LIFE IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS DAY 461
Forty years. Today would have been 40 years.
I try not to think about it and some years I actually manage to make it to the end of the day before the wave of grief for what could have-should have been (or anger at the betrayal) sweeps over me.
Forty years. Today would have been 40 years.
LIFE IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS DAY WHO THE HELL HAS KEPT TRACK AT THIS POINT
BLIMEY!!! 47 years ago today I graduated high school - very nearly at the bottom of my class but I did manage to actually graduate. Looking back (don't most of us) I do wish I'd been the student I know I could have-should have been. Regrets, I have a few, and being such a lackadaisical student ranks right up there near the top of the list.
And then, after an eye-opening camping holiday through Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks with my then boy-friend, and another eye-opening holiday through Northern California (wine and golf tour, and a side trip to Stanford to see if I was interested in taking up their offer - I wasn't), I joined the US Coast Guard.
No regrets passing on Stanford. Nor any regrets about joining the CG save one - I wish I'd been able to stay on active duty for an entire career. But back then the CG didn't know what to do when a SPAR (Lady Coastie) married and fell pregnant so their default was to de-mob us. Of course a year after I was sent to Reserves, they realised married (or not) pregnant SPARS were not as big a problem as they'd thought - I can still see that heavily pregnant SPAR walking past my base housing (my then husband was also a Coastie and we lived aboard) to work in her newly minted USCG Maternity Uniform, I can still remember the moment of complete bitterness I'd not had that chance.
Stanford then and now was/is a vastly over-rated 'educational experience opportunity' and so over-the-top pretentious I have always felt I dodged a bullet not taking that up.
TIP: when an institution or person feels the need to constantly remind others it/they are a 'prestigious' entity, they aren't. By the time we left the campus weekend I'd heard the word 'prestigious' so many times (on continual loop, as though it was the only word the guides knew and they parroted it the entire tour-sales pitch) it had become an earworm it honestly took me weeks to rid myself of. 47 years on I still cringe when I hear someone use the word - if not accompanied with an eye-roll from the speaker, I go out of my way ever after to avoid the pretentious git who'd used it.
Should I manage it, in another three years it will have been 50 years. FIFTY, WOW! I'd go to the reunions if I could get a fit-to-fly certificate but the plain truth is I'll have to 'phone it in' via Skype or Zoom or whatever is up and running in three years. I can't even get my doctor's approval to fly from Dundee to London (altitude and please refrain from derisive 'cabins are pressurised' when an hour into a flight my legs swell to alarming widths and the flight attendants worriedly ask me if I agree it would be best if they did an emergency landing and had an ambulance standing by).
My stoopid little heart thingies have me restricted from altitudes over 1000ft - no exceptions according to my cardiologist and if he had his way I think he'd say nothing over 500ft. So, that lets out any Munro bagging (hill walking the Munro mountains of Scotland), in fact it lets out just about most of the hills and mountains in Scotland including the ski resorts unless I'm happy to sit in Base Camp and watch, dammit.
Also lets out 'wild swimming' and other water sport - even with a wetsuit the shock of the water temperature would bring on a crippling angina attack that could be, well, fatal, really - in the midst of an angina attack I can barely make it to a chair much less be able swim back to shore for a Nitro-spritz.
I try not to let it bother me, I had a surprisingly active life until Spring 2019 when an invasive dental procedure went wrong and I ended up, well, nearly dying, actually, from an acute pericardial crisis. I've always had a 'stoopid little heart thingie' (Rheumatic Heart Syndrome) but it didn't stop me joining the USCG or enjoying any 'extreme sport' I felt like giving a go. But 2019 changed all that. For the most part I've adjusted, found other things to do besides horses and surfing and hill-walking and...and I bloody miss feeling able, if I'm honest. There are times I look at the badminton racket and think it should be a tennis racket and I should be back out there on the courts running like a scalded hare. If it weren't for my now multiple stoopid little heart thingies.
So in three years, should I still be around, I will be Zooming or Skyping or maybe just sending a Western Union to be posted somewhere in the venue where the reunions will be held.
47 years, WOW!
