The Olden Days

This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help baby boomers, seniors, retirees, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and purpose in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled: “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, is available by clicking here Amazon.com. Click here for her website: LeeGaleGruen.com

Now, on to my blog:

I was going through my credit card statement from a few months ago and matching my receipts against the entries. Many were from restaurants I frequented, stores I depended upon, and movies and theaters I attended.  How long ago that life seems now.

I took those things for granted. I never thought twice or thrice about making plans with friends to dine out. We all had our favs, and it was fun to organize a get-together in one of them.

I love theater and often attend, but usually it doesn’t average more than once a month or longer. My credit card statement reminded me that because of conflicting dates, I ended up attending plays at two different theaters with the same friend just one week apart. Oh well, we had decided to go for it as we were hot to see both performances.

That was before anyone suspected that our collective lives would change abruptly from free ranging spirits to inmates of our abodes with an indeterminate sentence. Yes, restaurants, theater and movie attendance, and shopping except for food and medicine have become the olden days. We usually think of such times with affection and nostalgia as a memory of long ago when life was better. With the speed that things are changing in the eye of the Covid 19 hurricane, even yesterday was the olden days.

Will we ever get back to those times we reminisce about so fondly? Maybe, but they will probably look different. Restaurants, theaters, ride-sharing services and the like that were our staples may have gone out of business for lack of customers to sustain the thin margins they depended upon to survive.

Virtual services and contacts have increased in popularity since our quarantine way of life began. Websites such as Zoom at least allow us to meet online and interact to a degree. Missing from such electronic interfaces are hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and handshakes. Such human contact is vital for our well-being. Our sense of touch needs stimulation to help keep us healthy. I’ve written before in this forum about the importance of touch.  Click here (and scroll down) to read my blog: “The Power of Touch,” dated February 4, 2016; and here to read “Hugs,” dated February 17, 2018.

We must do our part to vanquish this coronavirus. The faster we slay it as a group, the sooner we’ll be back to the gratifying, real contact, not the virtual kind.

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Photo credit: Christian Collins on Visual hunt / CC BY-SA

Irises and Viruses

This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help baby boomers, seniors, retirees, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and purpose in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled: “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, is available by clicking here Amazon.com. Click here for her website: LeeGaleGruen.com

Now, on to my blog:

Mother Nature has powers that people can only dream about. She may create exquisite beauty in the form of an iris or rain down havoc as the world’s creatures huddle in fear of the viruses she slings.

With all our war weapons, economic manipulations, and every other form of control that mankind has developed to hobble enemies, it pails by orders of magnitude to the sorcery Mother Nature can work. At times such as these as we face a threat to millions, we are humbled in the face of such dominion.

MN has currently unleashed the coronavirus to thin the herd. There are simply too many of us to be sustained by the earth’s resources. We humans are befouling nature, contributing to global warming, causing extinction of other species, blowing each other up, and generally striving to realize our collective demise.

Will we forget today’s lessons as soon as things are back to “normal”? Will we resume squabbling with each other? Or, can our current crisis teach us anything? If history is an example, the answer is likely “no.” If we look back on the great global tragedies of the centuries: wars, famine, natural disasters, and pandemics, we see that subsequent generations do forget, deny, or ignore.

Why are humans like that? Must the most twisted of us always rise to the top to lead us over the edge of the cliff? Is it in our nature to always devolve into a “Lord of the Flies” mentality?

Of course, today’s Covid 19 crisis could have been lessened to a significant degree by advanced planning, early action, and quick response. None of those things have happened to a sufficient enough degree to forestall the severity which is only increasing.

What can we do? Each of us is only one tiny cog in a sea of over seven billion of our kind. Are we completely powerless? No. We must do our part. Don’t go out and about other than for essential services. Partying with friends is not in that category. Stay at home even if you are bored, feel fine, figure it can’t happen to you, or are sure you won’t pass the virus along to others. You are not special, privileged or entitled to ignore the recommendation of experts on how we should proceed as a herd to defeat or at least lesson this viral infliction.

Think as the hunters and gatherers did when they lived off the land and made do with what they had. A few weeks ago, I read a story about a young mother who was panicky because her store had sold out of disposable diapers. Now is the time for adaptation and problem solving, folks, not whining. To that puzzled mother: rip up old sheets or towels and use them as diapers fastened with safety pins rather than peel and stick tabs. Then, rewash them just as your grandmother did before the invention of the disposable type–amazing!

Count yourself lucky to live in a first world country with resources to attack this crisis, and do your part to assist.

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Please forward my blog to anyone who might be interested and post it on your Facebook, Twitter and other social media. To reprint any material, contact me for permission at:  gowergulch@yahoo.com. If you want to be automatically notified when I post a new blog, click on the “Follow” button in the upper right corner of this page and fill in the information. To read my other blog posts, scroll down on this page or click on “Recent Posts” or “Archives” under the Follow button. To opt out of receiving this blog, contact me at the aforementioned email address, let me know, and I’ll remove you from the list.

Photo 1 credit: Visualhunt – Public Domain
Photo 2 credit: Photo credit: NIAID on VisualHunt / CC BY