COVID-19 Stella Uno: Gratitude

COVID-19 has brought a variety of challenges almost unimaginable 2 years ago. Sadly, “the new normal’ is not just a cliche’ but an all too accurate description of all too many lives.

Gratitude is needed and necessary. Not solely for the morally justifiable impulse of energizing daily life but to rise above the very real challenges of our very long today.

COVID-10 testing, as performed at the Boston Medical Center at 801 Mass. Ave. through the rear entrance, has revealed this blogger to be negative.

Not all are as fortunate.

Furthermore, my lease runs though April 2022 so I have the security of knowing where I will be living for the foreseeable future.

Not all are as fortunate.

Gratitude.

CORONAVIRUS 6.0 Quarantine Trey Stella

1) Bad hair days are no longer a threat to income.

2) Love is the only word that can describe the loving relationship with your Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven.

3) RING OF BRIGHT WATER was once called a ‘nature’ film at the Port Washington Public Library. I saw the movie as one of the free films shown to occupy the evenings of bored, alienated teenagers such as your humble correspondent. I loved the movie which of course I did not admit to the few folks I conversed with.

(It is conceded that my fondness for Harry Nilsson’s SON OF SCHMILLSON would have confused the issue.)

Last year I discovered a copy of RING OF BRIGHT WATER lying in the lobby of my building where harried residents donate/dump possessions that are not being brought to presumably greener pastures.

Sadly, I am past the point in life where there is limitless time to indulge in flights of literary fancy. However, on this occasion the under used right side of my brain reminded me that very little warm and fuzzy had entered within the last fiscal year. So…

I couldn’t put RING OF BRIGHT WATER down even with the paperback version’s glaucoma inducing 50 lines a page at 10 words a sentence.

Gavin Maxwell is an English author and naturalist who spends his summers in the rustic Scottish Highlands town of Camusfearna which translates as “ring of bright water.”

Mr. Maxwell brings an otter named ‘Mij’ on a treacherous journey from Iraq to become domesticated in Maxwell’s London flat.

An apartment is no place for an otter so Mr. Maxwell decamps for Scotland.

Mr. Maxwell details the joys and inevitable challenges of living with what is, after all, a wild animal.

Mij is quite the comedian and warms to Mr. Maxwell’s love but also very capable of destroying floorboards and furniture.

As charming as this story is, and “charm” is a word rarely spoken or evoked these days it is the literary grace that captured this mind.

To wit:

“Later, marbles became Mij’s favorite toys for this pastime-for pastime it is, without any anthropomorphizing-and he would lie on his back rolling two or more of them up and down his wide, flat belly without ever dropping one to the floor, or with forepaws upstretched, rolling them between his palms for minutes on end.”

In a time of 280 character Twitter blasts the elegant, albeit florid, literacy of RING OF BRIGHT WATER is almost shocking.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER is profusely illustrated with whimsical pen and ink drawings of otters cavorting adding a visual analog to the tale of otters.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER was a book I couldn’t put down, even as I acknowledge the ethical conflict of making a pet of a wild animal.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER is an ideal quarantine read. Recommended.

RING OF BRIGHT WATER, E.P. Dutton & Co, Inc. 1961

ISBN-978-095625404

stevegallanter@yahoo.com

617-835-2373

15 Edgerly Rd.

Apt. 8

Boston, MA 02115

CORONAVIRUS 5.0 Quarantine Stella Uno

“Social distancing?  I’ve been practicing social distancing since 9th. grade.”