January 2021.
I stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve to see 2020 over. Gone. It was a terrible year for everyone, a year that will be remembered as 2020, the year of a worldwide pandemic. There we were, masked and distanced, unable to participate in our regular activities, unable to travel and visit family and friends and discover new places. Unable might be considered one significant word of the year, I suppose. Or one of them. There were many. Resilience. I could go on, but that is not the purpose of sitting down today to start a journal entry for the first time in a long time. The purpose is to record some thoughts I had this morning about what was good about 2020, in spite of Covid 19 and the pandemic.
Here it is: During 2020, I discovered I am quite resilient. In spite of new health problems, I carried on. I am 83 now and have been extremely fortunate to be, on the whole, a healthy person. In spite of new medical concerns, I am still able to walk and shop and speak and perhaps dance when the pandemic is finally over. In the meantime, I have had regular Sykpe contact with two young grandchildren (Maurice and Emmanuelle) in Quebec (Montreal and the Eastern Townships), regular phone contact with Max, my 22 year old grandson who is in a music production program in London, Ontario. And contact with all their parents, most recently with everyone together on a virtual platform.
This past year, 2020, I received acceptance from my publisher, Inanna, for a nonfiction account (Late Bloomer) of my long journey to publication of my first book, (One Day It Happens) at age 70. Late Bloomer was accepted for publication in 2023. I self-published a linked collection of short stories, Dance Season, on Amazon in 2020. That involved a huge learning curve that continues into 2021 with the prospect of learning about effective advertising on Amazon. With Dance Season, five books have now been published. Late Bloomer will make six. I am in the process of working on a book on retirement (The Stage Is Yours) and another collection of short stories (The Jewel Thief).
The title of The Jewel Thief comes from one of two brand new stories written during 2020, i.e. written during the pandemic. I have entered The Jewel Thief (the individual short story) into a contest. The other story, Dog Walker, a pandemic story, I have submitted to a literary periodical. Both were fun to write, especially The Jewel Thief which started off largely as a spoof and gradually continued that way. It became a bit more serious as it was critiqued by two writing groups that continued, and continue, to meet on Zoom.
Looked at that way, 2020 doesn’t seem too bad. I have good friends and we keep in touch. And I have been blessed with having my sister and her husband, who lived out west until four or five years ago, only a block away. We manage to walk together, masked and distanced, on weekends when they are not busy with grandchildren. Also masked and distanced, or virtual, depending!
Then there is the area I live in, the Annex in downtown Toronto. This is a far cry from growing up in a frontier mining town in northern Quebec. But some of the same things draw me. Solitary walks in nature, for instance. Well, of course, it is very different to walk in an urban environment from when you live in a house next to the bush. But, you know, walking on the University of Toronto campus one is amidst trees and grass and a wide sky.
So, I guess the point of all this is, 2020 wasn’t so bad after all. I will be glad when the virus is enough under control for people to feel safe to go about their lives again. I will be glad to get on a train and visit my grandchildren in both provinces. I will be glad when I can go into a grocery store without a mask on. There are so many things I will be glad about. I hope some of them are differences in our approaches to the environment and climate change. To equity, diversity and inclusion. I hope there will be a change in how wealth is distributed. Not so the wealthy have to give up all their pleasures, but so that they enter into a contract for social change that will leave no one behind in poverty or hunger or…
These are my thoughts at the beginning of 2021 and as they began to overflow in my consciousness that had been flooded with despair and regret on the first days of the New Year, I thought them worth writing down. I also don’t want to forget that in this past year I have lost people who have been incredibly important to me. There are too many to mention, but I remember!
I am also grateful for my friends, old and new, who have kept in touch. It has been exciting, for instance, to recreate, in regular Zoom calls, contact between seven (including me) women who graduated in the late l950s from McGill University. We are dispersed between Ontario, Massachusetts, Georgia and New Jersey. And the friends here in Toronto who call regularly. And those who email from elsewhere. Yes. I have been, and am, a most fortunate individual.
And so… another day, another year. Onward!
