La-Dee-Da

If you didn’t know it was happening, you wouldn’t know it was happening. 

The trees sure don’t care; they are as pink and beautiful as they are every spring, especially this one.  And if you can ride all over town during the second week of March without your raingear, that’s as swell as it is unusual.

Tonight I learned that some people think that the moon is a titanium sphere, supposedly proven by the claim that when the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off from our satellite’s surface, they dropped a wrench and it “rang like a bell.”

Also, apparently, the Masons did everything and all of it was good.

It sure seems like these are historically weird times, which is all the more reason, I think, to keep it all in context.  Just because never before have all of society’s systems—health care, banking, government, education, etc.—caved simultaneously, is no reason to think this is unprecedented, even if it is.

Fortunately, it’s easiest enough to maintain the requisite 6-foot “social distance” on a bicycle, which doesn’t account for what happens when you stop pedaling and start standing in the shared firelight with a quartet of youngsters drinking rum and not falling down.

It’s the way we have all acquiesced to the mandates of the moment that is most striking to me. 

The virus in our minds has made way more difference than the virus in people’s bodies, which is why, in part, standing around an increasingly large fire in the out of doors offers such satisfaction.

No one knows precisely what the future holds; one thing we can be relatively sure of, though, is that the bicycle emphasizes its charms when you get to ride in lanes not usually conducive to the charms of bicycling.  We got out in it and that’s plenty.

Perhaps it’s the end of the world as we know it, if so, embracing what we do know is entirely sufficient for now.