Day 17 - 18. Teddy Bears

As the days flow into weeks, soon the weeks will flow into months.  Not much happens here.  I fear our kind children who FaceTime call us each night are quite bored by our lack of anything new to say.  It’s just the two of us here and while we love our walks, our days aren’t easily differentiated from each other.  Should I count the new blossoms on the apple tree and report them?  The newspaper always has bad news headlines.  What I want to know is how is the pandemic affecting our town.  There is little new information about that .  What is new is the number of jobless.  More than 10 million now unemployed in the United States.   A record 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week.  It’s so alarming, it calls to mind the Great Depression.  I cannot comprehend how awful this uncertainty must be for the young unemployed people with small children at home or for anyone fearing their job won’t return when this is over.  My generation, now the oldest ones around, has never seen such a scary time.  To be sure, the  polio pandemic was very scary when I was growing up.  I have friends who were quarantined with polio.  But I only remember we couldn’t go swimming in the high school pool.  I think back to my parents were young and back beyond to my grandparents.  I remember the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was formative in my father’s life.  His only sibling, his sister Beena, died from that flu.  Soon after, he and his parents emigrated from England to the United States and soon afterwards his parent’s divorced probably from the stress around the pandemic.  Our parents all grew up in the Roaring Twenties and came of age in the Great Depression.  It marked and formed each of them in very different ways.  I think about how this coming Depression will likely affect my grandchildren and change their lives.  I don’t expect to live longer enough to see the full recovery from this crisis.  Perhaps our world will be reformed in ways we cannot even imagine now.   Maybe things will be better.  I cannot discount that possibility.  Yesterday  our long beautiful walk,  I saw a teddy bear in a window and surprisingly it cheered me up.  I love to think about the ways we are all taking care of each other in this time of uncertainty.  It cannot be said too often, we are all in this together.