The other day when my son was winding the grandfather clock in the living room, the pendulum fell off and he was unable to reattach it because the hook had broken.  I’ll have to call the Clock Doc to fix it.  My Mother had built that clock from scratch (not a kit) in 1968 and given it to us as a housewarming gift when we bought our first home.  Over the years it has announced the time with the appropriate number of chimes on the hour and a pleasant tone on each quarter. I didn’t have to look at its face to know what time it was.  Now its hands are still and its song is silent, but time marches on.

It’s late April, supposedly spring.  When I took a walk the other day the forsythia were in full bloom and the trees looked ready to burst with color; but  I awoke this morning to the report that there had been several vehicular accidents due to icy roads.  When I looked out the window it was snowing.  WHAT?

Each morning when I turn on the news, I see the same people saying the same words they had said the day before, with only slight variation.  Last week Governor Cuomo announced that the Pause NY Program to mediate the spread of coronavirus would be extended until May fifteen.  Someone commented that when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter Sunday he saw his shadow, so there would be six more weeks of Lent (irreverent but humorous).

And there are the cultural and economic ramifications: schools and businesses closed; services we previously thought essential no longer available; social distancing and face coverings required (I’ll do a blog on that one day).  Stock market indicators first falling precipitously and then bouncing back and forth, green one day, red the next, except for the day it was on the fringe and made the screen look like an out-of-order traffic signal flashing between both colors.  It made me dizzy. The Government passing paycheck protection and stimulus packages costing future generations trillions of dollars (I can’t wrap my head around those figures).  It’s mind-boggling that a microscopic organism can wreak such havoc

One of the classes I’m taking on line, offered by Osher through Zoom is The Evolution of Life.  It deals in numbers like 4.5 billion years ago (bya)  dating the formation of the earth and Magma ocean and describing the synthesis of chemicals and movement of continents across the globe through the millennia.  So much for what Genesis tells us about God creating the world in seven days.  It seems God created life and then left the elements to evolve over time.  So in God’s grand scheme of things, an hour, a day, even a year, is an infinitesimal entity.   Don’t sweat the small stuff!   

I can’t even escape from the current environment. As I mentioned last week, I just finished a very enjoyable look titled The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa Lee, a powerful story about two women separated by circumstance, culture and distance.  In a remote mountain village, a girl and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea; ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations, until something happens to change their lives.

 The book begins: No coincidence, no story…the story could be anything…every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence or another. And a paragraph on page 353 (of 364) reads:

     When our noodles arrive, I follow Sean’s example and pour steaming tea over my chopsticks and other tableware, then toss the dirty liquid on the ground.  The alternative would be the trots or worse.  Every pandemic the history of the world has come from China.

 The book I am currently reading is Sea People by Christian Thompson.  It is about the vast expanse of ocean stretching from Hawaii to Easter Island and down to New Zealand, known as the Polynesian Triangle and scattered with hundreds of islands.  They are tiny specks amid the immensity of the Pacific and yet they were inhabited long before the arrival of the European explorers in the sixteenth century;  discovered and settled by a group of ancient voyagers, a people with a single language and set of customs, a particular body of myths and an arsenal of domesticated plants and animals.  They had no written language or metal tools—no maps or compasses–and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the plant.  Impressive!

During the past few weeks there have been some good things that have happened and for which I and my family are grateful.  On March first Stephanie and Peter put their house up for sale and had an initial flurry of interest and activity; however with the shutdown of all things normal, they considered taking the house off the market.  Then last week they received three offers, the best of which was from a trauma surgeon who had done his residency in Milwaukee (where Stephanie had done hers) and a fellowship in Pittsburg, (where Stephanie had done her trauma rotation) and whose wife was from Rochester and had grown up in the neighborhood.  Concidence!  Also one of their sons is named Peter.

Most exciting for me was that last weekend I received the long-awaited shipment of Tears of My Heart and filled all the prepublication orders.  The book is available through Amazon, or if you would like a personally inscribed copy, just let me know.  The cost is $15 and includes shipping or delivery. 

A few more musings on What Day is it?

This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad.

We are one day closer to putting this all behind us.  Brett Baier of Fox News

In the heart of every human being there burns an ember of hope that warmly entices us to believe everything will eventually come together into one perfect day and that potentially the hours in that day will stretch on indefinitely.  And so we life our lives in hopeful anticipation, dreaming and praying to reach this wondrous day, while in the process we miss out on the anxious affair that life truly is.  Life is not perfection, it is everything else.  Richelle Goodrich,

Now is the perfect time–today is the perfect day. Peter Yaremko

Finally, this from A. A. Milne’s endearing and enduring honey bear, Winnie the Pooh:

“What day is it?” asked Pooh

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

May every day be your favorite day.

Hope you are all adhering to the guidelines and keeping safe.  Lots of LovEstelle