw in some interviews with attractive people to make it more fun.

The amazing thing is, with a lot of us spending six or seven or even eight hours a day on line, there often isn’t any real news.

Which is my second realization. My blogging has gone down, and I thought it was just laziness. No, it’s not that. It’s just there is a lack of new things to talk about.

Let me explain, especially to younger readers who might think the 24-hour a day news cycle actually contains 24 hours of news. News networks just repeat earlier reports, which is actually a good thing to do. After all, some people may have missed them the first time around.

And real news - really honest-to-goodness the world is changing news - is getting harder and harder to find.

Meanwhile, you can tell when you’re watching too much warmed-over news. Last week I saw an outside expert on MSNBC talking about how smart Nancy Pelosi was being three separate times. He said the same thing, word for word, every time.

When I switched to Fox, I saw the same angry Trump supporter four separate times, complaining that Trump had really won the election. He didn’t change a word of his script either.

That, of course, made me think my complaint about a lack of new news was right on. After all, it’s hard to find something interesting to say when Mitch McConnell comes out against some Democratic bill, or when the Supreme Court upholds laws in Arizona or Alabama that makes it harder for minorities to vote.

Why? Because McConnell opposes just about everything. The only thing different is the words he uses. As for the court, McConnell gets the credit again for keeping a Democrat from filling empty court seats. We ended up with the Justices he wanted. 

Well, not much news there either. It is not news when you get wet going out in the rain.

And, those were the lead stories of the day.

Now I come from a time long ago when news had to be, well, news. At least for the big daily papers and the three television networks. Time and space were precious. As a print reporter, whenever I wanted another 200 or 300 words more for a story, it meant someone else’s story would be that much shorter.

Did we have a really good picture to go with what I was writing? Take out 350 words to make room for it.

When I did radio work, I would write a script and read it with a stop watch. A 90 second story had to last just 90 seconds, no more and no less.

Now, of course, we have networks that broadcast the same story endlessly - an hour or more of watching reporters in the field tell us they are waiting for a press conference to start, or pictures of a fire or a shooting scene looped over and over again. Then interviews with people who weren’t on scene giving us an instant opinion about the situation.

Well, we’re getting close to August, the traditional recess time for Congress. And the fire season will be in high gear for nearly half the country, followed by hurricanes that will come sweeping across the ocean to hit land somewhere.

Then, I think, there is an election coming up. Sometime in November, if I remember correctly.

No doubt I’ll see it on the loop. Over and over again. Along with those commercials that tell you what awful  things some candidate’s opponent did 15 years ago.

I’ll probably watch it all. After all, that’s what news junkies do.

Smoke and Vapor

 

I was at a friend’s house the other day, fighting an early Civil War battle with a half dozen other gamers.

Metal miniatures on an eight foot long table, enough social distancing to feel comfortable not wearing masks, even though all of us had been vaccinated for more than a month.

Still, one of the new guys asked me, as we walked to the front door, if we should be wearing masks. More a cultural and social thing than a medical inquiry.

Now, of course, the answer could be yes or it could be no. As a former President might have said “It depends on what you mean by ‘should’.”

Now none of us are scientists, although a couple of the guys are pretty smart about a lot of things, and our host is a retired high school chemistry teacher.

But, it was a nice moment to think about where we are, as a society, on the question of crowds and social gatherings, law and the mandates and advisories about wearing masks.

Simple answer for our wargamers, at least on that night, was that no one had to wear a mask. And, indeed, no one did. The same way no one has to wear a mask in a restaurant. Still, circumstances alter cases. In an operating room, everyone has to wear a mask all the time.

Our nation is celebrating the fact that almost half of us are fully vaccinated - the CDC says that on June 16, just over 41 per-cent of us had reached that status. We’re talking 146,456,124 Americans.

Now if you are in a ball park, out in the open, are you safe from getting an infection by someone six or eight seats away? Open air is better than a closed room, but still…..

That’s what bothers me. If you can smell the smoke from a cigar lit by someone two cars ahead of you in a long line to a drive-up window, than you are in the travel range of a virus.

Naturally, all of that led to a debate on game night, and our host - who used to teach things like molar equivalents and colloidal suspensions - sort of agreed with me. He pointed out that Covid 19 virus particles hang in the air for a short time. Long enough for someone to get infected in a crowded room. Think that’s a long shot? Well,  600,000 dead people say you’re wrong.

Those particles hang around a little longer. Hours or days or weeks. We haven’t even begun testing every surface under every condition of temperature and humidity and cleaning, exposure to sunlight, ambient airflow…damn,, but science can take a long time to do everything.

We don’t even know how long a vaccine will be effective. That’s because the clock only started running when people started getting vaccinated. Hey, you don’t really know that if you close your eyes and run across a crowded street you won’t be hit by a car. Want to do your research before you decide not to do it?

 But, transmission was an interesting question, so, I looked it up. It turns out that the Covid particles can hitch a ride on the ash in the smoke from a cigarette or cigar. They do rather well if they are exhaled by someone with the disease who is vaping. That big cloud when a vaper exhales is almost perfect for them.

By the way, none of us standing around the gaming table were smoking, or vaping. Not even coughing.

So, given the health data, our group was in pretty good shape. People who are fully immunized are not likely to come down with Covid. But that’s not a certainty.

The vaccines are designed to help your immune system activate and fight off the Covid virus. It will help you fight it off once you are infected, and people who are vaccinated will get milder cases and need less hospital treatment. But, it doesn’t mean they can’t carry the virus, at least for a while.

That means even if people are not showing any symptoms, they might still be carrying the virus and can still pass it on to someone who is not protected. Some people really will have to take precautions until we know a lot more.

Another interesting fact we don’t talk about very much. The CDC has found that the likelihood people will get infected in a closed room goes up if someone who has the virus stays in that room more than 15 minutes.

Why? The concentration of Covid particles goes up as they breathe.

So, be safe. 

I'm Still Working on It

 Consider this a progress report, in a slice-of-life sort of way.

There are far too many interesting things going on in the world for me not to blog about them, but it looks like it will take me a couple of weeks more before I can reclaim my old files, resurrect my old ideas for blog topics (nothing really changes, sadly) and regain my computer sanity.

So, let me tell you where I have been and where I am going with my blogging. It will make you almost as much an insider into my blogging as I am.

I used to have lots of files on my desktop, all of them in highly visible folders. I could click each one to check on their contents, with a lot of data carefully selected from various sources, and regularly updated. Of course, I was mocked by my computer-savvy children, for wasting memory and display space.

Still, it worked for me.

None of this means very much when it comes to talking about the fast-growing suicide of the Republican Party’s leadership or the growing “every man (and woman) a King” attitude among some Democrats in Congress. Still, those were two subjects I had created thick files on. After all, history is an interesting thing. 

Now I can’t get to them, and that very much effects how I blog. 

Let me show you what I mean.

I recently wanted to do a blog on the use of language by Congressional Republicans - particularly the crowd that declared the assault on the Capitol to be nothing more than a walk through a park on a nice summer’s day.

Now, when I start to write, I usually look up some facts. It’s nice to know what I’m talking about.

So I started looking up Republicans who denied there actually was an attack on the Capital (more than you would think), and the number who have made that denial important to their fund-raising and their political future. And, one of my files contained lots of other denials, and how they ended badly. Ever hear about Neville Chamberlin and his assurances he had successfully negotiated with Adolph Hitler for peace in our time.

Of course, another thought immediately popped into my head - an old saying: Nothing is harder than getting a man to realize something is false when his well-paying job depends on his not knowing it. Or words to that effect. If only I could find my file.

I started looking for the quote again, and it turned out I was close, The author was Upton Sinclair, and the exact phrase was “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Normally I would have put that in a working file, along with the blog I started to write, and then thought about it some more. Instead, I started trying to create a new working file on my desktop, spent about 15 minutes trying, then went out and watered the lawn.

When I came back to the blog, I was thinking of other people who talked about political conflict, and naturally Will Rogers came to mind. For my younger readers, I have a very old mind.

(That comes from dealing with a teenage granddaughter who really doesn’t know who Cary Grant was. Black and white movies don’t exist in her world, and she never discovered North by Northwest. Her loss.)

Anyway, Will Rogers.

I realize that a lot of people don’t know much about him, since he was born in 1879 and died in 1935. They do recognize the name in Oklahoma, where about two million people a year fly out of Will Rogers Airport.

Anyway, he was popular. Stage and film actor, columnist in more than 100 newspapers, radio host before television was invented, humorist and what today would be called a social commentator. And a Cherokee Indian. A political influencer for decades.

Two of his observations are still with us, even if he doesn’t get credit for them - “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”

Some of his other observations have been forgotten.

- "A Congressman is never any better than his roads, and sometimes worse."

- We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."

- "If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'."

As French journalist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”.  (Just showing off. I had to look it up. It translates as "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Well, naturally, I would have put this all in a folder on my desktop, something I am painfully learning how to do. That effort led to a healthy debate in my family about Macs and PC’s, and which ones are better.

But leaving that aside, the thoughts about values naturally led to the question of just what we value as a nation. Five more folders about Black Lives Matter, Coronavirus and government-ordered shutdowns, the fact that millions of people have lost money over the past year while the top 10-percenters have been raking money in, financial and health care inequality and the real meaning of infrastructure in the 21’s century.

Don’t think that last one is worth looking at? Well, I have really missed searching the internet for some topics I want to write about, even though I actually can do it on my tablet and smart phone, just not as easily. And, I can’t put the things I learn in a convenient desktop folder. I know I am repeating myself, but it’s still true.

Even today, about six percent of the United States population - around 19 million people - do not have fixed broadband access at adequate speed, and an estimated 14.5 million of them live in rural areas, which is certainly not equal opportunity for all. Want to live with dial-up for your modem?

Getting broad access to internet for the entire country is, at least for me, as vital as getting our interstate highways and bridges back to functioning condition. If you doubt how big a job that will be, just look it up.

All this was supposed to be the run-up to the main point of the blog I was working on before some barely-visible speck in a tiny part of my computer failed to work the way it should. A hardware problem that required the replacement of a board. Which was done very easily, so thank you Genius Bar.

Now, to the point I have been building up to. We, as a nation, seem to be worrying about the wrong things. I’ll tell you why later.

How do I know what we worry about? Well, I talk to people. I listen to politicians stroking the flames public anger. I watch the news. And I look at how much we spend on things.

Worry about Covid? Well, we spent more than $5 billion in the past year on medical research involving coronavirus, and it killed about 600,000 people  out of the 33 million cases reported in the United States. Worldwide, there were 164 million cases and about 3.4 million deaths.

We spent about the same amount in research on heart disease, which killed twice as many people. Getting everyone to exercise, cut back on fatty foods and lose some weight would save a lot of money - in the U.S about one person in three is clinically overweight and another one in three meets the medical definition of obese.

What else do we worry about? Well, a lot of people get upset when they fly or take a train, even though the safety record for those modes of transportation is far better than driving. That’s because they feel they have no control once they are in a passenger seat.

The same thing could apply to police shootings of blacks and other minorities. Whites just don’t have the same reason to be concerned when they are stopped by police officer, because you rarely hear of a police officer killing a white driver who was pulled over for a traffic stop. It’s a racial control thing.

There is a deeply bitter joke that whites involved in a mass shooting are more likely to commit suicide than be killed by police. It’s actually hard to know how true this is, since different police departments handle statistics in different ways.

Well, we can always look to our political leaders to help us figure out what to worry about. After all, the things we care about the most show what we value as a nation. I think Will Rogers said something like that.

So, the fighting and killing in Israel and the Gaza Strip, or the still-spreading Coronavirus across much of the world. Or maybe the economy, or the growing national debt? Health care for all, infrastructure, when will we be able to stop wearing masks?

And what’s this about those bamboo ballots in Arizona? I don’t even think that bamboo grew there.

Just wait until I recover my files.

Yep.my computer did me in.

 Sorry to be off-line for so long. Computer problems. Just imagine not being able to get on line for weeks. Wait, that might be a blessing.  Will file something again soon. I have a lot of password changes to deal with first.

An Empty Field

 

A friend of mine posted a video on facebook recently which  meant a lot to me. So, thanks a lot.

I’ll share it with you -  not the video, which most people would find a little boring, even though it only lasts a couple of minutes  - but what it means.

What you see is a camera panning across an empty field. A big empty field in a commercial/industrial area, one that has obviously been leveled by bulldozers to prepare for some new construction.

There’s no sign of what was there before. No sign of the big white 414,000 square foot building with the big NEWSDAY sign proudly announcing the home of suburban journalism in America.

No presses. No classified advertising department. No cafeteria. No circulation trucks. No newsroom. Just a big open field.

Of course, it won’t be empty for long. A new $190 million dollar construction project is going up. It won’t be as grand as the old Newsday building, just two warehouses totaling 945,000 square feet.

Hartz Mountain paid $54 million to buy the old Newsday property, but the Suffolk Industrial Development Authority gave the company $16.8 million in tax breaks, to help meet what it called a “very healthy demand for warehousing and distribution space…”

What went unsaid is that there was no longer a very healthy demand for a very good local newspaper, a daily that had the resources to cover towns and villages, counties and state and federal governments. Over the years, there were investigations  of businesses and utilities, scandals to expose, corruption to unearth.

In the china cabinet in my dining room, there is a small plexiglass plaque showing that my old paper won a Pulitzer Prize for covering a really big plane crash. It was really an editor’s story, although me and a lot of other reporters worked on and off for months trying to find out everything about the crash and its impact. A couple of reporters spent a year or more on it.

Eventually, the crash changed the way airlines handle fuel vapors in near-empty tanks. Probably saved hundreds of lives around the world - maybe more.

But, that was old-school journalism, a time when people actually had to wait a whole day to find out what was news. Now we have on-line web feeds, news from Facebook, competing with all those cute pictures. And floods of opinions from no one knows where.

I live in an aging part of New York State, where most people think they are computer literate and also say they won’t take a Covid vaccine until they do more research. I will never get to ask them which genetic sequences they are looking into, or how to explain just what efficacy means. Or even how control groups are monitored. Not even how to get that data on their tablet or their facebook account.

No, there is no room for that stuff any more. No room for a newspaper that offered much of it to hundreds of thousands of readers every day.

Just a big empty field. Makes me glad I retired.

I got my shots

 I got my second shot of the Coronavirus vaccine a week ago, and my wife got hers today.

I don’t mean to brag. That’s not the point. But, there is no other way to say it - I haven’t been this relaxed in the past year.

Now I qualified for the vaccine for several reasons, and so did a lot of other people - about one out of every five people in the United States so far, according to published figures.

I can’t speak for all of us, but I would be willing to bet that we are all sharing the same happy thoughts about going out to eat with some friends in the summer, going to a concert or a show in the fall, and hoping the somewhere along the way there will be time to go to a baseball game.

Not necessarily a major league team, but at least a local one.  The Long Island Ducks - an Atlantic League team - lost their entire season last year, but are supposed to play before a crowd at the end of May. Go Ducks!

It’s amazing how many things you can look forward to, from going to the local store to buy some milk or lettuce to wandering up and down the aisles of a nursery to buy some plants.

And best of all, not only can we go out, but we don’t have to worry about getting infected with a disease that can kill or, if not fatal, leave someone with a debilitating disease that will cast a pall over the rest of their lives. And, of course, not unknowingly giving that disease to others.

Heck, there are wineries within a hour’s drive of my house that might be open again, or games to be played with friends, And no dark cloud of worry to hover over the table when you pick up a card or roll the dice.

Of course, I realize that a lot of other people have gotten their vaccinations as well as me and my wife, and a lot more are waiting for their chance. But it seems   tens of thousands of otherwise educated people are deciding not to line up for it - at least it is proven absolutely, completely safe to their satisfaction.

Strangely, they don’t tell you what will satisfy them. Some hint that if a few thousand more people - or a few million more people - get vaccinated first, they would consider it.

I’ve seen a lot of interviews where those anti-vaxxers say it is safer not to take the vaccine than to take it. They promise to keep an eye on the situation by looking at e-mails from their friends, who certainly have the time to check out messages from their on-line friends who are passing it along.

Shame on them. Shame on their friends. 

Why?

Well, there are a lot of lies going around, passed on from person to person from who knows where. Some of them even look official. Heck, some are being sent out by officials.

Let me give you some examples. I won’t go into too much detail, but you can look them up yourself. Why should I have all the fun.

In no particular order: 

The test results were faked. Why? To rig the Presidential election for Democrats, to make money for their financial supporters, to support big business over the freedom-loving patriots - take your pick.

The vaccine is made from the Covid virus, and you can get the disease from it.

No and no. But, you only have doctors and scientists to explain the truth, and some people would rather believe their cell phones.

The vaccine will alter your DNA. Just ask anyone who tells you that what DNA is. If they can’t explain it, don’t believe them.

The vaccine was made from a cell line that came from an aborted fetus. Now that’s not true, and some pretty impressive people have tried to kill that rumor. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask the Pope.

“Who believes this stuff?” you might ask. Well, a recent NPR/PBS Newshour poll fibbed that nearly half the people who voted for Trump do not plan to take the vaccine. That resistance may affect when the country can go back to normal.

It’s not clear how many of them know - or believe - that Trump took the vaccine in the White House when no cameras were on him. Or even care about it.

And I will ask one final question. Just what do the people who keep saying the vaccine is a fraud, or dangerous or even deadly get from digging their heels in and condemning it and all that a vaccine stands for?

 So, let me put all doubts aside. I took my two shots, my wife has taken her two shots, and other close members of my family who qualify have also been vaccinated.

Which leaves me to wonder just one more thing. How come we were so lucky?

Well, for me, I got a call from my doctor, who is part of a practice at a huge state university medical center. Age and pre-existing conditions made me eligible, but it was hard to get an appointment on the state website.

The call came as a surprise. There was some vaccine available, and they had to make appointments to use it all once the containers were opened. The next day.

And, let me say, it worked like a charm. Now my family is quibbling about who is authorized and qualified to give out shots. Typical. We never leave anything alone.

But, we do check out the facts. Ever have dinner with your kids and half the people at the table are looking things up on their cell phones?

I live in an interesting house.