2020 – THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Wow, 2020!  There is no shortage of stories out there describing the year as, at a minimum, a pain.  I’d like to meet the person who’s saying “Best year ever!” if only to see if they tie the hospital gown in the front or the back like everybody else.  ‘Whoops! Dropped your med, buddy. -Three second rule. Here you go.’  The dark opinions with their shades of gray are so widespread I hesitated to do one of these annual wrap-ups.  What could I add that has not already been said?  What story could I tell that does not toss another woeful log on the fire or shame any report that all’s tolerable if not well?

Let me lead off by saying there is no way I am going to get this right.  You are not now reading my first draft which is strange given a year that was best known for its dormancy.  You’d think it would be easy to summarize.  When it comes to writing, multiple tweaks are the norm, but as I reached a near complete version I read back over it and could not help think the tone was wrong.   I did not feel as though my 2020 experience was all that oppressive in the relative scheme of things, but my tone had come off a little dark for the experience that really happened.  I counted the number of parenthetical if not unintentional dark references I’d written and began to think someone was going to call me in as a mental health risk.  ‘What’s wrong with you, Matt?  You don’t have it that bad.’

-And that’s the thing that is so hard about 2020 on so many levels.  On so many issues, independent of and on top of the pandemic, people are primed to give the Goldilocks critique on matters big and small.  Have an opinion that under or over-shoots your audience and one is guilty of a micro-aggression or micro-apathy.  Come in too cold and one commits the sin of not taking things seriously enough.  Come in too hot and one is piling it on or trampling the individuality we all cherish.  I’m not saying I don’t have strong opinions of my own, but suffice it to report that we here at Rancho Gilmartin did okay.  For us, 2020 was one long timeout though I personally know people for whom the world is burning down in tangible, measurable ways.  I defy you to find the 2020 timeout accurately memorialized in a Christmas ornament.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

Sticking just to the issues that are truly my own, my greatest problem at the moment is that I am mid-way through an oil pan and oil pump replacement on my old Jeep Wrangler.  Thankfully it is not my daily driver and has been relegated to hunting season 4-wheeling duties. To replace the oil pan, I need to remove the starter and transmission dust plate.  To remove the starter, I need a torx head socket I don’t have.  To remove the dust plate I need shoulders I had when I was thirty.  We missed this week’s trash and recycling pick-up because the Jeep is drained of its oil life blood and centered in the garage to allow me room to work, and I have a week to figure this all out before the trapped bins really fill up.  It’s cold, and it gets dark early, so I have been doing the job a little at a time.  -And THAT, folks, is as much stress as I intend to allow myself to experience.  Any and all new problems will have to drive out to Roxborough, Colorado to find me.

The kids seem to be handling the isolation thing better than I am of which I am astonishingly proud.  Maybe that sometimes difficult decision to allow them to self-soothe in those crying and screaming toddler years paid off, but that logic is probably a bit of a reach.  Emerson would likely agree.  Still working on his engineering studies and gainfully employed designing radio frequency equipment, “R.F.” for short, his confidence is at an all-time high.  At his age, barreling through achievements, accomplishments, and acquisitions, connecting any of it with anything dad did might seem like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, and…that’s cool.  It’s true that he is self-propelled and finding his own tools for living without me.  What more could a parent ask for?  I like the direction he is going, and just having his visits are reward enough.  Maybe he’ll come over and help me get the transmission’s dust plate off.  ‘God, I hope he does.  Is it Lefty Loosey and Righty Tighty?  -But what about when you are laying upside down and facing backwards?  Man, when is that kid gonna get here?!’  He’s good company for that sort of thing.  What a good boy!

Keagan commented in a half-heartedly half-jokingly critical way this last year that these newsletters are too much about me, meaning they aren’t, as tradition might have it, all about the family.  It is interesting to note that I’ve also learned from her this year that even her good friend and room-mate reads the online version, so I’m wondering how bad can they really be?  To this Keagan discounts me by saying her room-mate, Julia, will read anything and everything.  -And I am thinking, ‘So does George Stephanopolous.  Check and mate, my dad-bashing kid!’  If I were telling this story in-person I might opt for doing Keagan’s critique in a high pitched, nasally whine to give it a humorous edge, but Keagan sounds nothing like that and her sardonic wit is most often delivered in the deadpan style of PARKS AND REC’s April Ludgate which I think would then make me the Ron Swanson in this story.  For the record, I’ve offered her space on my site to do her own thing, and she has declined.

I really don’t know a ton of details about all that is going on with Keagan, and I am pretty sure that’s the way she likes it.  -And like Ron Swanson’s hands-off style in local government, it works for me most of the time as well.  Thanks to the pandemic, she has been home from college for all but four months of the year, but even with that there are many days when our conversation does not get beyond “Can I take the Honda?” or “Where do you keep the postage stamps?”.  To give you a sense of what I am really talking about, Keagan got a new boyfriend sometime around May.  I learned of his existence the day after she headed back to school in late August, and I finally met the young man when he stopped by late on Thanksgiving Day.  Throughout this covid ordeal Keagan has had her three-person social bubble, and beyond inquiring about the extent to which that arrangement has been respected, I’ve come to rely on the notion that Keagan makes pretty good decisions about her largely, as with respect to me, unobserved life.  I don’t worry about her, and one can’t write much about what one doesn’t know.  Besides, she is 21 now.  Legally I am done.

Theresa has spent a very very large part of the year inside the house.  Had she been working off a sentence of house arrest, the ankle monitor batteries would have died of boredom.  We’ve erected a balance bar and a floor mat in her office, and she has made good with Zoom versions of ballet and yoga classes.  For years we’ve had a practice of exchanging Christmas ornaments that in some way summarize or encapsulate some event of the prior year, but this year has been a very tough one to capture in that medium.  I’ve googled all kinds of weird scenarios I thought some creative Etsy vendor might have captured.  Home officing? -Nope.  Isolation?  -Nope.  -Not gonna lie.  This year’s was a punt and even then only after calling back the first pick for a creative foul.

Throughout the year I couldn’t help but compare what we were going through with what pioneering settlers must have contended with.  ‘They did it, so why can’t we?’  Imagine months alone on a farm or ranch in a scarcely populated part of the country with nothing but one’s immediate family for social contact perhaps for months on end.  Instead of bringing home stories about this person or that sleighting you in a meeting, matching the wrong shoes with the wrong top, or losing their mind waiting for an elliptical at the gym, as a settler one might sit around the dinner table marveling at the wild flowers that sprung up at the third to the last fence post on the northwest corner of the property.  The landscape of remarkability would be purer and simpler I think.  Throughout our marriage I have from time to time pitched the idea of moving to a remote part of Colorado, an idea which Theresa has always shot down for the lack of amenities she enjoys, -dining, theater, and such.  Funny thing is that she is so well suited for it.  I am the one who needs contact with people from the outside world whereas Theresa can move from her home office to the kitchen to the bedroom and repeat for days or even weeks at a time with hardly any complaint, -not bad for someone born in a city with a population of 8 million. ‘Maybe I should wall off her home office with Amazon packages just to add some sport to our lives. American Ninja Warrior that, baby! That or I am gonna turn up my Tik Tok version of Tina Turner’s PRIVATE DANCER.’

Our biggest casualty, in my mind, has been the regular date night.  Try as we might to re-create the setting through take-out and my amateur bartending, it just doesn’t cultivate the same mood.  I am very much looking forward to a return to this practice.  During the summer lull of the pandemic we did manage a few outings where we could find patio seating, but that ship has sailed thanks to the changed weather.  For some who may have always found the date night stories annoyingly exhibitionist or disagreeable, they might now get the chance to enjoy a generous dose of shadenfreude.  ‘-But that’s messed up.  You know that is messed up, right?’

2020 has been a good year for cycling though many of the miles were logged in relatively close proximity to the house.  As of this writing with two weeks left in the year, I’ve cycled 4,943 miles and read who knows how many audiobooks from the saddle.  I am one medium length ride away from 5,000 which is my default annual goal.  This year’s “long ride” was a covid safe 300 miles of mountain passes between Vail and Idaho Springs.  Next year though I am planning to lower the annual goal to make room for some judo.  I am virtually certain I can’t do both without some adjustment.  You young folks reading this, don’t even try to bait me on this.  There is no freakin way!  Most men my age would not consider doing either, much less both.  3500-4000 cycling miles with 2-3 judo workouts a week is what I am shooting for, and whatever poops out the other side as a result is what I will live with.

If 2020 has left you jonesing for a little human contact, allow me to extol the virtues of the many unconventional ways of making and sustaining friendships that I might have, pre-covid, dismissed as being weird.  The DM to a friend that is more letter than DM is one way.  Keagan took up letter writing, real snail-mail letter-writing, to friends last spring.  I’m not going to lie, not all of the responses were winners, but she also found some gems.  -And yes, it might, if you try it, start out feeling a little weird just because it is different for our times.  I for one find it strange when the person who videos and posts so many personal moments such that I’m not sure they fully experience their own life, then thinks it too intimate to share the written word beyond captions.  A joke about a flood, a prayer, a rowboat, a helicopter, and a declined rooftop rescue comes to mind.  Many perhaps God-given answers are right in front of us.

-Which is why I enjoy this story about Pallabee so much.  Thanks to covid initiated shift-splitting at work, I’ve gone months without seeing several enjoyable people at work who used to fill up the days.  Some I still haven’t seen since last February.  Pallabee was our grad-student intern turned data engineer.  She nearly fell off the edge of the contact map thanks to the pandemic.  A couple of weeks after a couple of SLACK calls that grew chatty and ran long, Pallabee DM’d one early morning and asked if I was going to be in the office that day.  I told her I was, and she said given that she’d head in even though it was her work from home week.  I spent the drive into work wondering what her news was going to be.  Was she going to tell me she found another job?  Was she heading back to India now that she had her University of Texas Computer Science Masters Degree in hand?  Was she getting married?  It was far simpler and more uplifting than that.  She just wanted to see someone she hadn’t seen in a long while.  She wanted a laugh, so, in a socially distanced way, we caught up like a couple of school kids back from the summer.  She took a risk, and I am glad she did.  It was a delight, and if for you alarm bells go off upon hearing such a story, I can only say, “Rowboat!  Helicopter!”  It’s good to miss people and to be missed.  Most of what I know of Pallabee has been learned since our mid-pandemic reunion, and there have been other people too with whom contact through a computer has deepened for lack of alternatives.          

Getting back to judo at age 51 after not really having done it since 2004 has been humbling.  It deserves a bump-acknowledging telling.  Since 2004 I’ve had a hip replaced (maybe because of judo), a hernia repair, and occasional bouts of gout when I don’t watch my water intake.  My toes sometimes feel like they are made of glass.  -But the worst thing by far has been the state of my shoulders which have probably frozen up gradually after 35,000 miles of gripping my road bike handlebars or…it is a carryover from the last time I did judo.  Who knows.

I have bursts of competence on the mat, but I am far from consistent.  Sometimes I enter a throw and find the limitation of my shoulders’ range and the pain of it crowds out any muscle memory of what to do next.  Throwing people requires the coordination of several almost simultaneous movements and stop any one of them mid-way and you get yourself a crappy throw that looks like you’re trying to hammer throw a wet mattress or shot put your weight in spaghetti.

The bursts can be cool.  I have my moments.  A few times I have gotten off really nice throws and part of me wants to get up, dust off my hands, and head for the door on a high note like a comedian who just brought down the house.  That’s not how it works though.  Usually when these bursts happen I still have another 20-30 minutes of butt dumps ahead of me and it only gets worse the more tired I get.

I am not cleaning up, but there have been instances when I think I at least captured the respect of the young guys who are, MY GAWD,…so freaking fast!!  You block a hip throw by throwing your own hip in.  The counter to that block is for your opponent to edge his or her hip out and around your hip from back to front for their shot at it, and these can be chained together until one of you gets the throw off or one or both of you fall over in the frenzy.  At one practice I was going with one of the senior ranked “kids” and that’s what happened.  God that kid was fast, -shoot-block-shoot-block-shoot-block-shoot-block down the mat we went our hips dancing off each others like a couple of fencing foils feverishly scraping together looking for an advantage.  The difference is that when it ended, I was gassing for air, and he was ready for another go.  ‘You get one, kid.  Give me 5 minutes.  -And then you bring it!  Bring that Richard Simmons sh** back here for me to knock down!‘  It’s okay.  None of these kids know who Richard Simmons is.

The very coolest part is the sense of community head coaches Scott and Heidi have created at the club.  I am blown away by it.  I haven’t cracked in yet, but the reason is coming up.  You see some of these guys enter practice not just with high-fives, but hugs.  Some of these folks are pretty tight.  They know each other’s stories and they are really invested in each other’s development.  It is good to see.  The statistically rich 2000 book BOWLING ALONE:THE COLLAPSE AND REVIVAL OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY speaks to the decline of community as evidenced by the declining participation in group functions like, well…bowling leagues.  We are much more likely to head home to our “containers” pandemic notwithstanding than get off the couch and “participate”.  My bet is it has only gotten worse since that book came out, but Scott and Heidi have cultivated something that swims against that tide.

Judo was the one group thing I allowed myself during the pandemic, and readers should know everyone’s temperature was checked before we got underway.  Covid numbers in Colorado bounced between 5 and 10 infections per 100K people for the better part of my time at practice.  When it started to creep up to 15, as reported by the WASHINGTON POST, I began to get a little concerned.  I told myself I’d let it get to 25, and at 28, I took my leave.  Rates have since climbed as high as 91 and was at 63 at my last check.  I’ll go back when the numbers settle down.  Now that I have written no less than five paragraphs about it, I have to, when the pandemic is in check, go back.  In the meantime I stew on writing ideas.  Someone needs to novelize the judo experience. Maybe me?  ‘Hmmm.  Stew, stew, stew.’

-And that’s the year as it were.  -No hunting tags this year.  -Crapped out on that.  Probably next year.  Stay safe and stay in touch, everyone!  Have a wonderful 2021.

RoxGilmartin