Falling Back, 34. Today is Yesterday.

The probability of each family celebrating Christmas in their own home, without being able to make family reunions, is growing. The probability of no one going out to New Year's Eve parties is practically writ in stone. The probability of there being lots of people angry with the government is a certainty.

No way are we, in two and a half months, going to get this so under control as to allow multitudinous celebrations of any kind. Some of the origins of this latest wave are outbreaks that began when an infected family member attended a celebration of some kind, and spread the virus around. Personally, I won't mind eating alone at home with my husband and daughter. My daughter might mind that she won't be going out on New Year's Eve, though. 

Time stretches and contracts at will, it seems. This morning I read an article that the star Betelgeuse is approaching its end soon; within about a hundred thousand years. That is soon in cosmic time, yet infinity in human time. It's been dying practically since there have been humans on Earth. 

A song on the radio by Celine Dion from the movie, Titanic, made me think that it's been over a hundred years since the shipwreck. And that it's now also been over a hundred years since the First World War ended. This year marks a hundred years that women could vote in the United States. It's been eighty-four years since the Spanish Civil War began, and eighty-one since the beginning of World War II. 

When I was a child, those events were so close in time. Sometimes, survivors of one thing or another were interviewed on television. While they were all old, there were some who were my parents' age that lived through the Second World War. My parents were older, but they weren't that old to me. I remember asking my mother about the European war, and her replies that it hadn't affected her. Nor did the Civil War affect her. I thought they were boring for not having stories about such momentous events in recent history, especially my mother, who was only two weeks younger than Anne Frank, and whose diary I loved to read and re-read.

The Spanish flu of 1918 is another event that seemed to have been relatively recent in my childhood. And here we are, over a hundred years later, going through another pandemic. That other one lasted around three years, with pockets of infection going on longer. Now, with more knowledge and technology, this one won't last much less time. The race for a vaccine will most likely yield results by the middle or latter part of next year. Vaccination itself will take some more time, so perhaps by the end of 2022 we can call it history. And then, the time will begin to lengthen, and there will come a moment when we look back and say, wait, that was already thirty years ago?

Life continues.