Happy New Year 2022

Last night I watched the PBS Newshour online, You can get a re-run of their shows, athough you have to buy a membership to get many, many others are free. You just go to www.pbs.org, then click on 'shows' and there it is. I really like the look back at the year that has just ended. I like that every year.

Needless to say, the headline news was the pandemic returning via Delta and Omicron variants. And of course there were the huge destructive and deadly fires from the drought across the west and southwest. The latest news was the death of beloved actress Betty White, just short of her 100th birthday.

Two things they omitted, in my opinion were the rash of school shootings and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Also, as American news becomes increasingly single minded and local, they neglected the vast flooding that consumed villages and towns in Germany due to the rising of the rivers.

In the line of my most recent repeat thought, you never know when it is the last of something. We never knew there would come a time when a deadly virus would run our lives. Not that such things haven't been part of our human history. We have had deadly viral and bacterial infections on the epidemic scale throughout human history, just to mention one - the Black Plague. It struck me that when I went to high school, and I graduated in 1963 at age 17, high schools were safe. That isn't to say that there wasn't social cruely on a minor scale, but no one got shot. We didn't have gun proliferation either. Nobody had guns and nobody wanted or needed them.

I was just speaking on the phone to my brother and I mentioned how we had free and easy television when we were young - no cable, no subcriptions no passwords. You just plugged the tv into the wall and voila! Even a child could do it. We got up off the sofa and turned a dial to change the channels (it was before remote controls) and as my brother reminded me, we had only half a dozen channels: 3, 6, 10, 12, eventually 17, 23, 48. Now, increasingly you pay a fee for each individual channel after you are lured into a provider such as HBO or if you stream, as I do, HULU or amazon. But with each complication and expense, of course there comes a benefit or we wouldn't shift over. As I am suffering from an age related eye disease which causes gradually increasingly inability to see, blurryness and foggyness and double vision, like bad 3d glasses, I can turn to the new devices to help me. I can see and hear watching my laptop which I cannot do on even the larger screen tvs. That particular distance from sofa to tv, is the distance where I have immediate trouble. Adding to that, shows are increasingly made with murky light, and the actors mumble and turn their heads away from the viewers. My father used to complain about that and if you want to see how true it is, watch White Christmas, which I can see and hear on tv perfectly because the colors are crisp and the camera work is clear and defined and the people, like stage actors, face us when they speak with clear diction and perfect volume.

The segments that I most enjoyed on PBS Newshour were the year in Photographs when they interviewed photojournalists and featured some of their most interesting or icon photographs: The wildfires in California and Colorado The Insurrection, one year ago, when crazed and deluded Trumpsters tried to forcibly invade and take over the Capitol and stage a coup The removal of troups from Afghanistan, the take-over by the Taliban, a group of evil men if ever there was one - like the gestapo or the Nazis. As I said, they missed the Black Lives Matter movement in their photographs, but they did a segment on a big and beautiful Quilt Exhibition and one of the quilters, a former football player turned artist had done a quilt to commemorate George Floyd with large ochre letters stiched across it BLACK MAN. The Quilt segment was my top favorite since I have loved quilts my whole life thanks to my Grandother Mabel being a traditional quilter and giving all her grandchildren quilts. I made quilts for my daughter, not traditional style. I made mine on the sewing machine and I made landscapes and cityscapes. One cityscape quilt I made for her had pockets around the border and a small toy in each pocket. I had it hung above her cabinet bunk bed so that when she awakened, she could reach up and take toys out of the pockets. I love so much about quilts, the patters, the history, the portability, the texture, the simplicity of tools, the meditative nature of traditional hand sewn quilting, the old tradition of recycling old fabrics into something new, the utility of them.

Well my theme was that you never know when it is the last of something, and increasingly the experts are warning us that we will never be 'over' the Corona virus and that it will simply continue to mutate and we will continue to struggle to vaccinate and adapt to the mutations. Kids may never be free of gun violence in schools and that era of stability that we knew in the years after World War II is a distant dream.

Nonetheless, I have tried to make a mind habit of the Zen Buddhist advice to "Be Here Now." And in my personal here and now, things are good at present, I am well, and all my loved ones are well and we all phoned to wish each other a Happy New Year which is what I wish you if you have dropped by for this conversation! Happy New Year - and heaven only knows what 2022 will bring!

Jo Ann