2020 – The Year in Review (…so far)

With five months left in the year, I thought maybe THIS year it did not make sense to wait until the holidays to do an issue of the GILMARTIN CHRONICLES, THE YEAR IN REVIEW.  I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that 2020 has been, so far, a very stark outlier compared to past years.  Maybe, just maybe, folks are in a frame of mind where they are more willing and able to take a letter about what’s been going on at this end.  My newsletter almost certainly doesn’t have to compete with other people’s concerts, sports, or the full-blown summer vacations most of us are used to enjoying this time of year.  Everyone is experiencing a slower pace of things in some way.  -So,…here it is for your enjoyment or delete bin, an EXTRA edition of THE YEAR IN REVIEW.

Before we get started, how’s everyone doing?  Noticing the smaller things of life?  Cherishing your friends who’ve joined you in the bubble more?  Gaining weight through this?  Losing weight through this?  Reading more?  Writing your holiday newsletter in July?  Yup, things are different.

At least in my neighborhood there has been perhaps thanks to the pandemic a resurgence of the evening family walk.  I live on a corner lot with my living room windows looking out to the sidewalk alongside the property, and I see, where I hadn’t so much before, an adult head bobbing past the window every few minutes as I sit on the couch most evenings.  -Kids too.  I admit, I am, thanks to a conflict several years ago with one of my neighbors, ‘Old Man Gilmartin’, the curmudgeon living on the corner who doesn’t want anyone’s dog taking a sh** in the yard.  -But I’ve relaxed a bit throughout the pandemic.  It’s nice to see people out and about.  I do a lot more smiling and waving now, -mostly.

Bicycles are coming back too.  Kids ride them in the way we used to ride them as kids which is to ride them as ‘play’.  Before the pandemic it seemed we only saw bikes when kids were using them as transportation to and from school.  Games of imagination are returning as a normal thing, and I frequently hear one group of boys engaged in the sort of over the handlebars kinds of debates I remember having, -which superhero is strongest and who’s is the fastest kid in the neighborhood.  Well, that’s easy!  It’s me of course, C’mon, kid, not if you strapped a rocket to that thing and I drug an anchor behind me! Race ya to the stop sign, Dexter.  Last one there is a rotten egg. -And stop calling my S-Works a girl’s bike!

Yes, bicycle sales are way up in 2020, and as I have been cycling for years, I can tell out on the trails and suburban streets that some of my fellow riders are sort of new to this.  ‘They’ are however looking for me down along the Platte River.  The sixteen mile stretch of bike trail along the river between Chatfield State Park and downtown Denver has a posted speed of 15mph.  15mph?!  Please!  A couple of radar operated speed signs have been erected probably because of the increased activity along the trail this year.  People, having been locked down, want to get out in a covid safe way, and I gotta admit that’s a pretty good spot for it.  I’ve taken the hint and altered my routes to let people have the space free of me trying to make time.  I get it, and I can ride elsewhere.  It’s funny.  I think I am a pretty safe driver behind the wheel, but I had to wear padded spandex shorts to become a scofflaw.  I’m not the only one who’s blown through this stretch on a road bike, but that’s no excuse. 

I am not put out.  It has actually been a good year in terms of cycling and interactions with motorists.  We hear every week about someone completely losing their mind in a Costco, a WalMart, or most recently I heard about a blood bank meltdown.  -But I am here to report that there has been an elevated civility between motorist and cyclist in 2020.  Maybe because folks are rethinking things?  Hardly anyone has hung out the window to yell or laid on their horn to let me know they did not think I belonged.  It used to be I could be putt-putting along well inside the shoulder feeling spiritual while listening to George Harrison’s MY SWEET LORD, and right about the part when George seems most in tune with the universe with his ‘Krishna Krishna’ chorus, then WOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK!  I’ve been so startled a few times, I’ve nearly wiped out.  Half the time I have no idea what the driver’s issue was.  Maybe they had to take their overweight foot off the gas pedal and apply a pound or two or pressure to the brake pedal to help guide themselves past me for the ‘however many seconds’ that took.  Yeah, I can see how that is right up there with a forced donation of a kidney.  -But!  It comes with the territory I guess.  At the end of July, I have 3025 miles for the 2020 year.  I am having a really good year in the saddle and think I will easily close the books north of 5000 miles for the year.

Both the kids, Emerson and Keagan, have had to be tested for the virus because both were in contact with someone who had it.  By now it is really not so special an undesirable situation to befall someone.  As of my writing, one in a hundred Americans have it, distributed unevenly across the US of course, so theoretically it really doesn’t take much circulation to make a connection with the someone who does, and it will only get easier to make that contact going forward all present trends continued.  Emerson however had a contact very early in the pandemic through work, and his engineering firm started performing weekly tests which I thought was very responsible of them.  It also made it easier to let him come over to the house knowing he was negative.  Keagan is still waiting for her results and is on a self-quarantine until she hears back.  School is kind of up in the air for both of them, but I don’t have to tell anyone with kids reading this about that.  Keagan is supposed to head back in a few weeks to Lewis and Clark in Portland.  Yup, THAT Portland.  This year she is renting an apartment with three of her friends all of whom are the brainy, studious type so no worries there.  Emerson is moving into a place of his own to live by himself. “I think a person needs to know how to be alone,” he says.  That something so self-aware came out of my kid’s mouth is really cool.  Theresa says he sounds more and more like me all the time, but I think he sounds like my father. 

Keagan has always been a paragon of responsibility.  I’ve joked that she practically raised herself she was so effortless, and she really leaves me believing that raising girls is the easier chore.  She wants to roll straight into a PhD program when done at LC, and, for her, making up her mind to do it might be the only big obstacle.  Her saying it means there is a high likelihood it will get done.  Emerson had a slower launch, but he is so responsible and motivated now it scares me.  Four or five years ago I would have had to sell him on the then hard to imagine virtues and payoffs of diligence.  Today I don’t think I could alter his very focused course if I tried.  He’s not even graduated yet and he is getting word-of-mouth interview referrals to engineering firms.  Is it ‘from’ or is it ‘to’ engineering firms?  In any case they’ve come a calling.  Yawp.  Whatever fears I had, I am now feeling this guy is gonna do fine.

Over a span of three summers Emerson took jobs first in landscaping (manual labor), then table waiting in a retirement community, and finally working retail.  Honestly, every summer I wondered why he did not return to the last job to take advantage of a sure thing, and I was a bit suspicious.  -But he had a plan to round these bases specifically and deliberately, so he could say he’d done them all.  -And being young the stakes were pretty low, so why not.  I didn’t get it at first, but now I am thinking it was brilliant.  He is going to be able to relate to so many people who’ve had one of these experiences.  It is just one of the sorts of things he does all the time to widen his experience and connect with people.  He’s a good guy and good people are drawn to him.

I am on a 50-50 work split with the company with one week in the office and one week at home.  We wear masks in the office as per the current guidance.  If there were no virus, I am the sort who prefers having a place to go for the day.  I like routine and having my work life separate from home.  Sure, there are days when, like everybody else, I drag myself through the front door of the building.  As Colin Quinn described the same feeling working at SNL, “It IS ‘work’ afterall.”  I also miss and like most of my coworkers, and this newsletter is in part for them.  Some of them I have not seen since, what, early March? 

Theresa has worked from home this entire pandemic.  Long ago she began using Emerson’s old bedroom as an office, but she has since the beginning of the pandemic made improvements.  She bought an L-shaped desk and a couple of monitors.  I poke my head in there now and then and she looks like she is sitting at a mission control station at NASA with monitors, and tablets, and her phone propped up playing music.  My God, no wonder the electric bill is so high.  I am a little jealous of the workspace.  After the re-design I got her old monitor which was Emerson’s old monitor which was Emerson’s friend’s old monitor.  Yeah, I am working on some punk, teenage kid’s old third-degree hand-me-down monitor who I don’t even know and who didn’t want it.  It is better than what I had before, but I can be a ‘grass is greener’ guy.  I want some new stuff for crying out loud!  -And there is an annoying dark spot in the lower right corner of it.  Hmmm, maybe that is why no one wanted it. 

Theresa and I have had to yell at each other a few times when one of us has gotten loud on a conference call.  Wooden floors carry sound and my place is cozier than it is big.  I’ve resorted to “Return to your workstation, madam!” to keep it professional, “-Or I’ll be forced to inform H.R.”  That might be when I get the cupcake embargo.  You know all those times when your co-worker warms something weird up in the microwave?  Yeah well it is really weird when that person is your wife, and I can’t really say anything cuz usually I want some of what she’s heating up too.  Meh, we’re all adjusting.

2020 is our 25th anniversary and Theresa’s 50th birthday.  Theresa took me to Maine last year for my 50th, so to reciprocate I was going to take her to Hawaii this year as part of a combined celebration.  Needless to say, that has been called off.  Then we talked about a road trip to the east coast.  That too has been called off, -virus and climbing infection metrics between here and there.  Then it was a road trip to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, -still a road trip but closer.  That has been called off.  I don’t know what we are doing now.  Maybe a drive to a truck stop on the Kansas state line to buy some pork rinds?  We had tickets to HAMILTON, -cancelled.  I had a very well planned 530-mile bike ride scheduled for the California coast, -cancelled.  I don’t mean to whine because I know all of you are in the same boat, but man!  Meh, I’ll get over it.  The big highlight of the year was an overnight stay at the Oxford Hotel in downtown Denver.  We never left the room, ordered room service, played Scrabble (Theresa always and I mean ALWAYS crushes me), watched tv, and I fed Theresa a steady stream of drinks.  After three months of hardly leaving the house, it was fantastic!  Theresa fell asleep, I watched Andy Griffith in bed until 3AM on channels I don’t get at home.  Somehow it is better doing dumb stuff in a nice hotel.  It was a great time.

House projects were getting checked off at a blistering pace at the start of the pandemic, but I’ve slacked off over the last couple of months in favor of cycling.  Still more is getting done than usual.  The trees have never been this pruned, and many to-dos long on my list have gotten done.  I told someone in April that I planned to pick up trash along the highway I had been doing most of my cycling miles during the lockdown but only recently made good on that promise.  Having done it, I will try to do it more regularly.  It is not really that big of an inconvenience to pick up trash this way.  I hook up my bike trailer and towards the end of my ride I pull over and with gloves and a lawn size garden bag I start picking up trash.  I figure I am already wearing an orange helmet, so people driving by probably think I am just another highway worker.  Sadly, it does not take long to fill a bag.  Once full the bags are too big to fit in one of my panniers, so I tie it to the trailer and haul it to the nearest dumpster in the state park the highway borders.

Speaking of trash, Theresa and I have been binging a fair amount of the show HOARDERS, a reality show, for those of you unfamiliar, about people who do NOT know how to throw things out and it ends up wrecking their life.  The show is a low impact distraction if you want something that will let you mill around the house doing other things while it is on.  It’s enough to walk through the living room on your way to clean your own bathroom and catch the hoarder’s disgusting bathroom out of the corner of your eye on the tv.  I am not going to lie.  It has served to get me to throw some of my stuff out. 

Here’s a question for my readership who might be familiar with the show.  Dr. Robin Zasio or Dr. Melva Green?  Tut.  Tut.  Let me help you out with this one, dear reader.  The correct answer is, hands down, Dr. Melva Green.  R-rrr-ow!  Yes!  She could teach a brakeless freight train to self-parallel-park on a windy hill!  Why?  -Cuz she’s patient.  A hoarder could be completely losing their mind, and she just stands there knee deep in dead cats and rat filth calm as an eye of a hurricane with the look of ‘I could do this all day!’  Hell, she’s probably writing a chapter for her next book in her head while the hoarder de la semaine rants like a lunatic in some lazy form of English, ‘Don’t nobody listen to me!’ as they make their case to not throw out the nineteenth urine soaked afghan pulled from under the pile.  -And Dr. Green looks perfect doing it!  She is loaded for bear.  I tell ya, she’s either writing a book in her head or doing that Robert Downey Jr., Sherlock Holmes bit where he’s perfectly plotting out every fight move for when sh** gets real.  That’s probably it.  That’s what she’s doing.  I had a comedic bit about that I was going to put here, but I don’t think it would translate well in written form.

I shouldn’t poke fun at the show because most of the cases they present are very sad.  Broken thinking can be frustrating to people who are on the outside looking into the problem, but most of these people on the show HOARDERS are the kind who take their response to emotional pain and go hide.  -And let’s face it.  There are a lot of versions of broken thinking.  Most of us have at least one.  People who are hurt and try in their maladaptive way to contain it so as not to create new harm to others, at least for the hoarders who live alone, I think deserve some credit for their attempt to keep the act-out localized.  It’s not like we’re watching a reality show about domestic violence interventions.  These people are retreaters.  Of course, it’s not the case one hundred percent of the time in these stories that the hoarder is only self destructing, but the hoarders are NOT the sort who are completely without feelings.  Usually quite the opposite, -they feel their feelings more deeply and don’t know what to do with them.  Many of them just want to be left alone.  I can identify with that.  I can identify with that a lot.  Not wanting to cause anyone hurt with my presence, I can see how it would make sense to isolate in a space and do whatever it takes to get by within it.  There is a sort of attempted Hippocratic element to this thinking,  -to do no further harm.  Most of the time when Dr. Green shines a light on the effects to themselves and others, the hoarder seems to have never before put it together the impact of their habit.  If I thought an ingrown toenail was keeping me from going nuts, I am probably not going to remove it.  The calculus and the economics of it, in the moment, would make sense though it sounds crazy.  

Well, that went a little dark.  -Back to the haps.  I really really miss date night with Theresa during this pandemic.  I’m saving a ton of money by not going out, but it was worth the expense and I would gladly pay for it to have it back.  I miss going for a 60-mile bike ride and just stopping in somewhere for a break just cuz I can.  I’ve done a lot of exploring that way, and I miss it. 

Mrs. Lively, my seventh-grade journalism teacher, taught me two indispensable lessons l have carried with me into my fifties.  First, I learned the fundamentals of good journalism, such that I can see through a lot of the crap mystifying so many people a lot of the 24-hour news networks are putting out.  Journalists have rules believe it or not, and, right or left, really basic rules of journalism, teachable even in seventh grade, are getting violated all over the place.  That you like what you are hearing in your news source because it supports your inclination is not one of the rules.  The second lesson was from Mrs. Lively’s personal life.  Mrs. Lively, who in 1981 was an empty-nester in her fifties, made a point of blocking out time every week with her magazine editor husband to share a glass of wine.  Some people in their fifties describe their marriage like they are carrying a heavy couch up a flight of stairs and whoever puts their end down first is the loser.  -Not Mrs. Lively!  I gave up drinking sixteen years ago, but I love the time spent with Theresa while she unwinds.  I unwind because she is unwinding.  Several years ago, we started making it a regular thing to go out, and when you are raising kids it can seem like a counter-intuitive thing to do at first.  You feel like you are being irresponsible and frivolous.  It had to be a very conscious choice the first few times when we began, at first only on a quarterly cadence, but after a few years it became such a regular and automatic thing I miss it now that it is gone, -not unlike how a good exercise program should be.  -But!  The good news is we are heading to the mountains next week.  I am going to try to do the cycling miles I had planned for California, and Theresa is going to do her thing during the day.  We’ll spend the evenings together.  God, I hope I am not too crampy.  I am going over some pretty high mountain passes on my bike.

Well, I hoped this newsletter would NOT be a ‘rant’ about the virus.  How’d I do?  I hope everyone is doing great.  Hang in there!  I can’t wait to see folks again.