Feeling a little blue after Christmas

The Monday after Christmas is bound to be a bit sad. A trip to the airport to drop off family at least keeps your mind off missing everyone, but Covid and weather and who the heck knows what else has caused two of the three Alaska Air flights to be cancelled. Our daughter's family is still at the airport, hoping that the flight they are on, the one still scheduled, takes off.

About five hours late.

As with a certain percentage of life's challenges, there is nothing to be done. The systems are too complex and the decisions of large corporations are too opaque. I am home cleaning a bit and putting some decorations away and feeling a bit guilty that I am home while family members are stuck in America's purgatory: a large, impersonal airport.

New Year's celebrations are on the horizon but you would need to be quite fatalistic about the virus to seriously contemplate some sort of crowded party, filled with wine and dance and laughter and germs.

Yet millions likely will put themselves and others at risk this weekend, though not us. No going out to a restaurant, though we may order a nice takeout meal. No going to the theater to see "West Side Story" or any other intriguing film, though there are plenty of great options from our many streaming services. 

The new year is likely going to begin just like the old year in terms of the country and the world finding some sort of  "normal," which is depressing. But perhaps this omicron variant will burn through the population quite quickly and February could see some respite. 

One of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel albums includes the song, "Old Friends." It contains this memorable line: "How terribly strange to be seventy."

Seventy-one is just as strange.

Kathleen and I don't need to go to work and we happen to live in a sane corner of a rather insane county, so we are as confident as we can be that we will be OK.

At this point in history, that is as much as we can ask.