MARCH 8, TUESDAY

SURREAL

This has been a surreal week. But maybe every week on earth is a surreal week if you are 84. It started with the brutal Ukraine war which started almost two weeks ago. The war seemed to turn the world upside down again and hangs over all of us every day. At the same time the Pandemic, while still putting people in the hospital and killing some has been declared over. Buncombe County is receding back to Thanksgiving 2021 levels. But at Thanksgiving 2021 everyone in Buncombe County was masked up. At the basketball game the other night of the thousands of people there I saw only two besides me wearing a mask. My Paris trip is a little over two weeks away and the world seems to be a more risky place with war in Europe and Covid still everywhere, especially risky for 84 year olds.

And then yesterday, Susie, who has a plane ticket to join me for ten days in Paris was helping Todd to load a piece of heavy equipment into his truck when something popped in her back and suddenly she was in great pain. Her friend Dana guided Todd and her to Emerge Ortho Urgent Health Care where an xray revealed a spine fracture either from this accident or earlier.

In Todd and Susie’s tiny house, 10 by 20 feet, they sleep in a high loft climbed to by a ladder and have to climb stairs even to get up onto their porch. They live in the 19th century with stream fed water and an outhouse that is too far up the hill for Susie to walk to. Susie could barely move and was in great pain. So they came here to stay with me with no stairs and a recliner to sleep on. Today Susie gets an MRI.

Last night we watched Susie’s German actress/director cousin, Maria Schrader in Deutschland 86, the second of three ten episode series, 1983, 86, 89 about East Germany before the fall of the wall. Maria plays a hard ass Easter German agent trying to get hard currency for the DDR. It was suspenseful, often comic and very dramatic.

Because of Kathe‘s family Susie has three English cousins because Linde, Kathe‘s nurse sister moved to England after WW2, three American cousins because Kathe moved to America in 1965, and three German cousins including Maria, children of Kathe‘s artist brother, Hinnerk. Years ago we had trouble in America seeing Maria‘s movies. But now with streaming video rather than videotapes and DVD‘s we are able to see everything that she does as soon as it appears in Germany.

Between the two episodes that we watched we FaceTimed niece Caroline who was studying for a Physics test at NC State. We could see her on the large TV screen, big as life. She leaves for ten days in Peru on Friday with a group to do a medical internship. She talked for a bit and then said she had to get back to studying her notes on her iPad.

None of this digital connection is surprising if you are twenty, at 40 you are used to these digital connections but they still seem amazing, but if you are in your 85th year as I am this all seems not only miraculous but surreal.

I have the feeling that everything is becoming virtual and that space and time are more relative than Einstein dreamed about. I feel the pain of people being shelled in Ukraine, am in the presence of Maria acting in South Africa, am about to experience Peru with Caroline and will be in Montmartre in a couple of weeks, very likely without a visit by Susie because my Airbnb is up four flights of stairs but able to Facetime daily. I don‘t know where I am or where anyone else is and time seems collapsed as well. Lima yesterday on Scott‘s Cheap Flights was $207 from Atlanta when normally $750. The world is collapsing and we are all in each other‘s living rooms, literally, with virtual imaging, with the present unreal and the future even more so.