Saturday was one of those perfect spring days in New York City. The temperature was in the 60s, the sky was clear, the sun was bright but not harsh and the air felt pure. I met a friend for lunch in Soho and I was pleasantly surprised that there was traffic heading down lower Broadway. There was traffic again in the city.

When the vaccine started shipping from its Michigan facility in mid-December, it was with a promise that someday soon, we would be able to visit our elderly relatives and friends and simply grasp onto each other with the acknowledgement that we somehow made our way through the pain and devastation.

The last trip I took was to London a year ago for a board meeting of a non-profit that I am involved with. I was reading at the time about the virus that had shut down Wuhan, China and considered for a moment if I should take the trip. I had no idea what was to come, and I look back on the life I led in February 2020 with a great sense of loss. It is as though we have all been through a near-death experience.

When I first heard about the Daf Yomi cycle it was through an article in the New York Times that reported on an event attended by 90,000 mostly men who gathered at a New Jersey sports stadium to celebrate the end of a 7 ½ cycle of reading a portion a day of the Talmud. A new cycle was about to start again on January 5, 2020. I was always curious about the Talmud which appeared to be a mysterious repository of all Jewish knowledge. 

I never realized before the onset of the pandemic how much I have lived my life through restaurants, until so many beloved establishments were gone. Among all the loss and sadness this year, is the disappearance of so many places that have been part of my life for the decades I have lived in New York City.

Can I just be open about it and say that 2020 was a terrible year. It was even worse than 2018 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my father died and 2001 when I was at the World Trade Center on September 11th and 2008 when the economy fell off a cliff and 2012 when I lived in darkness for a week during hurricane Sandy.

My heart sank when I saw the line of people waiting in lines at airports and train stations over Thanksgiving. We were told to stay home. Over one million Americans passed through US airports over the Thanksgiving holiday despite pleas from health professionals and the CDC to not travel.

The trucks have just left Pfizer’s Kalamazoo, Michigan facility with the promised coronavirus vaccine onboard and are on their way to the US states. There is hope that eventually we can stamp out the virus that has wreaked havoc on our public health system and economy during what has been a very dark year.

I have a confession. I believed in Santa Claus until I was an age that is older than I would like to admit. I was a late bloomer, and it took me a while to understand that the world is really not a place where a magical man in a white beard hands out gifts to anyone who can prove they have been good.

This is a tough year to live alone and to be honest, the loneliest Thanksgiving in my memory. When the CDC recommended against the mixing of households on Thanksgiving, it meant being alone on the holiday for people like me who are single. In past years, wherever I found myself in the world, I somehow managed to travel to be with my family on Thanksgiving.

Last year I spent Yom Kippur in Israel. It was my first time in Israel, and I had neglected to check the calendar. When I booked a week in a Jerusalem hotel, I had failed to realize that coming at a time when everything was shut down for two days was not optimal.

“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”  From Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a role model for so many women, including this small, Jewish, middle-class woman who has had to make her way in the world. There is so much to admire about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, including how hard she worked for woman to have an equal footing in the workplace. I am old enough to remember the struggles in the 1970s to provide women with equal employment opportunities and how tenacious Bader Ginsburg was in her application of the law to the fight.

If I could return to just one day in February before the encroaching coronavirus shut down New York City, I would live – truly live -- in every single moment of that day. Now that I have been locked up for three months, I understand that I have been walking through my life, without truly experiencing what was unfolding around me.

We show up each Saturday

for our own reasons:

cheap luxuries, a hot date,

the small geography of our hands –

the length and shape of our nails,

cuticles growing like disorderly

wees upon their flush beds –

For Art Spiegleman

I return each day to the Museum of Modern Art

on my lunch hour and read the walls.

My fingers trace the maps of Auschwitz

and Birkenau, counting in units of one thousand

how many Jews were stuffed in barracks,

and hauled into ovens.

it would be Take Me To The Water

with Nina Simone

if blue had a taste –

it would be ginger sweet and spicy

if blue were a time of day

it would be dusk

before the night inks

the earth

You were already an old man

when I first saw you

In a Swenson’s on Fourth Street.

Your head was soft and scrubbed

bald, your hunched shoulders

disappeared into the brush of a suit,

men say who don’t know me,

they all feel entitled
A friend of my parents says,

you’d be a beautiful gal if only you smiled.

never suspecting that somewhere there is another you

or at least someone who looks enough like you in a scarf and dark glasses

who has fabricated you from a scrap of paper littered from your life --

I could tell you what it was like to be there -
the sky black with bodies - humanity colluding with gravity -
people jumping in pairs - linked lives spent working together
in towers so tall it must have felt like heaven to sit at a desk
and watch the city transform with the light of the seasons -