Saturday night we had another hang. I throw these up because somehow not being out on a Saturday hits many of us more poignantly. I found out, on Facebook, I’d lost a friend of more than a decade to the virus. I hadn’t seen him in a while but he was very important to me, he showed up whenever I needed him, and I did for him when he rarely beckoned. We knew we were in each others’ lives and that was that. To lose someone like this was painful. However, as he was an actor, among the many hats he wore successfully, I knew he adhered to the old adage “the show must go on,” and so it did. We opened small, with a handful of people, one who also recently lost someone, a 92 year old uncle. My friend was only in his late 50s, but there’s no weighing the importance of a loss in someone’s life. As people came on the conversation drifted to what was important to people at the time, one noting he recognized the box his new tv came in hanging out the back of a garbage truck, one focusing on her find of boxed wine. I was not in the right state of mind, so I begged out and left the Groove running. I heard after that it ran for more than an hour after I left, which was good. A party is supposed to do that.
Sunday I had a classmate, Jonathan F. Putnam, read from a book in his historical fiction series about young Abraham Lincoln, the “Lincoln & Speed Mystery Series.” He came really prepared with a slide show to accompany his readings and series explanation. We had a good showing from our class from around the country, as well as some PareaGroove regulars. Our author friend was calling in from London where he relocated his family a few years ago. So, we were able to compare quarantining experiences here and there. Much of it is similar, we’re all dealing with much of the same thing. Our discussion was really fun, about the book, about his experience leaving law for the life of a writer, about history, and about comparative politics. He had to hop off due to time differences, and we kept going onward, sharing our recent information gathering about the virus among other things.
Last night we had the “midweek hang” and a good number of regulars showed up, as well as some newbies. One of our Groovers had posted about an interview by a Columbia professor for her class of a NYT writer who had been warming about the virus for months. Another, on the Groove, was interested in watching. After an hour of chatting we figured out how to share the screen and run the Youtube interview and we watched that for an hour. A few people logged on and logged off during it, but it was a shared experience watching the stressful recalled forebodings and the fearful anticipation of worse to come.
This week is a week of holidays, Holy Week for Christians, and Passover starting tonight. Many of us are going to launch into Zoom seders. Some synagogues have public ones, some people are hosting private ones for friends and families. I tried to do a bit of matchmaking for the Seder orphans. We’ll see what the reports of such efforts will be at our next Grooves.
