Looking Forward to the Pounds

      So here's how I originally started this post: It had been nearly 3 years, and as with many of you, we were more than ready to take a trip on a plane now that there were no more masks or vaccine-testing or unusually long delays due to waiting for a Covid test at the airport.  Yes, airline crews were still getting sick and causing staff-shortages and delays and all the rest; but hey that was happening everywhere.  We, like many fellow impatient Americans, were ready to just go somewhere, anywhere (just look at the record amount of travelers this summer), what the Washington Post titled "Revenge Travel" (see how American that sounds?)  We were ready to temporarily leave behind all the ups and downs back home: the plunging housing market, the rising interest rates, the plummeting stock market, the top secret documents hidden by he-who-must-not-be-named that may have compromised the lives of a few thousand agents overseas, the Russians holding-up inside a nuclear plant; rather we were more looking forward to jumping on a flight and heading somewhere different.  And what better place than to go than to head to another country undergoing a similar set of travails and grumbling just like us, a place far across the warming Atlantic.  Yes, we were heading back to the UK.  

     Okay, so that original opening was a bit of venting but in my defense, here was some of the stuff I had been reading and not much of it had been pleasant.  One piece in the London Review of Books began this way: How long do we have left, and how bad will it get?  David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: "It's worse, much worse, than you think."...Permafrost in the Arctic is already melting, with the potential to release large quantities of methane, while the hydrogen sulphide that is thought to have 'capped the end-Permian extinction, once all the feedback loops had been triggered', is currently 'bubbling out of the sea' along a thousand-mile stretch of the Namibian coast, where green sulphur bacteria have caused a vast oceanic dead zoen, devoid of oxygen and life.  It's by no means the only one.  There are now more than four hundred such dead zones in the world's oceans, totalling an area the size of Europe.  In another piece on the global food crisis, writer Tom Stevenson noted: In Turkey, inflation has hit 61 percent...Last year the UN predicted that 97 percent of people in Afghanistan would be in poverty by the summer...(Lebanon) has experienced a major rise in poverty rates and a 90 percent drop in the value of the lira...Morocco is currently experiencing its worst drought in decades and is expected to lose more than half of this year's grain crop.  Yet another issue talked about the insect crisis ("almost 1.3 billion of them for every human"): 'Between 2000 and 2012 we lost 2.3 million square kilometers of forests worldwide -- an area greater than the combined size of the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Ireland and the Czech Republic.'  The result is that something like 135 rainforest species are being driven to extinction every day...Insects predate human life by almost 350 million years.  Noted National Geographic about the Amazon rainforest: Since 1985, nearly 22 soccer field-size tracts of intact forest have been lost per minute.  Ahem, that is worth repeating...the equivalent of 22 soccer fields of forest cut down each MINUTE.  And then there was that piece on dying...

     In one way the review (on the death trade, of all things) was uplifting in the sense that we won't be alone., "or not for long,"  said author Hayley Campbell: ...it's where we're all heading -- 55 million of us annually, more than six thousand every hour...Most people in the developed world hide from the reality of death, and those who don't, those who make a living from it, are hidden from us...We know death is there --over the horizon, around the corner, tugging at our sleeve-- but, as La Rochefoucauld observed, we cannot stare directly at it, and when we finally do it's only because we can't help it...In the UK, cremation is chosen for three-quarters of all funerals...Tumors are apparently hardest to burn and glow like gold in the inferno.  Good heavens, how could you not relate to one of the article's title at the start of this post: All the New Is Bad.  Said staff writer Jennifer Senior (whose article on friendship was mentioned in the last post); It's the damnedest thing.  The dead abandon you, then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.  My, my, and I was somehow hearing the words Daryl Hall wrote in Abandoned Luncheonette: Day to day, to day... today.  Then they were old, their lives wasted away.  Or maybe I was hearing The Animals?

     Good grief, it seemed we needed (or at least I needed) a fresh outlook on life so off we went to our first outdoor concert of the year (of the past three years, actually), one where security was extra tight (any container with liquid was dumped out, everyone was wanded, and all bags were inspected for cans or metal -- Robert Plant's orders, said the security guard).  Things were never like this, I mumbled, as we headed to our "lawn" seats, an area now reduced by nearly 2/3 in order to add more built-in seats (and higher-priced tickets).  Grumble, grumble.  The ticket prices used to be this, the artists used to be that, the security used to be this, the seating used to be that.  Grumble, grumble   And that was when my wife told me to stop.  So what, she said, all that stuff is over; things have changed so move on.  And she was right.  The view and the setting of the concert was still stunning, even if the old days of not allowing lawn chairs and being able to run up to the front of the stage were now long gone.  Sigh,  and yet those performers were as fortunate as I was to just be here, still alive, still performing, still entertaining the crowds.  I should be grateful for all of it...and I was.  And right about then, my front tooth started hurting...

     My dentist had told me that somehow I had gotten a cavity really close to the nerve, an area he would try to fill and yet letting me know that he didn't have a lot of leeway.  "You're gonna need a root canal, sooner than later," he told me.  What?  On that tiny tooth in the front?  But now, as my feet bounced to the harmonizing tunes, my tooth was acting up.  My month of being pain-free was ending.  Why the nerve!  So off I went, a quick appointment, a new venture into a world I hadn't seen in over a decade, and my how things had changed.  Open offices (no cubicles or doors), portable X-ray machines so no biting down on sharp paper, a CT scan of my mouth to view my teeth as elaborately as a brain scan,; and best of all a painless (and quick) root canal done from the back of the tooth (traditional, I was told, to preserve cosmetic appearances).  And then I happened to pick up a book at the library sale, Finding Grace.  Quickly glancing at it I came across this story (the book is about being homeless): Some homeless children may have report cards from two or three different schools in a single academic year.  Routine visits to a pediatrician are rare.  Because 12-year-old Deamonte Driver and his family had been in and out of homelessness in Prince Georges County, Maryland, he hadn't seen a dentist for years.  He died from complications after bacteria from an abscessed tooth spread to his brain and after his mother tried unsuccessfully for months to find a dentist.  And his health coverage lapsed because his renewal papers were sent to a homeless shelter where his mother no longer lived.  Wait, I was grumbling because while I sitting on the grass enjoying a nice concert, my tooth was acting up "a little?"  Had my dad been there he would have sternly remanded me: "Quit your bellyaching..."

      The fact that this book was now part of the library sale likely meant that even in an oversized coffee-table book form, we didn't want to see --or acknowledge-- what was happening right in front of us.  As actor Danny Glover wrote in the forward for the book: Homelessness surrounds us every day.  And yet, though the poor and unsheltered are right before our eyes, we have ceased to notice them.  The indifferent gaze of the general public has rendered them faceless and anonymous.  Homeless people have somehow --conveniently-- been deemed unworthy of our grief.  It is all too easy for mainstream society to be lulled into believing that extreme poverty is the result of indolence, a myth from which those in more secure circumstances can draw a measure of comfort, creating distance between themselves and the people they see --or don't see-- on the streets...No individual can end homelessness, but we can each find our own way to embody the struggle against it.  To do so, we'll have to draw on our profoundly human gift of imagination.  We will have to acknowledge that the same resources that we use for destruction can be redirected any way we collectively choose.  Nothing can stand against our political will once we decide to bridge the vast divides in our economic system, or once we resolve to honestly examine and address our educational system, our health care system and our social systems.  We must decide to act.  But first: we must decide to look.

     The beautiful oversized photographs came from author, photographer, and successful business entrepreneur, Lynn Blodgett, and he added: In some cases I am certain that I photographed people who would soon find a way off the street.  In others, I'm sure I captured the face of a violent criminal.  And it is likely that in some instances the person in the photo is now deceased.  But my purpose is to see and capture one moment in the life of the person before me...I offer Finding Grace in the hope that we can develop the desire and courage to see beyond the myths that all homeless people are lazy, addicted or crazy.  Perhaps we can begin to see people in need, and to acknowledge our own fears -- of illness, economic downturn and becoming a "bag lady."  I believe that if we look into these eyes, we will recognize our mothers, brothers and daughters, and we will discover talented musicians, bricklayers and stockbrokers, businesswomen and poets.

     So back to my own selfish getting away, complete with grumbling.  What was I thinking?  Me?  Exasperated?  Frustrated?  Fed up?  As a loud chorus of voices in my head would say, get real, because let's face it, was I even "looking?"  And if I were looking, perhaps I needed to heed the advice of my wife and to begin looking anew for soon  I would soon be among those fortunate enough to be board a plane and arrive in a foreign land for a vacation where the crowds would be vastly diminished, money would be in our favor (a year ago the pound was nearly 20 cents higher but had dropped from around 135 to 115 when we last checked), and after a relatively short coach transfer and flight, step off in Cornwall, home to Poldark, Doc Martin and numerous other British shows showing off the beautiful coastal scenery.  How could I have the "nerve" to grumble at all?  After a splash of cold water I should know that I was surrounded by friends and lucky enough to be married to a beautiful wife for over 3 decades, and also loved by animals still teaching me what love actually means; I was relatively healthy* and living a relatively carefree life in retirement.  Certainly I was older, but what a blessing to even be older and to have reached this age, especially after reading so many books on errant molecules and mutating viruses.  My shopping cart was full.  And speaking of which, I'd been listening to the late Stuart McLean and his fictional world so humorously presented in his Vinyl Cafe series (a typical story of his can be heard here).  In one, he talks of our lives being similar to a shopping in a grocery store, a store loaded with goods that come and go, items surrounding us and filled with things we feel we need or don't need (but are glad they're there "in case"), and for the most part, things we often pay little attention to as we check out, instead looking forward to once again getting home and cooking dinner or perhaps getting things ready for the guests who are coming over.  We go about this over and over, sometimes our carts full and other times our items barely filling a small basket.  Over and over, day to day.  And then one day, we arrive at the checkout and discover that we've left our money at home and somehow the store feels that we've shoplifted something.  Slightly embarrassed, we discover that we have to leave our cart there, that we actually have to leave all of it behind and be escorted out to a world we're unfamiliar with, a place we somewhat knew existed but had never experienced and that all that we knew and enjoyed and took for granted all these years is now at an end.  As Daryl Hall's lyrics said: And the sign on the door read -- This Way Out...that's all it said.  

     But not yet, fingers crossed.  It was time to snap out of all that depressing reading and to stop listening to the news and those seemingly self-serving politicians treating us like lackeys.  Much better to read the inspiring words of marine biologist Sylvia Earle: The best present would be that out of this terrible, tragic time that we're all experiencing, there will be a renewal of optimism in a better world that we know is possible, that we can, through our individual and collective actions, turn to a new era of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive, and for one another.  So off I was heading, ready for a different outlook, a different viewpoint, and soon --if all went as planned-- I would be in England walking along the coast and letting the salt air wash away any remaining thoughts of woe-is-me.  Ahem.  That said, there will thus be a slight pause in these posts for I am taking little in the way of connecting with the world...a small tablet to check a few things but nothing electronically elaborate.  Should I drop or lose or misplace my tablet it will prove of little importance.  It will be a time for my wife and I to start fresh, to down a few fish & chips and a semi-chilled beer in a pub, and for me to come back a new man (at the very least, a few pounds heavier man).  It will be me in a land of new accents and new voices...and who knows, maybe when I happen to hear a bit of grumbling from those walking by I'll wonder, what's up with that?  The world is your oyster, mate...at least so far.  Mind the gap...

Image: Watergate Bay Hotel

 P.S. Both of my wife's cousins in the UK, whom we would be hooking up with some days later, have cerebral palsy and are immune-compromised so we're planning to be extra-cautious and ready to test ourselves for Covid a few days after our arrival; luckily we had checked our "tests" expiration dates and found that most of them had indeed expired so we purchased new ones before leaving.  Most Covid tests only have a limited useful shelf life, often under 6 months.  All of our earlier government tests we got in January and March had expired and we tossed them out per CDC guidelines...such expired tests can and do provide false results.