This never-got-posted post is about eight months late. Typical.
A California Gray Fox is my closest neighbor here in the deserted dorm village at the Ojai Valley School. He calls for a mate several times in the night and early morning. I must've done a passable imitation of a suitable lady fox night before last. When I stopped returning his screeches, he came into the courtyard and gazed up at my balcony, okay, really a metal deck in front of my window.
*****
13.July.2020 – Three months have passed since I chatted with that fox. Three fox kits were born and raised in the rocky culvert next to the barn. I've named two of the 50 or so resident lizards, Lefty and Stumpy. They've just molted (is it molting with lizards?) so I think Stumpy will be hard to find as his new tail section was looking more and more normal every week. Lefty is missing three middle fingers on his left forelimb. Doesn't slow him down a bit.
People are still contracting COVID19 at an alarming rate here in California. Though we thought we had it wrapped up six weeks ago, we didn't and now the Southwest is the epicenter of the global pandemic. That is, the southern and western US states are gaining cases faster than anyone else in the world.
We have a fake-billionaire-reality-TV-host for a president and he appears to be trying to burn the entire country to the ground.
The school where I work is in some serious denial about the coming year. There's a so-called Roadmap to Reopening (lately I dislike the verb to open and loathe the word reopen) that fails to mention asymptomatic spread at all. It seems completely insane to write a set of rules and guidelines that makes no mention of the mode of transmission widely understood to cause 40 percent of the cases. Of course, these must be guidelines since we are asking for tons of money and probably won't make anyone do anything that endangers our chances of getting paid.
All I know is that I would not send my children to a school that pretends that 40 percent of cases in a deadly pandemic simply did not exist.
*****
Because some 70 percent of us will contract this disease eventually, according to the brainy Angela Merkel, and I have congenital risk factors that make survival a fifty-fifty shot at best, I think I must set down some notes for my sister here. She hates writing. Hates it. She's not a fan of tidying up after the dead either and I want to make it as easy as I can, should she have to sort through my crap.
If any of my friends from the early days want to remember me they will want to play good music and dance. Though some will remember the Boothbay Playhouse, others will remember studios in Santa Cruz or New York. The common denominator is dancing.
Even on horseback, it is rhythm and movement that made me me.
We have a fake-billionaire-reality-TV-host for a president and he appears to be trying to burn the entire country to the ground.
The school where I work is in some serious denial about the coming year. There's a so-called Roadmap to Reopening (lately I dislike the verb to open and loathe the word reopen) that fails to mention asymptomatic spread at all. It seems completely insane to write a set of rules and guidelines that makes no mention of the mode of transmission widely understood to cause 40 percent of the cases. Of course, these must be guidelines since we are asking for tons of money and probably won't make anyone do anything that endangers our chances of getting paid.
All I know is that I would not send my children to a school that pretends that 40 percent of cases in a deadly pandemic simply did not exist.
*****
Because some 70 percent of us will contract this disease eventually, according to the brainy Angela Merkel, and I have congenital risk factors that make survival a fifty-fifty shot at best, I think I must set down some notes for my sister here. She hates writing. Hates it. She's not a fan of tidying up after the dead either and I want to make it as easy as I can, should she have to sort through my crap.
If any of my friends from the early days want to remember me they will want to play good music and dance. Though some will remember the Boothbay Playhouse, others will remember studios in Santa Cruz or New York. The common denominator is dancing.
Even on horseback, it is rhythm and movement that made me me.
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