Broken Humerus

 Dear friends and family,

Liz just did a few exercises, slowly using her left arm to lift her lower right arm and let it down a couple of times. That was all she could do. Her upper right arm is broken; more precisely Liz’s humerus broke when she fell on an icy sidewalk 9 days ago. In three days, she will get a new shoulder out of plastic and titanium. Not good as new, but much better than now.

Suddenly, without any warning or ability to plan, Liz said this would be a turning point in her life, in our lives. It’s easy to think that the turn would be downward, like a lot of turns in the last few decades of natural human life, the inevitable decline in ability, gradual or sudden. Even so, it might not necessarily mean that everything about this change will be cause for pessimism. She is right, but we don’t know what it will mean for us over the next decades.

I am about to take a turn myself – the much ballyhooed shot in my arm tomorrow. Like much connected with the pandemic, nothing changes right away, as the vaccine process takes a month or so. Anticlimaxes everywhere.

One result is that I haven’t been able to focus enough energy and clear thought to write a normal essay last Tuesday or today. Because we are at another turning point, a big national turning point that seems to be stretching out much longer than I could have guessed, that may also make it more difficult for me to write anything in a normal way. So please give me a bit of patience until I get far enough around the turn to see where I am going, where Liz is going, where we all are going.

On we all go into the somewhat predictable future, where surprises lurk around many corners, and we have little choice but to do our best with the cards we are dealt. Folding them is not a good choice.

Best wishes,
Steve