We went to Massachusetts at the end of July for the first long trip since the pandemic started. It was for a memorial for my wife’s mother who had died of Covid-19 in May 2020 at age 89. She caught the disease in a New Jersey nursing home, and by the time she was admitted to a hospital there didn’t seem to be much they could do to help. Arrangements were made to transport her remains to where her long time home had been in the Berkshires where she was interred with no one to witness, which seemed a great lack.
© Melinda Nagy
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The sudden violent death of someone in our extended family has brought back some thoughts of a philosophical nature to the surface for me. As near as I can tell, our circumstances did not match up closely: he was living in the East, I on the West coast, he was killed in the kind of rough urban neighborhood I rarely come into close contact with, and while have a workaday routine like hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the Bay Area, he earned money piecemeal buying and selling electronics to individuals in person.
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One of the things I like best about the end of the year has to do with music, which is one of the main ways I pass the time all year round. Now, I don’t hang around in places featuring non-stop Christmas carols on loop so that is not the kind of thing I’m referring to. I am also not big on the music countdown segments that certain DJs like to put out during the last week of the year.
Ever since the Magna Carta, people have had the right to petition their government for redress of their grievances. The Bill of Rights also guarantees the right of peaceable assembly to be heard.
The first event I attended was in Redwood City the same day as the main Women’s marches around the country the day after the inauguration. The event was billed as a “non-partisan, multigenerational gathering” to affirm the community values under attack by the new administration.
