Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

My child was supposed to go to Spain on a trip with classmates leaving on that Friday. I was watching cases in Spain and noted the fact that they shut the US air base over there down so that no one could enter our leave it. And the Spanish teacher that was taking them refused to cancel and the group kept saying they were going. On Wednesday, my daughter and I decided she wasn't going and by Friday the tour group had canceled all the tours. But they put my daughter through a lot of hell by just not canceling it earlier.

 

I need to remember that one

 

That response really would work in hundreds of situations to get people to back off, now that I think of it.

I always wanted to play a prank on people when they asked where me and my wife met and respond, “She was counsel on my second trial. Well, actually the fourth if you count hung juries.”

 

Everyone figured that this BA2 strain was going to piggyback on OG omicron and maybe slow the descent from the omicron peak. But it's been slow getting here. I don't think it'll amount to much here, but you know there's a Pi baking in the oven somewhere in Asia or Africa.

 

Well, I went to my aunt's funeral Thursday afternoon. Probably 500-600 people there. The church wasn't packed shoulder to shoulder, but it was pretty full.

She was 85, and I'd guess the crowd probably averaged about 70 years old.
The number of people wearing masks was so small I could indeed count them: five. She'd been very active in hospital work so I'd be confident everybody she knew was fully vaxxed long ago.

After the funeral, we headed over to the local country club where my aunt had been a member since her marriage 60 years ago, and before that, my grandmother had been a member since the 1920s, and my grandfather's family had been a charter member in the 1900s.

So I've been going there for family dinners literally my whole life.
But with the passing of my aunt, it's the last link of my family to the area. Her three kids have all moved away, and there's no particular reason for any of us to come back again.

Maybe to visit our grandparents' graves, but I don't really do that. They're buried in a small cemetery which is basically locked down; to even get in, you have to visit the diocesan office and check out a key -- my aunt had been one of the last people going in there a couple times per year.

I was hitching a ride with my brother (12 years younger) and sister (10 years younger); the entire StarSis bunch of seven (my youngest sis, 15 years younger than me, her husband and her five kids) came separately in their Suburban.

So after the service ended, we tooled around the streets one last time, to see our mom's old house and the houses our grandparents had lived in.

 

May her memory be a blessing.

 

Well, it's more than just her, really: it's my mother's whole family. They were really huge parts of the community ever since Saginaw was founded as essentially a Wild West lumber town shortly after the Civil War.

The whole city has been totally hollowed out by the loss of GM production plants and the abandonment and demolition of entire neighborhoods which have been de-urbanized.

My grandfather once had an office in a prosperous downtown area that's now almost completely cleared out. (It had devolved into, to put it bluntly, a hardcore ghetto hood in the 1960s and beyond.)

One of my strongest childhood memories of Saginaw was coming into town from the south side, driving past the GM foundry plant, half a mile square, which in full operation would fill the air with noxious choking black-green smoke for about five miles in every direction. Happily the prevailing winds would usually carry the clouds away from my grandmother's house, but you could usually sniff that acrid metallic scent.

That plant is gone now, razed to the ground. Only acres and acres of brick-strewn concrete pads remain.

(One positive effect appears to be that the Saginaw River, which my grandfather swam in as a kid in the 1890s according to family lore, which as long as I remembered back to the 1960s had been an oily chemical swill covered with a creepy greasy sheen, has pretty much reverted into a normal-smelling inland river. I probably wouldn't swim in it, but I'd probably go out in a fishing boat without the gnawing feeling the bottom of the boat was going to dissolve in a hydrochloric acid bath.)

Suburban strip malls which were bustling and busy when my siblings and I were trekking up to see Nana in the 60s-90s are now mostly boarded up. Even her apartment building, which had been a spiffy and well-maintained "luxury retirement" complex, was looking a bit dingy and paint-chippy. But I hadn't really been there since 1996.

It was good to see a lot of the old places again, but a bit dreary, too. I'm sure Saginaw will be a bustling city again someday -- there's certainly plenty of wide open space to develop now -- but that'll be for my nieces and nephews to see in the 2050s and beyond.

 

I’m going to church this weekend, as I’ve found Hell. I can’t think of anything more scary than the formula in this story; cruises, country music and Covid.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/03/11/outlaw-country-cruise/

 

Not the first time the Outlaw Country cruise has made it into the media.

https://bittersoutherner.com/all-in-the-same-boat-outlaw-country-cruise

 

I'd enjoy Mojo Nixon, but that's about it. Can't believe The Beat Farmers are still playing under that name a quarter century after the death of frontman Country Dick Montana.

 

I'm sure this is fine.

China battles worst Covid outbreak for two years as cases double in 24 hours