Most people, when they're young don't look ahead to retirement. But if they, by some quirk of thought process do, they tend to wonder what on earth would they ever do with all that free time of nothing but boredom. It's possible that some people are bored once their paid working life comes to an end, even though there are people who continue to work for as long as they can physically manage to, either by deliberate design because their life revolves around their workplace, they enjoy what they do to the exclusion of all else, or because their financial situation mandates it.

 

We've been retired for a long time, fully a quarter of our lives. And we've never been bored. There is so much to do that at times we wonder where the time has gone. There never seems to be enough of it to squeeze in all the things we plan or want to do, even mundane things that capture our attention and give us pleasure. Mundane only in the sense that they become a routine, however important they are in our lives.

 

 

Perhaps it's true that as we age time seems to telescope, closing in from all corners, leaving us gasping for more. Something as routine as doing a weekly food shopping seems to take an enormous amount of time. Mostly because of multiple stops; say first to the pharmacy, then on to the main supermarket and following that over to the specialty shop to complete the shopping. Even though all these destinations are in fairly close proximity to our home, the entire enterprise takes hours out of the day as it did today.

 

Our focus on shopping didn't deter us to notice the obvious, that increasingly fewer people are masking up. And that's people from all age demographics. In a sense it's understandable; people are learning, as social observers claim, 'to live with COVID'; it's here to stay. Which, needless to say, does not mean that intelligent caution should be set aside in the maintenance of a respectable space between yourself and others. Still, the first line of defence is masking.

 

Not so long ago, cautionary advice from infectious disease specialists urging the public to be vaccinated, to wash their hands frequently, to maintain distance and to wear masks hit the front page of any newspaper. That advice is being renewed, but now it's published in small columns below the fold, in obscure parts of the paper. People are sick and tired of the pandemic, and who can blame us?

In more obvious locations in the papers are reports of schoolchildren arriving in droves at area hospitals too swamped with cases to even admit them. Hospital emergency rooms are closing down, unable to handle the bloated workload. And those who track the prevalence and ongoing surges of new COVID mutations circulating in the public sphere and their infectiousness are quietly advising the public to exercise more caution.

On the more light-hearted and equally important version of our days when we set aside such conerns there is the companionship of our two little dogs. Where omnivorous Jillie refused her breakfast this morning, and even her chopped-up hard-boiled egg. Under the weather, as it were; more unusual for her than it is for Jackie. But as we entered the ravine for our afternoon forest dawdle-about, there she was prancing about with Jackie, agitating for cookie treats.