Wheel slippage in the time of Pandemic

One of my dearest friends, Paco, we’ll call him, is a bit of a worrier.  He is quick to see the down side of a situation and also he is just plain quick.  Once in conversation about some contest I asked him who he was backing and he said, “Oh I sort of like to root for the underdog.”

And I said, “Paco, that’s just because you’re contrarian.”

I love Paco and his humor and I admire the way he finds such joy in flying a little two-place back-country airplane north in the summer to get out of the California heat and east on occasion to visit a friend in Ohio. His “tiny little airplane” my wife calls it and Paco grits his teeth. In our last conversation we quickly turned from flying and sailing to the dire present circumstances. He is truly suffering the Black Dog due to what’s going on…in the States, across the world…things like the seeming death of democracy as we in America have known it, a crashing, shrieking economy that seems in free fall with no adults in the room and this pandemic that is much like the plot of a bio-thriller except that it is real; it is among us.  It is killing us.  Even so, I chided him for sounding so dour,  saying that surely we would find our way, but the last few day’s headlines from the scientific community as well as the chant of daily deaths and new spikes of contagion bear out his concern and fears.  Add to this economic horror and desperate world-disease the complete absence of cogent thought from our nation’s political leadership and the perfect storm is upon us.  Upon us with both feet or however many feet it has.

Perhaps it is textbook denial, but I have turned to the things I can do and away from the things on which I can have no bearing.  On the Can Do side are my woodshop, the beautiful dory my son and I have under construction, some handsome pieces of furniture I’ve built, a splendid Portuguese coffee with my wife outside a favorite ocean-side restaurant, letters to my friends, chatting with my seven thriving Jasmine Vines that will soon provide fragrant jungle-like privacy for us and our neighbor, and of course, watching industrial films from the 1930s-50s.  I’ve just cued up “Top Fifteen Extinct American Locomotives”.  I’ve learned that one such mastodon had a wheel arrangement of six/four/four/six and at 147 feet long was, believe it or not, nicknamed The Big Engine”.  I didn’t know that and now I do.  And now you do as well and neither of us, nor probably Paco, has thought about death counts or infection spikes for several minutes (this is valuable stuff).  The narrator went on to share that unfortunately this giant was susceptible to wheel slip.  Ah, God, not wheel-slip…I was stunned, gutted nearly, but there are also happy steam engine stories out of Great Britain.  They are all narrated by somebody named Nigel or Cryil Broughamly Goodwin-Chatsworth and Nigel often lets go a ‘Rawhter Keen, or  a ‘Fine that, what!’.  And what magnificent machines these engines were and how they can still take me away from fear and worry for an hour or more…without slipping at all.

Try it; wash your hands. Talk to your Jasmines.