It wasn’t in the cards.
For 30 years I’ve collected greeting cards but have given up the habit for how much it hurts. It’s been a favorite pastime shopping rows of card racks for hours at a time walking out with all the very best wishes for any occasion or holiday or simply “just because.” The funniest, the best written, the most beautiful and all the ones that made me wipe my eyes in the store over the years ended up in three crates, many now yellowed, none of which were ever sent. Turns out I couldn’t bring myself to part with them when someone’s occasion or holiday was approaching. Today a foot-high stack each got their own final read and their last cry before being buried in a 13 gallon sack of memories whose optimal times had come and gone, now rolled to the street for their crimes of assorted missed opportunities. Everything Mom, every Wonderful Dad and all those bought to give in case I ever fell in love again, which at my age has turned out as unlikely as me sending out a card to anyone who’d deserved it at just the right time or occasion.
So after a productive afternoon and a half box of tissue, it’s time to make myself dinner and climb into a melancholy dreamland of rest and regret. From this day forward, if you ever get a card from me, trust it will be freshly picked and never too belated to matter when it really could have.

Way too alert to the ever-changing news, I find I’m getting more caught up in network waves of hopeless thinking, sadly-speculated scenarios and general maladaptation to the new normal than I would like. And I suspect I’m not alone.
It’s no help that I haven’t seen nor touched a living human being in weeks and now witness more televised refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies than any healthy psyche should. I’m on my 17th day working alone from home 40 miles from everything and everyone I cherished as normal, welcome impositions to my day. I’m now thinking some of what I’ve considered temporary accommodating changes may soon become eerily permanent.
We’ve been told who and what is essential, and my head is working overtime without permission connecting all the dots of what’s to come, weighing alternate endings, and being entirely futile at the expense of decent sleep. So many possible end games. So many tipping dominoes of a world and economy likely to continue its decline long after I’m gone from this earth.
Having lost our health and wealth and so many departures of loved ones before their due dates, the only way to break from this gloom is time travel.
Set a future date, go there, and envision life without this black swan. One thing unique to our species is vision. It pulls us into, across and through tragedy and we have always, always emerged victorious. This ain’t the end. Not even close.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.—Proverbs 29:18