Chatham Corona Journal #12

On: May 26, 2020

#12
My son recently pulled $10,ooo from the stock market. Over the past 6 months he had earned $1,500. The money he invested came from his savings. God knows, the saving impulse didn’t come from me or I’d send our whole (yours and mine) $1200 check to CORA right now. Still it was a privilege to send $50 a month instead of spending it on some out-of-reach bauble. All my life I’ve been a paycheck-to-paycheck worker bee.
I am reading these days that most of the people who finally get their check or direct deposit mainly buy food. This is a hard reality. Perishable food from a fixed source means that hunger will come and will drive their decisions again in the near future. I’m fortunate. I live on a Social Security check and thrive on Medicare plus BCBS.

Wikipedia says, “The Social Security Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt on August 14, 1935, almost 85 years ago. In addition to several provisions for general welfare, the new Act created a social insurance program designed to pay retired workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement.”

Bob, my stepfather, learned his trade during the Great Depression. Born in 1917, he was 12 years old in 1929 when the economy tanked through most of the 30’s. He came into the workforce then, carrying two newspaper routes to help he and his mother get by until he began his trade at 14. He became a highly regarded body and fender man during his career, building gorgeous Grand National race cars for Ford in Charlotte, cars that went on to win championships through the 60’s and 70’s. When I went into the carpentry trade I knew the standard of quality I would work toward; I started working in his shop in 1952 until I went in other directions.
Why this long narrative bragging on my stepfather? He, like me and you, measured himself by his work. He worked every day until cancer swept him away from us at age 75. He wasn’t a work alcoholic though he worked long hours. I’ll bet if you look around your family you’ll find many people like him.

Bottom line for you and me is, “…the coronavirus, which doesn’t care about political spin, will have the last word.” It ain’t pretty now, and for the future, stay safe in the world. Right now “normal” isn’t normal, and there is no common sense.

David Brooks, a conservative Republican columnist in the New York Times writes this:

“But so far as a country we are hanging in with one another. And we’re in a process of discovery. We’re slowly learning the strange features of this disease, slowly improvising what will be a wide variety of local ways forward. Endurance is not static. It’s slowly learning, slowly adjusting.
The pandemic has revealed the rot in many of our political dogmas and institutions, but also a greater humanity, a deeper compassion in the face of suffering, and a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.
Fragile Verse.
by brad page
Poets are not heroes.
Their fragile verse
Does not charge armored walls.
They speak from hearts
Beating bloody words not to retreat
From the impulse that drives them.

Comes the gift,
No rest is possible.
Words you and I
Bring into the world –
Newly born, crying, kicking,
Pierce our arcane present.

Would that we knew
What we do not know,
A cliché for the times,
For all times
As we struggle with
This intrusion into our lives.

Will we fill our minds
With comforting dogmas?
Will we hate the poor and sick,
As though they deserve this moment?
While some pray to their God,
“Oh no, not me, not now, Lord.”