Even Now I May Still Mask Up. Call Me Prudent.

Prudence (noun) from the Latin, prudentia, meaning to see ahead.  The ability to govern oneself by the use of reason and foresight.  One of the Four Cardinal virtues, along with Justice, Fortitude and Temperance   --virtuefirst.info, et al

I’m not quite ready to fully discard my mask, not just now, not just yet. Even though, vaccinated, I have nothing that requires me to mask up.   

So, last Saturday when I went into Starbucks for a large dark roast, I still spoke my order through the confines of my jet-black K-94 mask. Last Sunday when I led worship at the church I serve, still, I kept a cloth mask affixed to my face, save for preaching and praying with the congregation. I will absolutely, positively keep wearing a mask for the foreseeable future when visiting with my friends and their one-year-old son Ellis, whether we are inside or outside. When I pay a pastoral call to the bright-eyed parishioner who lives on the memory care unit of a local nursing home: yup, I will be masked. And when I visit with my friend whose immune system is severely compromised, I will have a mask at the ready.

I guess you could say I’m being prudent. Careful. Cautious. Considerate. I hate to admit to this seeming timidity, as I imagine some folks might see my continuing use of a face cover, after I am fully vaxxed. Yes, I know like everyone else in the United States, that two weeks ago week the Centers for Disease Control issued brand new mask recommendations in light of the roll out of the nationwide vaccination program and the hard science that proves the vaccines’ efficacy. The CDC’s new guidelines are simple and clear, stated right on their website.

“If you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic. Fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.” Governor Baker affirmed that new directive and so, last Saturday morning, May 29^th, all of us who were vaccinated in the Bay State could enter back into the world sans mask. The exceptions to this rule include hospitals and health care settings, congregate living facilities, prisons, and public and private transportation settings.

It will be a treat to see folks’ full faces once again.  See smiles and listen to speech unfettered and play sports without an annoying mask and hug and kiss loved ones and once again begin to return to social normalcy. I’m already maskless around my vaccinated family and friends. That liberation has been a Godsend, especially for me who lives alone. It’s like a miracle in a way. People coming into and even staying overnight in my home again. It is amazing to hear other voices in my house, to not feel such isolation, as I’ve experienced for more than a year now.

I know my mask hesitancy is not fully logical or rational.  I imagine my more conservative friends or readers might even deem me a liberal snowflake, one who is fragile of spirit. I trust the science behind the CDC’s new rules, absolutely. My head tells me to just quit the mask and to let it go. And like everyone else I am sick of all the little annoyances that have accompanied our nationwide mask up. Having no mask in the car or having 167 masks in the car, as I seem to.  Having to put up with “maskne”, facial acne breakouts that many folks have struggled with.  Buying a mask only to discover it’s too small and barely fits my now chubby face, from all my additional COVID poundage.

I am ready to let go of all that but in a little while, okay? Not so immediately, not so swiftly, not so quickly. I know I am not alone in this reluctance. I talk to lots of folks who also plan to still wear masks outside and are still not ready to eat in at a restaurant and are still holding back from coming to church and are still being very cautious. They remember that COVID has killed more than 18,000 people in Massachusetts, 600,000 in the United States and almost 3.5 million worldwide.  I don’t think it is cowardice or wimpiness to consider such stark statistics when discerning how each of us plans to go about life now.

We’ve all lived in this strange and weird and scary COVID life for a very long time.  When the pandemic state of emergency, declared by Governor Baker on March 10, 2020, ends on June 10^th, it will mark a sobering statistic. That we have endured lockdowns and economic cataclysm and huge social disruptions and illness and death for some 15 months. That’s a good chunk of time. That’s why I think it’s okay if me or you or anyone needs to take extra time to get used to our “new normal”, whatever that will look like.

When it comes to masks I plan to try and be extra kind and patient and compassionate with all those who, for whatever reason, will keep on wearing a mask.  My faith teaches me that mercy and love should mark all my social interactions, with friend and stranger alike, and yes: with the masked and the unmasked too.

Go ahead. Call me Mr. Prudent. 

For the time being, that’s where I choose to stand in this still crazy and odd post-COVID, not all the way there yet, world. To mask or not mask? That is up to you.  That is between you and your conscience and your temperament and maybe even your God. That is the most personal of choices. I respect that.

I pray all of us will respect this choice as well.

                     

        

How to Live to 100? With Love and Gratitude.

“Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated.”  --Confucius

One-hundred years old.

Now that is a long life. A very long life. The rarest of human lives.

If you or I were to make it all the way to the day we celebrate our one hundredth year of life on this earth, we’d be very much in the minority. In the world, we’d be among only 573,000 people out of 7.8 billion folks and in the United States, just 97,000 centenarians are alive out of 328 million souls. At 100 you’d also beat average life expectancies: for men in the U.S., it’s 75 years and for women 80 years. The toll of COVID shaved almost a full year off those numbers.

All pointing to one truth: make it to the day you’ll see 100 candles on your cake, and you will be the rarest of souls.

One-hundred years old. Four years ago this Saturday, my grandfather Armand Bolduc died, after a long and very good life of 103 years. To put that number into perspective, I was blessed by God to have a grandfather until I was 56 years old! On the day he left this earth, he left behind four children, 17 grandchildren, 29 great grandchildren and one great great grandchild. He also out lived two wives, both of whom he loved very much.

Having attained my sixtieth year not so long ago, that big day made me wonder: what would I have to do to get on the same calendar as Grandpa? To live until the year 2064? I know chances are very much that I won’t. Most of us will not live so long and yet: there has got to be something special in the lives of centenarians that gets them to triple digits in age. 

There are obvious health factors. Don’t smoke. Drink and eat with care. Everything in moderation: that was my Grandfather’s go-to piece of life advice when asked. Get out and exercise regularly. My Grandfather never took up any formal physical activity regime, though he did bicycle most days while in his seventies and eighties, for errands around his home on the Florida Keys. That no doubt helped in his aging process. It obviously helps to have dependable healthcare and so I thank God for Medicare that took such good care of him and right now is also taking very good care of Grandpa’s soon to be 86-year-old daughter, my Mom. Watch out for high-risk activities. Grandpa wasn’t a sky diver or a race car driver though he did love to drive fast and fun cars, his first being a Ford Model T. These are all obvious longevity factors, I suppose.

But I think the best life and the longest of lives are also marked by intangibles, circumstances and life disciplines that can’t be measured on an actuarial table. To love and to be loved fully, faithfully, and generously: I’ve no doubt that this made Grandpa a healthier and happier person.  There is something so debilitating about a lack of love in this life and loneliness, absolutely. I wonder and worry about how many of our senior neighbors and friends and family member this COVID year have lost years of life, for lack of simple human contact. Human touch. Face to face conversation. Hugs and kisses from adult children and grandchildren. Shared meals around a common table. I pray coming out of COVID we might recommit ourselves to such simple and lifesaving actions of the heart.

So too I imagine faith—faith in something bigger than yourself, faith in God; it must be of help to living a rich life in the fullest sense. The best faith reminds us daily of the need for gratitude in all circumstances and of our responsibility to love our neighbors. Grandpa rarely if ever missed Catholic Mass on Sundays and often during the week he would also watch a service on TV. His was not a faith of cliché platitudes or showiness: no.  He loved his God in quietude and commitment and lived out his faith in humility. There’s a life lesson for all of us.

But in watching how my grandfather lived, I’d say that one thing, more than any other, brought him into his tenth decade on earth and then some. He appreciated each day as a gift from God, every day. The great ones where life is sweet and kind and easy and the hard ones too, when life is a slog or painful or difficult. It helped him to have lived through two world wars and the Depression and having been widowed twice in life. I think he knew just how precious this life is, all the days, not one left out or wasted. In my phone calls to him later in his life, I’d always ask, “How are you!” and he’d always answer, “Good! I woke up and I put my feet on the floor. That’s a good day.”

Hard to believe he’s been gone now, four years on.  His life makes me want to pray for all people, that they too might have someone special like him in this life, a kind and good soul, who teaches us about how to live a good life and how to live well every day, until that one day we die. He certainly gave that gift to me. 

Will any of us live to 100? The few, the very few. Me? I’m just trying to live my best in this one God-given day. It’s the only one I have. The only day any of us have.  And that’s a good and a beautiful thing.      

Thanks Grandpa. I miss you. Love you!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn (pilgrimsherborn.org).  If you have a word or idea you’d like defined in a future column or have comments, please send them to pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org or in care of The Dover-Sherborn Press (Dover-Sherborn@cnc.com).

 

 

        

    .       

IT'S BAAAAAACK! Damn This Traffic Jam.

“Well I left my job, About five o'clock, It took fifteen minutes, To go three blocks, Just in time, To stand in line, With a freeway looking, Like a parking lot. Damn this traffic jam....” --James Taylor

“BEEP!!!!!” 

I beeped my car horn last Friday, while sitting in an epic traffic jam on Route 128, at that most hellish of times for auto congestion, the late Friday afternoon commute. Folks all rushing to get home or rushing to get to the Cape or rushing to get to the mall or rushing to get to their kid’s sports game or just rushing for the sake of rushing, I suppose. With white knuckled grips upon the steering wheel, we commuters started and stopped and rolled and halted in an all too familiar vehicular dance.

Cars and trucks were backed up as far as I could see, behind and in front of me. I sounded my horn when an errant BMW SUV cut me off, zooming by on my right, in my blind spot; hence the toot. But he or she only made forward progress for a car length or two because very quickly they were also at a dead stop in that sea of vehicles, a tsunami of packed and idling pick-up trucks and sedans and minivans and delivery trucks, lined up from horizon to horizon.

Damn this traffic jam.

The odd thing, the telling truth of this story is that it was the very first time I’d found myself trapped in this kind of traffic since March of 2020, some fourteen months. Like everyone else in our COVID times, I’ve lived a largely traffic free existence for some 400 days. In those carefree times of driving without delay, I glided with nary another car around, down a quiet Route 93. I maneuvered like a silent and meditating monk over the Mass Pike. I vroomed up to Vermont on deserted stretches of Route 89. I even zipped right through the middle of downtown Boston and found a parking space without a hassle. That’s a miracle!

It was driving bliss then. But now? Traffic is back.  Big time. 

According to statistics from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, at the height of COVID’s grip on our state, traffic was down by a whopping sixty percent in April 2020. But one year later, we are all back behind the wheel, it would seem. By mid-last month, traffic was down by only about ten percent. And now in mid-May? Full on traffic has returned, as if it never missed a beat, was hiding and just waiting to make its comeback. 

So too returned is my high blood pressure and scrunched up shoulders and fuming frustration that always manifest in a driving slowdown or a terrible traffic jam. I fiddle with the radio. I call 511 on my phone to get the latest traffic update. I listen to my book on tape in the hope that it can soothe the savage beast just below the surface of my spirit. It cries out. “LET ME OUT OF THIS TRAFFIC! NOW!”  But the traffic gods are fickle and so I sit. I wait. I watch as the time to arrival estimate on my GPS goes up and up and up.

There are so many realities that were and still are just awful when it comes to our COVID lives. So many deaths. So much sickness. So many unemployed. So many businesses shuttered, and houses of worship closed and ball games cancelled and face to face visits with loved ones curtailed. Like everyone else I want to escape the weird times we’ve been living in. Yet I also confess I’m a bit anxious about our return to the status quo.

Because if COVID has taught us anything it is this: there was some grace to be found in how much our world slowed down and our lives opened, and how we had space to breathe in this past year. To clear out and simplify the calendar. To spend so much more precious time with the people in our households. To be reminded of just how important our relationships are in this life: with family whom we’ve zoomed with weekly, and friends we’ve shared driveway cocktails with, and jobs made less stressful when performed from home.

And with traffic that went away.

I’m not saying we should go back somehow, no. Absolutely not. But I am wistful about what we are losing and seem on track to return to in the coming months. Busyness. Rushing. Stress. Already cries of “I’m so busy!” and “My schedule is jam packed!” and “My weekends are booked solid!” are becoming the norm again in conversations. What a gift it would be if we could leave COVID behind but retain some of the space, the amazing space, and the extra time and the quiet and the simplicity we were given in the fourteen months just passed.

That’s what I was thinking about last Friday, as I sat in my car, averaging a top speed of four miles per hour. 

Damn this traffic jam.

 

           

            

  

    

 

When It Comes to Being Snobby, Is Massachusetts Really #1?!

Snob (noun) 1. one who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior. 2. one who has an offensive air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste.  --Merriam-Webster.com

I’ve got some bad news. Or good news, depending on where you think you stand in this life.

According to the job search website zippia.com, Massachusetts is the snobbiest of the fifty United States.  That’s right. We’re number one in our overly inflated view of ourselves here in the Bay State. How zippia (sounds like a food delivery service--We get it to you ZIPPIA!) came to this conclusion is a bit suspect. Here’s their criteria: percentage of population with bachelor’s degrees, percentage of degree holders who studied arts and humanities, number of Ivy League colleges, and the kicker, 21 bottles of wine consumed yearly.

Thus, if I went to Harvard and studied art history while slugging back 4.1 gallons of wine, I’m a snob. Apologies if you fit this description. I don’t think I’m a snob. I went to UMass, studied English (strike 1), and stuck to drinking mostly Rolling Rock beers for my four years there and yes, it was a lot more than 525 ounces of Latrobe Pennsylvania’s golden hued libation per year. Okay—libation is kind of a snobby word, but back to the insult that we here in Massachusetts are like the two guys on the Grey Poupon mustard TV commercial.

When I ask friends not born here, if we are in fact snobby, they’re often quick to answer “Well, yes!” There’s our nickname for Boston: “the Hub”, as in the absolute center of the universe, a description penned by poet and Harvard man Oliver Wendell Holmes. We’ve also called ourselves the Athens of America, the Cradle of Liberty and Titletown, for all the sports championships we’ve won lately. But ask a Chicagoan or New Yorker if Boston really is the Hub and they’ll chuckle and point out that Beantown could easily fit into one of the neighborhoods in the Windy City or the Big Apple. Or the fact the New York Yankees have won twenty-seven world championships to our nine and they stole Babe Ruth too.

The Hub? Maybe not.

If snobbery is marked by thinking of yourself as better than others…do we really fit the bill? Do we sound like snobs, speak with a Boston Brahmin Kennedy-esque accent as in “chowdah” or do we actually speak like most of my relatives from Dorchester? You know, “Haavad”, and “cah”, and labeling everything as wicked good. That’s what I think of when it comes to our home. Not so high-falutin.

There’s also the fact Massachusetts claims more Dunkin’ Donuts per capita than any other state, one for every 6,072 people. What’s more down to earth than coffee in an orange emblazoned Styrofoam cup and yes, the first DDs opened in Quincy in 1950. Or that we invented Marshmallow Fluff, right here too, in Somerville. Or that we have a state polka, “Say Hello to Someone from Massachusetts.” Take that zippia!

And perhaps what might be the anti-snobbery fact that brings us back to earth: the plastic pink flamingo, was invented right here, in 1957, in Leominster, Massachusetts.  If that isn’t downscale, and tacky and goofy, well nothing is. And yet….

Harvard University was the very first college for higher education, founded here in 1636 and the Boston Latin school is even older, established in Boston in 1635. Does the truth that we Bay Staters highly value education and knowledge make us snobby? Or what of the cliches about Harvard’s hometown? Some say it is the most opinionated zip code in America and others call it the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Lefties and liberals and progressive like me: we do tend to be self-righteous, even overly smug about our “rightness”, while driving around in our bumper sticker covered Volvos and Priuses, our feet shod in Birkenstocks, a six pack of the latest craft beer cooling in the backseat.

Maybe zippia is right! Who knows?

Let’s confess and own up to this: snobbishness is true for some and a false label for others. The ultimate truth is that no matter what the size of your bank account, no matter how posh your family tree might be, no matter how refined your accent is, no matter what school you went to, in the eyes of God, all those human-made distinctions are moot.  Don’t matter at all. The God I know creates us all, not for self-righteousness, but for humility, as in being down to earth.  Harvard or Holyoke Community College?  I don’t really care. And most of the folks I know don’t get caught up in the race to the top of the heap either.  I put my pants on one leg at a time and I know that you do too. Unless of course they’re Velcro.    

Now, please excuse me. I need to sit out in my flamingo laden front yard and enjoy a fluffernutter, washed down by a large DD’s iced coffee, as I listen to the Sox on the radio.

Have you heard? They are a wicked good team this year!