Items

• 
  2020-04-16

  Zoom Book Club

  The last time my book club met in person, March 2020, we talked about what we would read next. I noted that I had a few books about pandemics already on my shelves and we should read one of those. Camus' "The Plague", "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter, "Journal of the Plague Year" by Daniel Defoe, "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez... why did I have so many books about plagues...? We decided on Defoe and I said "Well, maybe we will be meeting by Zoom next time." The group was incredulous (I live in a small rural town in South Dakota) that we wouldn't be able to meet in person in April. If I had read this book in non-plaugue times it certainly would have been good read but it took on a lot of added meaning when I read it at the beginning of the quarantine. Thermometers may change but people never change.
• 
  05/04/2020

  And I looked and behold a pale horse...

  A fuzzy, through the trees picture of my neighbor's white pick up truck the day after he was finally arrested for something ; the police are called there a lot. This truck is a dingy white and the springs squeak loudly when it bounces across the gravel driveway. The property has 2 trailers and 2 RV's and people come and go all day long. There is an 85 year old woman who lives in one of the trailers. The owner of this white truck is doing renovations on the property. He goes back and forth as if it is still an ordinary time, leaving the property 6,7,8 times a day, those springs squeaking down the drive. In Albert Camus' the Plague the Dr feels that he can hear the sound of the plague rats in the labored breathing of one of his patients. That truck's springs sound like the wheezing of the Coronavirus to me. I call it the Pale Horse. And he who rode upon it was Death.