​We still don’t know, but yesterday’s reported early testing results of promising therapeutics say we have hope.

Sometime after we entered the plague’s third phase, I wondered why I felt so little anger during the second phase? What I’d seen, heard and read was unbearably horrid. Maybe my weariness of it was a kind of madness. Interspersed with brief feelings of revolt.

Those endlessly breaking reports of revolting things exceeded human understanding. But now I thank the powerful evolutionary gifts that rendered me incapable of understanding it all as I passed through it.

—–

Some of us to our dying days shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which people are put to the torture of such a plague. Where is the grace in all of that?

Grace is something that more than a few had and still have. Especially the caregivers, the scientists, those working on the cures, feeding us and protecting us. Beyond blasp​hemy and prayers, grace was the only thing that truly mattered as we rubbed shoulders with death.

—–

I will be convinced the BREAKING NEWS morons have learned their lessons when they start consistently saying “we” instead of “you.”

—–

Our time of testing by suffering in ignorance and hopelessness is passing. Will we, as we must, learn everything? Or will we learn nothing?

We learned to reject abject resignation and tried to display humility in our daily acts of love. What the plague demanded and eventually received from all of us was our humiliation, to which we had to give our full assent to its willful cruelties and debasements.

We denied it nothing.

Each and every one of us had to stay put until we were granted our conditional masked release.

For most everyone, there was no question of not taking precautions or failing to comply with the orders wisely promulgated for the public’s health during the disorders of this pestilence. Nor did we listen to certain end-times moralists who told us to sink on our knees and give up the struggle.

We came to appreciate a smell of a coming rain, the tang of drenched sidewalks after it passed, and warming to the daily shifts in the weather outside. We had little difficulty after a keeping our heads from getting blown away by the press’s 24/7 braying. We learned to bow our heads to protect our spirits and minds from their hotly uttered daily contrivances to re-engage us in the panic and their chaos.

—–

A look forward

Perhaps this will be written sometime in the winter of 2020 on a yellow legal pad paper: The All Clear Day this fall was very different from what it had been in former years, when it was called All Souls Day. True, the weather was seasonable; but, there had been sudden change, and the plague’s great heat had given way to mild and surprisingly sweet autumnal air and salmon pink skies began and ended each day. In past years cool winds often blew in early November with big, cold grey clouds attacking us from the northwest. When they passed, a pale gold light was everywhere.

This year’s Halloween was tacitly but willfully ignored. No one felt like dressing up in scary or fantasy costumes. It possessed none of its old-time associations; it smacked a bit of hell rather than of playful tricks and treats. There still were half empty or unlighted, shuttered shops, lots of unbought treats on store shelves and confectioners’ window displays. In the past all the town, rich and poor alike, indulged in this seasonable festivity. This year the streets were mostly empty. The few children about were skillfully wrapped and escorted by worried parents with no-touch candy being offered from the original packaging bags via glove-handed tongs. Some fine memories had in the past been created on porches everywhere in the Empire.

A few children, too young to realize what had and still might threaten them, play acted their costumes roles in our cheerless streets.

But no one dared to bid them welcome to approach us closely for their treat. Our sweets were dispatched to their bags over our front fence and gate.

Less than a month later, railroad traffic through the Hostess City started surging upwards, ships of all countries came to our port more regularly and long haul trucks on our highways were becoming more common. Somewhere near the beginning of Advent, air traffic overhead perked up with the first regular use of an overhead international flight path observed in early December.

Soon there were the sounds of cars speeding on wet pavement as their occupants tried to make a turning light or keep an appointment for dinner perhaps. Then vague shouts and peals of laughter could once again be heard in town sidewalks, parks and squares. The plague’s long dense veil was slowly falling away from our town.

—–

Most of us have seen courtesy of Hollywood or the internet film of men being executed by a firing squad. None of us ever saw one in person, since spectators are hand-picked like a private party by the rich and famous, where you need an invitation and proper attire. But what we think we know from books, pictures and movies — the post, a blindfold, some riflemen — is entirely bogus. A firing squad stands only a yard or two from the condemned. Should the victim take two steps forward, his chest would touch the rifle.

We plague stricken know now the truth of pestilence’s random firing squad executions. Our former peace of mind is no more since we know the grisly details and how close its rifles are to its innocent victims. We will never get rid of the foul taste in our minds and mouths from that knowledge. It’s as if the air about us reeked of stale wine, beer and fish.

—–

During phase one of the plague, we passed our time sitting at home and watching the world go by as if we were plopped down upon a boulder facing a featureless open ocean whose waters slowly rose and sank. For a brief time after our morning rise and before our evening setting, these plagued waters transformed their appearance from a greyish mass to a heaving expanse of deep piled purple velvet, like an undulating creature of the wild. This beast’s tranquil breathing was broken by sudden oily glints formed and flickered over the surface in a haze of broken lights from the meaningless news reports.

—–

As April 2020 comes to a close, we are growing more certain that the plague’s darkness is not infinite. Yet we know that we were one and all standing in front of the plague’s firing squad. Too long before its loaded long guns, we stood, way too long, and so even if we survived it, we were irrevocably changed.

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