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.
Monday, Jan 4, 2021 – Happy 2021! First Groove of the Year!
