Today as we leave Arizona for the summer, and to our home in the north it is with so many mixed emotions. We are in the troughs of the corona virus and no we are not leaving to hide from it, as it seems to be everywhere. We are going to where we are more comfortable with the medical community and family, if it should come to that. Each fall when we return to Arizona, we learn of people who have are no longer with us. It’s are hope, our prayer that this year, the virus will not be a part of that for those who stay here or for us who leave.
I once read a book by Steven King where a global pandemic was ravaging the world and people were wondering if this was the end of humanity. Now this is nowhere that serious but I caught my mind, drawing parallels between that story and current events. One wonders if the time will come when something far more serious than the Corona Virus will break out. Our country seems to have been complacent when it comes to being ready for things like this.
As a young boy I grew up during a polio epidemic. I had classmates who contracted the disease and I remember one of them dying from it. Others wearing steel braces on their legs and pictures of kids in iron lungs. I wasn’t overly worried about contracting it, because I was a kid and I left my worries at the kitchen door each morning when I went to school. Each day was a new adventure for me. There was no television or media to stoke our fears. What we knew was what our parents told us, or we witnessed with our own eyes. Then they found a vaccine.
Then we have the direct opposite from this country, in other places where the borders are closed and the media is largely absent. I thought the other day what if this virus gets into North Korea or sub Africa. Countries that have little ways to take care of the masses and it sometimes seems, have little empathy to go along with it. Places that struggle to feed their people, let along take care of the medical needs of their citizens. It could be happening as we speak because we will never know about it. What about the homeless people in this nation grouped together in makeshift shelters? As we leave, in the home behind us, lives an elderly couple that needed to be in assisted living a long time ago. He’s 93 and basically bed ridden and she is 89 and has cancer. For all practical purposes they are helpless. They need to sell their home and go into a care facility. We talked with her the other day and she says she can’t do that because she can’t part with her stuff. Their middle age kids don’t seem to care or live too far away to help. Hopefully social services will get involved and force their hand. I can’t imagine the sense of hopelessness that must exist inside that house.
So, for Pat and I, we will return to Minnesota and try to stay as cloistered as we can and minimize the risk as best we know how. I hope the leadership in this country can calm things down. Life will go on and hopefully we will have a nice summer and be able to go back to Arizona in the winter safe and well.
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