November: Celebrations & Politics

CELEBRATIONS

Covid Thanksgiving

For most everyone I know, Covid-19 put a crimp in their holiday plans.  Travel cancelled, gatherings reduced in size, no family present and on it goes.  It’s probably the strangest Thanksgiving most of us have experienced.  But ours was still a very good one.  

We are healthy (priority one, I’d say), and we enjoyed a tasty turkey dinner with one other couple.  We shared in the meal prep, toasted one another, hoped for a more normal 2021, and appreciated being together in lovely Florida.  Add in a FaceTime call from our son and family.  In 2020, you can’t ask for much more!

Age and Anniversaries

When she was around seventy, I remember my grandmother telling me that she aspired to grow old gracefully.  She didn’t like the thought of being old and said that she certainly didn’t feel old in her head.  Even then, when I was in college, her comment struck me.  Not that it was so profound, but that one could attain a certain chronological age and mentally still see oneself as young and unchanged from decades ago.

When the Chief Penguin and I had been married for not quite two years, we and my extended family of siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles attended a festive luncheon for my grandparents.  They were celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary and were both 75. My, they seemed old!  But Grandma and Grandpa weren’t stodgy people, and they were definitely intellectually engaged with the wider world.  They ended up enjoying almost 55 years together.

Yesterday, G. and I marked our golden wedding anniversary, and we aren’t old at all—or so we think!  New medications and a greater emphasis on exercise and healthy eating make it possible for our generation to stay youthful longer.  While Covid upended planned trips for this anniversary year and cancelled a family Christmas in New York, we look forward to more years of globetrotting.  We are optimistic about 2021, post vaccine, and will strive to stay fit and healthy as long as possible!  

READING

Momentous Memoir

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

I have missed Barack Obama’s intelligence, eloquence, and grace these past four years.  I pre-ordered his memoir, A Promised Land, and it arrived the day it was published.  I’ve often thought that political memoirs are informative, but dry, with ultimately mind-numbing detail.  That is not this book.  Obama is an engaging and agile writer.  He captures the feel of a room, notes a telling detail or two about the scene or an individual, and doesn’t stint on his own gaffes and faults.  

I am now about 250 pages into this six-hundred-page tome and finding it highly readable and a fascinating review of recent history.  Obama is also compassionate and concerned about his family and those with whom he works in the government.  It is a refreshing and most welcome change!  (~JWFarrington)

VIEWING FOOTNOTE

Politics in Sweden

This week I finished the third and last series of The Restaurant.  I found this season especially powerful for its depiction of the radical fringe movement of the 1960’s, the protests against the war in Vietnam, the expanding role of women in government, and the lessening of prejudice against gays and lesbians.  Yes, it’s fiction.  The three siblings, Gustaf, Peter, and Nina, continue to war with each other and have more than their reasonable share of crises.  And perhaps the ending is too neat, but it’s a very good series and a great way to forget about Covid.  You’ll even learn a little Swedish along the way, the words for thank you and hello, if nothing else.

Note: Header photo of reflections in a pond ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).