Author: bahaft

Again, today we talked about the vaccine, and who was legitimately qualified to get it. We talked about the definition of “obese” and how alarmingly low the bar is to define oneself as obese, but how some people we knew used that definition for themselves in order to get the vaccine. We discussed the different vaccines, the different delivery modes of Moderna and Pfizer and AstroZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. We worried about the New York variants and how it was found in Georgia and how the UK variant was found in Florida. We all knew of people who had it and who died of it. We talked about the monoclonal antibodies and how they did help. We discussed how we heard trucks carrying the vaccines were being hijacked and the vaccines sold on the Black Market.

Too much of this talk is a downer so we veered to our group dog in his Zoom box and his new crew cut, about strange pets people have had, and how herbal cures for people, like nettle tea for allergies and ginger for upset stomach, can help dogs too. While our call was going on some people were watching the Oprah interview of Meghan & Harry, and some of us were taping it for later. I mentioned I met someone who had met the Queen several times so now all the PareaGroovers were two degrees removed from her. They liked this.

As the Coronaversary, as it is being called, approaches this week, when the lockdown was first declared, we talked about our experiences immediately before that happened, what we bought, what we thought. We then talked about how Dr. Seuss’ books were canceled, how Mr. Potato Head was now gender neutral, and somehow how Mother Theresa wasn’t always so great according to stories that came out after she died. “You gotta be tough to climb to the top of the nun business” one suggested. And then he posited perhaps weaponizing the Flying Nun, which was hysterical. We talked then about watching television, shows online, on our phones, then to the eye strain all these screens were leading to and whether the blue glasses actually helped, and whether all these screens caused insomnia, or was it just stress. We talked about how family parties, even Bar Mitzvahs, were now “hybrid,” where some were in person and many more were attending online alongside the streamed in-person event. And we ended with a little combined FOMO and worry for Florida where things seem as back to normal as ever, as our Floridian resident comically warned “if you stand too close to a door they push you inside.”

This Groove was named for the Farmer’s Almanac name for this month’s full moon, the deepest, darkest part of the winter. So, it was just as well we had our cozy Zooming time inside to end a very cold weekend. We of course started with vaccine talk and about who among us had gotten theirs, who were trying. Some got their two shots legitimately, in that it was their turn by age, they were a healthcare worker or the like, and some got it by a bit of cleverness around the corners, figuring out how to get them through connections, websites and pharmacy wait lists, and we all had tips for each other on how to find them. Then we wended into talking about dating sites, and dating, and getting out there again, as one of us utilized her downtime to enjoy online courses on dating and life advice. So we started by asked each other how we meet people, which of course these days is mostly through dating sites, and how we navigate the whole process. Meet outside under heat lamps? For walks? Are we comfortable eating inside yet? New York has opened up indoor dining to 25% – 35% but many people still aren’t so comfortable with eating inside. Of course, many States are now fully open. The disparity in risk averseness from one State to another, from one person to another, is large. We veered away from the relationship conversation to talk about a Black Lives Matter protest some of us watched pass us that evening, about thirty or so protesters marching down Columbus Ave. in NYC, in the rain, surrounded by about forty or so police, in vans, on foot and on motorcycles. It was small, but loud, and seemed a bit anachronistic. Now that Biden is elected it feels like it’s almost old fashioned, the BLM protest, but of course the problems they’re protesting have yet to be solved. It kind of felt like a strange scene out of a movie, this small group of protesters marching in the rain down a strangely empty main road surrounded by cops with flashing lights.

We returned to our conversation about relationships, which although is largely on the minds of many of us is rarely a topic on these “Grooves. We kind of delved deeply and personally since our group that night was mostly regulars who have grown somewhat comfortable with each other. We talked about our parents’ relationships and how that may have affected our feelings about finding partners, how those of us with parents who had good, long relationships might have a higher bar to meet and a tougher time dating. We talked about polite date behavior, how men’s eyes sometimes wander, as do some women’s, which is not very cool at all, and how impressed we are when people actually do focus on us. We talked about building trust with a partner, how it needs to be developed over time, how we need to define our space, what we want, and allow for each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We acknowledged the importance of commitment, how it helps us to push through the tough bumps every relationship has. We also delved into an extended conversation about contempt, the number one relationship killer according to several publicized studies, and according to a lot of our personal experiences. We discussed what contempt was, a lack of respect, hatred, maybe more than disrespect, a total disregard, a seething anger, something smoldering, a dark fire fed bit by bit over time until it informs every interaction, a drop that grows to poison the well of love. We veered from what ruins a relationship to what makes a relationship work, that two people need to agree to run their life together, to discuss how, as if in a committee meeting, how to make daily choices, and how every choice is different and relevant to the relationship that it is, and how to choose to be with each other again and again, daily.

Talking about relationships isn’t for everyone, so we moved from that to the politics. We wondered why Biden was being lenient with the Saudis, even as it has become very clear that they were indeed responsible for Kashogi’s murder. We talked about Trump’s speech at CPAC and how rambling it was, but still his people were enthralled, some seeming to even worship at a golden statue of him at the conference hall. We shared screen and played the video of the woman who sang the National Anthem at the CPAC conference so terribly, missing notes and switching keys and just out of tune and terrible, which was split screened alongside the pianist who was trying to keep up, a pained wincing expression on his face the whole time. Some of us on the call were singers and this was especially amusing to them. We moved from there to talking about celebrities who sing surprisingly well, like Meryl Streep in Mama Mia and how when she sang badly on purpose in the Florence Foster movie it must have been difficult for her, since she knew how to sing correctly. We talked about old Shirley Maclaine movies and then about famous sound effects, like from Star Wars or Law and Order, and where they derived from, usually from simple street sounds combined cleverly. We then talked about old fashioned expressions like 23 – Skiddoo, and 86’ed and where those expressions came from, that there was a subway air shaft that used to blow women’s skirts up like Marilyn’s did famously at West 23rd Street and men would linger to see it, and cops would tell them to “skiddoo,” to leave, and “86” was a military expression. We talked about southern expressions like “that dog won’t hunt,” “God be willing the crick don’t rise,” and of course, “bless your heart.” And somehow from there we talked about making steak with butter, Greek yogurt brands, Japanese food in Texas, Chinese food in Pennsylvania, the best date restaurants in our neighborhoods, and the best dumpling place in Queens. We ended the call hoping for the day soon when we can all maybe enjoy one of these places together, in real life.

This ‘Groove happily welcomed a wonderful surprise guest!

On February 18 NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars with a mission to search for extinct life. This massive human achievement happened in the middle our current horrors, the global pandemic, strange divisive political movements, and natural disasters, including the Texas snow that shut down their power grid leaving people without warmth or water. The Rover landing was one thing everyone across the world, and especially here in the U.S., could all celebrate and enjoy, a moment of awe and success.

I name the ‘Grooves and choose a picture to promote them on Facebook to reference what is happening that week, somewhat randomly, pulling something out of the news or the current gestalt that catches my eye, with not too much thought. There were a few things I thought of using to base the name, last week’s Valentine’s Day Sunday (which was among the only, if not the only skipped week since I took it off for a brief Birthday week vacation for myself), winter’s depth, maybe Cruz’s ridiculous escape to Cancun to escape the terrible power failures happening in Texas, and of course, the Rover, which I ultimately chose because it’s a bit of a happy thing. And I’m really glad I did, since one of our regulars took our titled ‘Groove as an excuse to reach out to a high school friend of hers who actually works for NASA and worked on the Rover landing! Although they hadn’t been in touch since high school, he generously agreed, last minute, to speak to our group, a total surprise, popping in as we were happening. I sort of wish I’d known before the Zoom so I could have promoted his talk and had a bigger audience for him, but he was happy to have a small group, as technically he’s not supposed to speak publicly, especially the night before the videos of the landing were released to the press. I won’t share his name except to say he was a charming, handsome, and brilliant guy who was super generous to speak to us for close to two hours and answer every question, small and large, in detail and with patience and humor.

Our NASA friend works out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech. He shared that he was a member of the team called Entry, Descent & Landing, “EDL.” This meant his expertise was focused on the seven minutes between the time the Rover entered the Mars atmosphere and landed on the planet. He was particularly interested in how the dust would interact with the parachute as it opened, as revealed by the newly released videos which he of course watched, and the rest of the world would have to wait for until the next day to see. He said he worked for eight years on those seven minutes, and what is absolutely amazing is the last year, that is this past one immediately prior to the launch, the entire team worked remotely because of the pandemic. And yet they were still able to successfully launch and land the spacecraft, and even with the further complication of an earthquake July 20, 2020 in Pasadena, California, where the NASA mission control center is located, as the Rover launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

He explained that Mars has one third the gravity than that on earth and thin air, cold, with below zero temperatures. They don’t know if the planet is inhabitable now, but it may have been which, is why they are looking for microbes and other life that may be earth-ish. He explained that the location of the landing is an ancient lake bed, and was selected because this would be where microbes would be most likely found. The ancient river and lake was bordered by a cliff and the strata, the stripes of dirt, in the cliff would have fossils of different ages, or maybe not at all, but it was worth looking at in hope that there were. He explained how the cache of samples the Rover might find would be collected into sample tubes and then another smaller Rover would be sent to pick them up and take them back. He explained that the selection of the site came out of a bit of a contest among the NASA Rover team members where they took turns pitching the best idea for a landing site. Interestingly several countries are sending Mars explorations now, China, Russia, the UAE, because of a rare opportunity weather wise on Mars, and he said that the scientists from the different countries were rooting for each other, helping each other out in the name of science, which, in these divisive times, was pretty nice to hear. He told us how they were very careful to clean the craft so that we didn’t bring viruses or bacteria to Mars, like we destroyed so many aboriginal animals and cultures in the past. He said they built a Deep Space Network of antenna for communication, but even though it is large and sophisticated, once a little insect sat in the wrong place and brought them alldown. He said the landing site was filled with rocks and silt, and some parts of the planet were easier to land on than others. Information coming back is delayed, charged particles flying around could mess that up.

We asked what they did to celebrate the success of the landing and he said the team ordered in sushi and ate it together from their Zoom boxes. From after the landing they handed it off to the Surface Team which handles the driving and planning . The Rover will continue sending information as long as its able, weather conditions affect how long that will be. Global dust storms took out a previous Rover. We asked if they were looking for non carbon life forms, and he said sure, who knows, they’re open to finding anything they can. All very cool, and all very lucky we got to talk to him about this really fantastic achievement.

We had our “make-up” session Monday to give Ellen the full platform, uninterrupted by football distractions, to share her knowledge about the markets, where equities and debt are trading, what happened with GameStop, and where she thought the future of the economy was heading (which was fortunately positive). We were lucky to have one of our regulars, B, who is the finance world, co-captain the talk. We had a surprisingly good turnout, I believe in part to support our regulars taking the stage, but also in part because finance feels like a mystery to too many of us. As people rolled in we talked about the Super Bowl, our favorite commercials of course, of COVID. And then it was all about finance. Ellen spoke to us with respect and intelligence and an assumption that we understood what we she was talking about at a sophisticated level, and she patiently took our questions and explained to us the details when we didn’t. It was a really great conversation and like a one-room schoolhouse we were all “taught” what we needed to know at the level we needed to learn it, smoothly and patiently. People shared information about how they were trading, and who was helping them invest. It was noted especially that we were fortunate to have this platform to converse, share and learn because so many people, so many educated people, don’t have an understanding of investing and become vulnerable to bubbles of day trading frenzy or miss out on the benefits of investing. We are certainly in uncertain times, and any semblance of a life preserver of sorts being thrown to us as we bounce among these weird waves is welcome, and this conversation very much felt like a bit of help.

Today we planned to have our own Ellen I. talk to us about finance and investments and about how to make sense of the markets. However, every one of us had the Super Bowl game on in the back. Some were recording it, but others were actively engaging with the multiple touchdowns Tom Brady insisted on making. The commercials were fun, and even though we could watch them the next day, they were distracting. I thought we’d stop for the halftime show with The Weekend, but we didn’t, just watched off to the side. So rather than mix focus for our guest I decided to postpone her talk to tomorrow, and everyone agreed, most said they’d return, and I suspected we’d get more people.

I figured we’d end the call early, but people still wanted to talk. The conversation veered mostly about the vaccine, where to get it and how to get on the list to get it, how the eligibility was expanding who could get it, but that the scarcity didn’t help the expansion manifest. So many people are against getting it that there may be enough to go around sooner rather than later, especially as availability increases with more companies producing their versions. One of our attendees, younger and working in healthcare, had recently gotten her second shot of Moderna and said she experienced arm pain and some fatigue. The older person on the call had had no side effects. It seems that’s what’s being reported, that the younger people have more side effects, perhaps corresponding to a greater immune response. She reported that they were down to thirty COVID patients in her hospital, which was lower than it had been for quite a while, good news, but bad news in that we’re hearing even those who are conservative and careful with COVID are coming down with the virus more frequently, and her hospital is requiring eye cover as well as masks for protection as cases threaten to be more virulent and contagious. We mentioned other vaccines on our lists, the HPV one perhaps, now that’s offered to those up to age 46, and the shingles vaccine for others who are older, but that maybe mixing vaccines, taking them to close to the COVID vaccine, is not a good idea.

We then turned to politics, this being a big week in the impeachment story with Congress meeting to determine whether there will be consequences for Trump. We asked what constituted “high crimes and misdemeaners” and speculated maybe they would invoke RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which had been used to bring down many who seemed otherwise impossible to bring down. But we were not to positive about it. Instead we turned back to yet another Brady touchdown, and agreed to end for the night until tomorrow.

The snow began falling as we started our Sunday evening, soon to pile high into a near record-breaking snowfall the next day. People talked about the food delivery orders they made in preparation for a day or two in and how much to tip their delivery people on a difficult night. We talked about the ridiculously long lines at all the supermarkets, already too long on Sunday nights, as the stores need to parse in COVID compliant numbers, now augmented by the anticipation of being snowbound. Strange that even when the homebounding will be only for a day the inclination to huddle and hoard kicks in, honed by the longer lockdowns of the Spring.

Several people on the call had visited a couple museums over the weekend, the craving for art viewing in live form having been compounded by nearly a year’s seeming deprivation. A few followed a friend’s lead to view stained glass, modern at the Museum of Art & Design done leadless on standing screens by an artist named Brian Clark and some much more ancient, from back in Egypt and Renaissance, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Others caught the last days of a special exhibit of Latin American art at the Whitney. Hearing their reports of their experiences kind of mitigated the not-going for the rest of us.

We talked about how this COVID time continues, how we’re losing nearly a 9/11’s worth of lives every day. Our Zooms will keep going for better or worse, and the ladies among us discussed the best Zoom-box makeup and hair tips we picked up along this time. I personally favor lipstick at minimum, and some light eye shadow if you want to do just a bit more. We talked about the food hoarding, and the amount we don’t get around to eating and that goes bad in our refrigerators, the ensuing clean-up and the guilt we feel for letting it happen. We talked about using “doggy bags” at restaurants, how that’s not really done in Europe, maybe because their portions are smaller, or maybe because they just think it’s tacky, and how PETA objects to using “doggy bag” as it’s perhaps pejorative to pets, which of course elicited some verbal eye rolls.

This week starts an initiative in New York that replaces the city’s Restaurant Week with a special take-out menu, and we talked about the pros and cons of take-out, the environmentally incorrect packaging and how the food arrives a bit colder and not presented the way the chefs would have preferred, and yet it gives us access to the magnificent meals we miss. We veered to Valentine’s Day dinners, the restaurant meals, the greeting cards, how we liked it, or didn’t, and memories of being a little kid and distributing the punch out cardboard cards to our classmates. Then somehow we wandered into the best weapons, I guess triggered by memories of unpleasant exes, from icicles from murder mysteries to pranks involving frozen lids of pee slipped under college dorm room doors, and that insulin used to be the preferred murder weapen in old Sherlock Holmes stories because at the time they were written it was untraceable.

Somehow the prank memories brought up elementary school abuse of substitute teachers, about teacher tantrums and breakdowns we as kids didn’t understand at the time, but to revisit as adults elicited more compassion and understanding, and in a collective chat like this, some momentary contemplation. Someone out of the blue asked me what made me proud of my parents, of whom I’m proud as both are accomplished physicians, and I mentioned my father more than twenty years ago received an “official blessing” by the Pope for having treated a member of the clergy with some pull. That had us wander into other religious experiences, like others who received touristic Papal blessings in Rome, and religious weddings, then we talked about a naked wedding one attended and then events at universities where students were encouraged to show up naked, and of course drunk. We figured out many of those events have since been non-continued now with more understanding of abuse that happens under the cover of “just for fun,” and also more likely the possible memorialization of compromising positions too easily done by all of us with our cell phones.

We touched a little on how the internet pushed up the Gamestop and AMC stock and whether that would matter long term. Then we talked about vaccine logistics again and the ethics of “jumping the lines.” Someone mentioned they had seen a 60 Minutes episode about how the companies collecting DNA data are selling it, or even merging with drug companies who would use the collected data, and that information, data about anything, is the new currency. We talked about the ethics of using knowledge about our DNA and that the HIPPA laws would probably not protect us, and how Apple and Facebook have already compromised our privacy.

From there we talked about hunkering down for the snow day the next day, as we saw the flakes fall outside our windows. Popcorn was brought up as a great hunker-at-home aid. I shared my “recipe” for popping with oil and herbes-de-Provence, people reminisced about the smell of microwave popcorn permeating their non-remote offices and our then aggravation about it and now longing for it, and again back to our dorm rooms and the smell of air popped popcorn. We talked about our memories of snow days, of waiting for it to be announced on local radio and television shows, about the old school “phone chains” before the internet made it all so much easier. Someone from Chicago said they’d close schools for extreme cold even without snow. Our regular who hails from Finland remarked that she never had a snow day, that when she was a kid people would just ski into school over the snow. She shared this as if it was quite unremarkable but the rest of us responded otherwise. We wondered whether snow days would be a thing of the past now that remote school and work has been established.

We pined for summer a bit, and somehow hitchhiking came up which some of us explored as kids, though we wondered whether people dared do that much now. A couple who’d just traveled to Costa Rica said they saw someone hitchhiking and thought to pick him up, but opted to not. Someone mentioned they did this on a golf trip, and then someone talked about a recent HBO Tiger Woods documentary and how his father was a bit pushy, a stage dad, and we talked about other famous celebrities with pushy stage parents many of whom befriended each other later, like Brook Shields and Andre Aggasi, who then went on to marry Steffi Graf, who also had a pushy parent. Our regular then again dug out for us a picture of him and her from many years ago when she met him on some local tennis courts, his memory was that she was kind, very pretty, but not so enthusiastic about having to practice tennis, and we noticed he was sporting a quite pronounced fanny pack. We all agreed that we heard that Federer and Rafa seemed to enjoy playing and practicing tennis.

The mention of Costa Rica had our friends who recently traveled there bounce out of and back to their Zoom box to demonstrate a pretty nifty science-y demonstration. They’d noticed that the black sand at a beach where they’d been stuck to the magnetized buckles of a sandal, so they brought some back and put it in a big round glass flower jar. When a magnet is glided along the jar the sand jumps up in twisted clumps to meet it, and is pretty cool to look at.

As the snow got heavier we wondered about the suburbs and shoveling, mocked our friends who put themselves in a suburban living position, and worried about our elder parents who insist on shoveling their driveways themselves. We ended the call with everyone enthusiastically volunteering to collectively call my parents and “yell at them” to not shovel themselves, which although would likely not work, would be worth mentioning to them.

The Inauguration went off without a hitch, no violence, no protests, just great speeches, great coats, and a beautiful poem by a beautiful young poet. And of course the Bernie Memes of Bernie Sanders slouched in a folding chair in a casual parka with his arms crossed over himself in the classic Patiently Waiting Impatient Elder pose so many of us recognized, his oversized brown sweater mittens prominently displayed. For the picture I used to promote this week’s ‘Groove I chose a Bernie meme, the one of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling with God reaching down to Adam’s now Bernie-mittened hand.

The mood was definitely lighter, a palpable relief post peaceful inauguration and exit from the stress inducing ending administration. We didn’t talk about it much except for a brief mention that it was great and we were all very happy about it. We had another celebration among us, a regular Groover landed an excellent job, for which she had interviewed remotely and for which she will work remotely through the end of the pandemic. We were all excited for her personal victory, but we also commiserated about the challenges of remote work, especially those involved with starting a new job never having met your colleagues or managers. So much of the work experience happens in the hallways and office kitchens, the bonding among co-workers, the sharing of information, the learning about who knows what and who does what, ultimately necessary not just for employee morale but for efficiency. On the other hand, remote work has it’s own efficiencies with no commutes and fewer lunch hours away from the desk, and no doors to open and close at the beginning and the end of the day so days spill over into evenings and early mornings. Work will definitely change post pandemic, especially now as new hiring is happening more frequently.

We also talked about the Old Masters exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which some on the Zoom got to attend, as well as the football games being broadcast simultaneous to our Zoom that would predict who played in the Super Bowl, among Tampa Bay Buckaneers, the Green Bay Packers, Buffalo Bills and the Chiefs. We talked about Melania’s choice of wardrobe, her military inspired outfits she was favoring the last couple weeks of that administration, almost frightening and threatening in light of recent events at the Capitol, “Fascist fashion” as one dubbed it; and, then her choice of a bright orange mumu to wear as she emerged after landing in Florida, as if to say to all “let them eat cake” and some on the call suggested maybe it was a nod to her husband’s notorious skin color. We also talked about Kelly Anne’s choice of wardrobe, sometimes tasteful, sometimes not, and her recent interview on Bill Maher, where some thought she was thrown too many softballs and not asked to be accountable for the deception she helped propagate, the “alternative facts” that hopefully will be relegated to an unpleasant memory. Then on the question of accountability, Lindsay Graham’s name came up and we commented on his behavior in support of the now ex president and the ongoing hypocrisy with regard to questions of whether to impeach the ex president as he encouraged the Jan. 6 insurrection.

We then veered to all the challenges of living at home all the time. NYC apartments can be especially problematic, with some complaining of the uncontrollable dry heat emanating from clanking steam radiators and others about not getting enough heat and having to wear coats and hats inside. We marveled at how warm Bernie’s mittens looked, discussed their origins, apparently made by a Vermont schoolteacher and gifted to him, and we took time to find and post more Bernie memes in the Chat, crocheted Bernies, Bernie cakes, and YouTube videos explaining how to make the mittens for yourself, which apparently only involves cutting up some old sweaters.

One of our Groovers, who is of eligible age for it, was fortunate to get a first vaccine, she explained she checked the apps over and over for an appointment and found one with less than an hour’s notice and requiring her to hop far uptown to get it, which she happily did. She described the vaccination experience as pleasant and organized and her delight for having received it was palpable, she was close to giggling with glee. Another tried to get her elderly mother to her appointment but was unable because her mother’s dementia aroused some press-stirred paranoia about the vaccine. We talked about whether mixing the different “brands” of vaccine was safe and whether the wealthy had an advantage to get vaccines, and we worried whether the vaccines would be effective with the new variants. We talked about how other countries were handling the vaccines, how Israel is doing well and providing data to the rest of us, (someone joked they were handing out “chicken soup boosters”, and how the UK is doing worse, as is Africa, and how France and Canada have strengthened their lockdowns again.

We talked about the meds suggested to combat COVID, the lice meds and the cholesterol meds that showed some good effect, and how we should maybe avoid aspirin and other pain relievers after getting the vaccines according to some some vague research that suggests it may weaken the vaccine’s effectiveness. We talked about the caravans heading to Florida of people hoping to get it, and whether double masking was helpful. Everyone at the inauguration seemed to be double masked. We talked about which masks are better and how people in the street are still yelling at each other to “mask up.” President Biden put in a new federal rule to wear it which we agreed was good.

We then veered again to our friends little dog, which had just gotten neutered. The guys on the call winced and squirmed when we talked about it. We wondered what happened to the dog, if he felt differently, and one of our doctors on the call offered some thoughts, though wincingly. We joked there might be a “phantom limb” of sorts, since the pup was still acting lasciviously with various stuffed toys, but perhaps less so, especially as he had some healing to do. We worried for the little thing, and someone brought up there is a new AI being developed that can read pain in an animal, and maybe in humans who couldn’t speak for medical reasons, so as to determine what they’re feeling and to care for them better. Someone also mentioned new AI which can record our brains, even speak for us. It’s a brave new world, meant to help, but maybe might ultimately menace.

We honored Martin Luther King and his legacy, especially in this tumultuous year of protests and heightened awareness of racial inequality through the Black Lives Matter movement and race based election obstruction issues and the racial tilting of COVID victims. We shared some inspiring quotes of his, relevant and hopeful. We also talked also about how even though it was a “three day weekend” most of us felt as if it was not, every day being Blursday still. And we meandered into our typical topics, mostly COVID and the vaccines. Many of us expressed concern about getting our parents vaccinated and how hard it is now to find a vaccination site and to figure out how to get an appointment for it. We worried about different people’s risk tolerance, We noted the news was again filled with reports of how people who seemingly protected themselves picked up the virus, one at a New Year’s Eve party who since passed, in less than three weeks, which is horrifying. We involved our doctors on the call to weigh in on their opinions about the different vaccines from Pfizer, J&J, Moderna & AstroZeneca. We wondered about the reports of corruption in the distribution of the vaccine, how Canadians and South Americans are flocking to Florida to get it. Now, our Florida resident reports, you need evidence that you live in Florida to get it. There aren’t enough people to vaccinate people, and we hear in the UK they are asking flight attendants to do it. Someone who had luck in finding out how to get vaccinated in the City shared her advice. And we talked about the new recommendations to double mask. To lighten the mood we then touched on commercials we remembered from past years, and documentaries we’d seen. The rhythm of these calls has always seemed to involve “breaks” from when things get too tense, someone steps up to create the air between heaviness.

Finally we got to the elephant in the room, the upcoming Inauguration of President Biden and our concerns about the safety of the event. Reports were there were more troops in Washington, DC than there were in Afghanistan and Iran combined in preparation for anything. We worried about how Trump had too much free reign to pardon people and who he was going to set on us again within the three days he had remaining. The anxiety from the last four years exacerbated the recent attack on the Capitol and COVID and our concern for the 20th was palpable, even if not fully expressed. On this evening when we remembered MLK’s urging for peace and equality, there was both an irony and an offered optimism.

This Sunday we were privileged to host a talk by Mark Hershberg who just published his book “The Career Toolkit – Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, the hard copy of which already sold out on Amazon two weeks in a row. He came with a prepared PowerPoint presentation and answered personal questions on how to manage our careers and our managers, how to interview, how to pivot, how to deal with challenges, and so many other things. Mark teaches a course to MIT students about career prep so he was certainly prepared. He’s a friend, and his book tour is obviously virtual, so he fit us in and we were lucky to have him. It was a well attended Groove, including some college aged kids of friends who wanted some tips, and we kept going later than usual with questions, both broad and very personal, which Mark generously and graciously entertained, as well as the ensuing conversation which some our questions triggered.

What was surprising about this Groove is no one really wanted to talk about what happened on January 6 when thousands of rioters overtook the Capitol during the counting of the Electoral College votes. It was a miracle none of the members of Congress were hurt, kidnapped, or killed as the rioters intended, and that their very young aides had the presence of mind to save the mahogany boxes of Electoral College vote certificates, and what heroes they were to return to count the votes just hours after what was probably the most terrifying day of most of their lives. We mentioned the lack of preparedness of the police, and how we’d like to see everyone involved thrown in jail. But really, this was a very small part of our conversation, that is, during the first twenty or so minutes before Mark started, time which I always allow before a scheduled speaker so people can unwind a bit and the latecomers roll in. Even though the event was only five days before, I guess we were all talked out about it having immersed ourselves in the news since Wednesday. Instead, we focused on our friend’s little dog which just got its first grooming since she adopted him. She calls him our Group Therapy Dog, and in this instance he very much was, a welcome distraction from the current chaos.

This Monday we celebrated crossing from out of one of the worst years of our collective lives into a new, hopefully far better one. Most of us had quiet New Year’s Eve gatherings, small get-togethers outside that ended before midnight, solo toasts to the televised, rather bleak people-free, Times Square Ball Drop, or small groups of under fifteen known people. Of course, we all knew of people bouncing off to Mexico or South America or the Islands to have far more festive – and warm – celebrations, as well as bigger parties held secretly in the City and not so secretly down in Florida, but we tried not to focus on our FOMO. We talked about our lives otherwise, day trips to the Hudson Valley on some of the recent unusually warm days, and on our friend’s newish dog which we enjoyed watching sleep. We also sidelined into the history of Lilith, mythically Adam’s first wife, before Eve, and how she became an evil figure and then a symbol co-opted by modern feminists, and we did google searches on the subject and read them to each other. We diverged back to our current television show favorites and also celebrated some current events, like Argentina making abortion legal. We discussed origins of names, of our names, and how finding something cute with our name on it as a child was more difficult for those of us with more unusual names. And we finished with tales of bike accidents, both recent and past, and how bike helmets really saved lives, either our own, or those we witnessed bounce off their helmeted head to land safely. We chatted for as long as usual, but it was a smaller crowd, and we decided maybe Monday isn’t the best day to do the ‘Grooves, so we’ll go back to Sundays. Our first in 2021, but we still feel we’re on hold in this semi-quarantine time, even as others open up, and others, like Cali and the UK, close down.