At the start of the pandemic, feeling isolated, as one does when in isolation, I decided to finally do something I had been intending to do for a long time: Reach out to my friends and family whom I have friended on Facebook that I haven’t talked to in forever. Considering how busy my life has been, this meant basically everyone.

The man walked down the empty street, listening to the sound of his footsteps and the dragging of his suitcase’s wheels as they echoed. It felt like ages since these streets had last been filled with the pollution of noise from cars and people and businesses. He’d like to say he missed it, but he knew that to be a lie. Although he was alone, he found the silence comforting. It was as though he had become a part of something far greater than himself. No longer was the world happening around him. Now he could hear himself and know the world heard him as well.

As I’ve noted a few times since the relaunch of the blog, the past few years found me in a place where I simply didn’t have as much time for writing as I once had.

And the truth is, I still don’t.

My wife and I have spent a long time battling the idea of age. As a simple note to prove this fact, the song we chose to be sung at our wedding reception was Bob Dylan’s Forever Young.

Although I grew up playing an awful lot of putt-putt (or, mini golf for those of you who don’t know the right thing to call it), I had never, in my life, played an actual round of golf.

Until last year.

This past week, I had a day which felt like the first truly successful writing day I’ve had in years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done plenty of writing and plenty of good has come out of it, but this was the first time that the writing felt so absolutely effortless since before I had to put writing on a back burner.

And it was awesome.

A year and a half ago, I was on a flight back from Las Vegas with my wife when we started discussing this little epidemic in China which people were concerned might become something bigger. I remember thinking little of it at the time. This wasn’t the first time we had heard similar mutterings. This wasn’t even the first coronavirus we were told could become a pandemic. It wasn’t even a month later when we would be shutting down the country in an effort to try to slow the pace of this incredibly virulent strain of coronavirus so our hospitals wouldn’t be overrun and therefore cause all the issues that happen when you simply don’t have enough hospital staff to take care of the sick people coming through their doors.

One of the many reasons which kept me from writing over the past few years, especially with regards to the blog, was because I bought a hobby farm.

This past winter, my kids and I decided to start a weekly tradition of helping out with the local Meals on Wheels chapter. At the start of the pandemic, we, as a family, had decided to try to find some ways to put some good into the world and the idea of spending an hour delivering meals was an easy hit. And it allowed my kids and I to get out of the house a little bit during these long periods of being stuck at home hoping the world would get a little less crazy.

Obviously we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and staring down the barrel of another lockdown if this delta variant (and its variant) doesn’t somehow manage to slow its roll (probably through, you know, vaccination). But, as a parent in this time of lockdowns, I can’t help thinking of how absolutely strange of a year this was for both parents and kids.