John Fischer The Catch

And suddenly there was with me

An ocean of humanity

A sea of many faces

In waves of warm embraces

And while I questioned how to judge them all

Who would rise and who would fall

I found myself among them

And it mattered little who was wrong or right

                          – from the song “The Only One” by John Fischer

The wind is picking up and it’s 71 degrees outside at 5:00 in the morning. That’s probably a little hard for some of you to take on the 8th of December. That’s a little rare for us, too, here in Southern California, but then again, what’s normal about anything right now? Nothing’s been normal since they cancelled baseball’s spring training last March. Restaurants are again only available for takeout. Hair and nail salons are closing. We’ve gone backwards in the last few weeks. Our COVID-19 numbers are higher than ever. Lockdowns are tied to how many ICU beds are available in a local community and our units are filing up.

There’s a medical office three blocks from where we live and I pass by it just about every time I run a local errand. Lately there has been a line of cars out front with people being tested for the virus. Nurses are out there in their scrubs, masks, and shields, standing in the street taking swabs of people’s noses while they sit in their cars. It looks more like something out of a science fiction movie than something real that is happening in my neighborhood.

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