Thinking of You

Not all clutter is created equal.

Every single year I promise myself that I’m going to clean up my apartment: toss out the mounds of paper, give away the old clothes and books, and finally—finally--bring some order out of the chaos.

And every single year, about the only that gets thrown out is that vow to throw stuff out.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not about to become the third Collyer Brother and I don’t think my home will be featured on a cable reality show.

Still, this place is messier than I’d like it to be, which can be quite depressing, especially now that we’re all trapped in our homes under Covid-19 lockdown.

I have some vacation time coming up and since travel is probably not a good idea, I’m going to work on getting rid of the damn papers.

But whatever goes out, I fully intend to keep my greeting cards.

God knows, I’ve tempted to ditch some of them, just to make a little room in my files. Nothing personal, of course, I just to want to tidy up a little bit.

But then I’ll open a birthday or holiday card, see the name of a friend or family member, and it suddenly becomes very personal indeed.

These cards are reminders of someone’s love and loyalty—two things that are awfully hard to come by in this life—so tossing them out with the trash seems incredibly wrong.

These people made the effort to get a card and address it to me, which is really impressive in this age of e-cards, tweets, and text messages.

And I recently discovered that these cards can also serve as a pretty effective anti-depressant.

Like just about everyone else on earth, I’ve had some serious bouts of coronavirus despair in the last four months—and I wasn’t the happiest guy in town to begin with.

The death and infection rates are climbing, people are refusing to wear masks, this country’s alleged leadership keeps telling us everything is fine, while doctors are warning that the fall and winter could be much worse than what we’re facing now.

Best Wishes

Loneliness can crank up regret and it was particularly bad last week, when I just felt completely hopeless.

In an effort to climb out of the funk, I started doing some half-hearted cleaning and that’s when I came across a stack of old birthday and Christmas cards.

I start reading them—any excuse to get out of cleaning, right?-- and I found that I was feeling a lot better.

Each card had a lovely memory attached to it and they remind me of the friends and family who had stood by me all those years.

With all this kindness, who needs Prozac?

One card in particular sticks out in my mind, though, because it takes on a new meaning in this quarantine world.

It was a get-well card I received during my hospital stay a few years ago from my friend and former co-worker, Susan, whom I worked with at the Pocono Record back in the 1980s.

I was terribly depressed during my recovery and all the support meant the world to me.

But the intriguing thing about Susan’s card is that reading it today, under the yoke of this pandemic, her kind words sound like a get-well message to the world.

“Everything is going to be okay,” the card says on the front, and the inside says, “Thinking of you.”

“So sorry you have to endure this ordeal,” Susan wrote. “Hope your recovery proceeds well and as quickly as possible and that every day brings you closer to getting back on your feet and the activities you enjoy.”

The world needs get back on its feet, also.

“Hope, too, that some extra time—a lot of extra time, actually, for reading, writing, reflection is good for your mind, imagination, and soul,” she continues.

Yes, and now we all have extra time for these things and maybe instead of collapsing, we could become stronger, better people.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. We don’t know when, or even if, everything will be okay.

All we can do is wash our hands, wear our masks, and stay close to one another emotionally until the time comes when we can do it in person.

Susan signs off by saying. “Prayers for healing, patience, and all good things!”

Do you hear that, people?