First day under the new dispensation

After lingering over coffee and scrutiny of the Web, off to the grocery and the liquor store, where there were still crowds. We now have enough coffee and whiskey to see us through for a reasonable span.

Then off for a walk in the sun with Kathleen to pick up her car at the repair shop. Daffodils and blooms all around. Spring has arrived without our having had winter. I put the snow shovel in the garage. 

The mundane tasks, laundry and bill paying, resume.

Online, the clamor that the coronavirus is some Democratic plot has died down, and some participants even appear to have been schooled in the mathematics of exponential increase. Still, though, the occasional slur about George Soros, indicating that blaming the Jews is a sturdy response in the West. I ponder unfriending and blocking acquaintances who bombard me with dumbass right-wing memes. Life now seems too short to endure all that.

Instructed by my daughter in the technicalities of Zoom, I am more or less prepared to participate in tonight's meeting of Memorial Episcopal Church's vestry, our first disembodied session.

Quiet dinner to come with Kathleen, since Maryland's bars and restaurants have shut down. (Unknown when we will be able to resume taking the healing waters with our little coterie.)

Two days off to come and a day of work from home before I return to The Sun, where my colleagues still labor under difficult circumstances to bring you clear and verified information, despite jackass nonsense about "the media."

Like you, we watch the numbers of cases rise, worrying if we are unknowingly harboring the coronavirus, waiting to hear if it has taken people we know. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year begins to sound eerily like what we are experiencing, and we hope that our efforts to separate ourselves, and others' efforts, will blunt the impact of the disease, and decrease the losses.

I listen as I write to a recording of symphonies by Dr. Arne, which echo a world of grace, balance, and order, to which I hope we can return.