About 360-odd days ago, I can recall thinking to myself, “Wow. Good riddance to 2019. I can’t imagine 2020 could be much worse.”
There were reasons. The previous year was not a good one for me, healthwise. I spent a week in the hospital and never really recovered from the illness — which is cautionary tale No. 1 about how one should be careful about what one wishes for. All I thought about as the clock struck midnight Dec. 31, 2019, was that maybe a new year would usher in better health.
Well, if you went by the first two months, you’d have had to say that was foolish. More health problems meant more hospitalizations. And just as I was in the middle of really trying to get those squared away, the granddaddy of all health pandemics descended upon us. And 2020 was well on its way to being the worst year in this country since the days of unrest that made up 1968.
First it was simply “things” that got pushed aside due to COVID-19. Almost in rapid-fire succession, the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments were canceled (so was hockey); then the rest of the NBA and NHL seasons; then St. Patrick’s Day (or, at least, the festivities that went along with it). We spent Easter socially isolating. We fought over when to reopen businesses.
Then “things” became serious issues. Just when it looked as if everything might start to lighten up after almost three months of the COVID-induced iron curtain of isolation came the horrifying details of George Floyd and the advent of the national reckoning for racial injustice. The year 2020, I’m afraid, just hasn’t given us a break at all.
Look around in all four directions, and all you saw was — to use a polite term — buckets of cow pie. Sports? The Red Sox traded one of the more transcendent players in their recent history — Mookie Betts — because they overpaid a couple of broken-down pitchers and decided to be frugal with the most significant guy they’ve had since David Ortiz. The team he was traded to — the Dodgers — won the World Series.
Then, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick split up after a 20-year bromance. The Patriots didn’t make the playoffs while TB12’s new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, did.
We had a long, hot summer, both meteorologically and figuratively as we continued to feel the anger over racial injustice. And it’s still going on.
If you liked Donald Trump, you saw him defeated in November. If you didn’t, and thought about gloating, you saw his shameful attempt to invalidate the election.
And the bucket kept getting refilled.
Check off the holidays and customary celebrations/observances. St. Patrick’s Day. Easter. Passover. Cinco de Mayo. Memorial Day. July 4. Labor Day. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Thanksgiving. Hanukkah. Christmas. Kwanzaa. New Year’s. Even Festivus. What do they all have in common? We’re not able to celebrate them the way we’d like for fear of spreading the virus that not only hasn’t gone away, but has come back stronger. Is it — as some suggest — because people are selfish and stupid? Or is it because, even now, nine months later, we still don’t have enough of a handle on it to be able to tell anyone just what to do?
There seems to be good news on the horizon. We have two vaccines ready to go, and apparently safe to administer. Perhaps by this time next year, this thing will be far enough behind us that we can have a festive holiday season again.
And not to inject too much of myself into this, but when the rest of the country went on forced sabbatical, Steve went outside for a walk. And got healthy. Knock on wood.
So if there’s a moral to this story, it’s that there are things we can’t control … and things we can. We just have to be smart enough to know the difference. My one hope for everyone in the coming 365 days is that we find that line that separates reason from futility, and that we stay on the right side of it.