Silver linings in a very dark cloud

Tens of millions infected.

More than a million dead.

Businesses crippled.

Nearly everyone’s lives upended in ways great and small.

The year (mostly) gone by — 2020

I spent a lot of time in 2020 … walking.

Almost every day it wasn’t raining or snowing or freezing cold, Suzi and I walked.

Just when you think you’ve heard all the Christmas music

The yelp caused me to bolt off the couch and hurry to the kitchen.

Suzi was making a buche de Noel, the last of her weekly pre-Christmas treats. Even though I had warned her not to expect it to be as effortless or perfect as Mary Berry’s Yule log, the fact of the matter is I’m married to a perfectionist, so I wondered what kind of disaster I was walking into.

It wound up having nothing to do with the baking.

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The shortest day

I had to get out. Right then.

There was no time to wait … literally.

It was 4 o’clock. It was going to be dark soon.

The week gone by — Dec. 20

When I first went to college, I met a girl.

No, this isn’t one of those stories, although we got along well for a time, and she was pretty cute if I remember correctly.

We eventually wound up in different circles, and I think it just sort of happened, although it didn’t help that I …

Life from the Before Times

Since it literally was the first moments of 2020 in the United States, it’s fitting that couples kissing and general merriment in Times Square on New Year’s Day would the first picture in The New York Times’ retrospective of the year in photos.

Even though I love Times Square in a way I’m sure many people would find illogical, ringing in a new year with more than 1 million of my closest, drunkest friends has never appealed to me. 

However, there was something else about the photo that struck me — that it happened.

Freaked out by the forecast

We’re supposed to get a snowstorm later in the week.

It’ll be a pain, especially after the plow dumps snow at the end of the driveway, but neither of us has to be anywhere that day, and the snowblower ran fine when I used it a couple weeks ago.

But then I saw a forecast of 14 to 20 on the local news, and 24 to 36 down toward Cape Cod, where we used to live.

The week gone by — Dec. 13

Every Monday at 7 p.m., I carefully prop up my iPad in my sock drawer, log into Zoom and kick, punch, jump and shuffle for an hour in my exercise class.

We haven’t been in the gym for months, but as long as there’s a class on Monday, I’m there, whether it’s in the parking lot of a pizza place — where we gathered with cones to keep us the required 14 feet apart during the summer — or virtually in my bedroom.

After all, when the class started almost four years ago, it was Thursdays at 7 a.m., and compared to that, how hard is it to follow along on a screen?

Oh, the pain … the Christmas pain

All of a sudden, Suzi got very excited as we were listening to Jolly, which is by far the best of the SiriusXM holiday music channels we’ve listened to.

The music’s mostly up-tempo, as opposed to some channels that seem to be into Christmas dirges, and there’s good variety … important when I’m pretty sure we heard three or four different versions of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in two hours.

So what had my wife so excited?

Never thought much about borders before …

Blink, and you’ll miss it.

Look anywhere but the side of the road, and you’ll miss it.

Try very hard to run the car in front of you off the road because they’re trying to figure out where to turn and you just have to get where you’re going right now, and you’ll miss it.