I’m back in the saddle again,
Out where a friend is a friend.
Where the longhorn cattle feed
On the lowly jimsonweed.
Back in the saddle again.

Ridin’ the range once more.
Totin’ my old .44.
Where you sleep out every night
And the only law is right.
Back in the saddle again. – Gene Autry

After a drive through the Navaho Nation, trying like the devil to hold our breath, we made it home to Denver Saturday afternoon. Every time we drive from one home to the other, I always think we won’t bring much. We have made a concerted effort to duplicate things to avoid lots of hauling back and forth. Alas, it never works out that way. For one thing, when we drive to AZ in November, we are bringing all of our summer clothes. We won’t need them anymore in Colorado, and then they are there awaiting us when we arrive Christmas Day. Conversely, when we drive back to Denver, we are bringing all of those same summer clothes with us. Plus any we added and we’ve always added some.

Bill has work-related stuff to haul. I have hobby-related stuff to haul. This year I also brought back lots and lots of canned goods that I had purchased and didn’t use. During those first days of the quarantine — you know, the days of ehe Purell and Toilet Paper crisis– one never knew what would be on the grocery shelves. So if I saw something that hadn’t been there for a while, I would grab one, not remembering if I had some at home. Because of this, I ended up with four cans of diced tomatoes, three boxes of chicken broth, one box of beef broth, and four cans of cream of mushroom soup. All of these items — and more — rode with us in the back of the car.

We unpacked the car first thing. And then we began settling in. Changing clocks. Turning on the water. Opening windows to let out the smell of must. Getting the ice maker going. Putting away all of the perishables. Calling Dish Network to change the location of our satellite service because we have what’s called a Snowbird Account.

A full two hours and two phone calls later, it still wasn’t changed. We have had this account for 10 years. For 10 years, all we’ve ever had to do was call Dish, and explain that we have a snowbird account and that we’re changing locations. They always understood completely, and in the 10 minutes it took them to make the change, I listened to them try to sell me something-or-other, which I always declined. But then, voila! our local stations were back in service.

This time, I simply couldn’t get to the right person. Nor could I get to anyone that I could understand. I’m not trying to be negative, but I simply didn’t know what they were saying and they simply didn’t understand what I wanted them to do. Finally, after a total of three people in three separate telephone conversations, someone did something that involved Bill crawling behind the television and pushing buttons and pulling out computer cards and lots of praying to the patron saint of technology (who happens to be St. Isidore of Seville for reasons I don’t quite understand). But it now works.

And as I write this post, Dagny is once again mowing our back yard and Bill is washing windows. So, nothing ever really changes.

Did you hear the one about the two people who drove through Navaho Nation during a pandemic?

Bill and I took off Friday morning, heading to Denver. We were completely in the dark about what to expect in the days ahead. One person told us that we wouldn’t be able to find a bathroom for love nor money. Not good when you’re a Baby Boomer with a bladder the size of a dime. We limited ourselves to one cup of coffee.

When we drive, we have a whole system that frankly varies very little. Bill starts out driving, and he takes us to Payson, about an hour-and-a-half from our house. We generally stop at McDonalds and get a breakfast sandwich and use their restrooms. No restrooms available this time, and the drive-thru line was long. No prob, because we’d already eaten breakfast.

Once I take over, we head to Holbrook where we might stop and have lunch at another fast food restaurant. My mother always said that the town of Holbrook, Arizona, looked like a town that had recently been hit by a nuclear bomb. Needless to say, she was never asked to serve on their Chamber of Commerce Board. Alas, she really is right. It is a town with very little to offer, except a Dairy Queen. A Dairy Queen at which we always make a stop to have an ice cream treat.

Because we needed a stretch break, we stopped at this very Dairy Queen, thinking perhaps we could use their bathroom. Signs on the windows indicated excitedly that their bathrooms were open. The lobby was closed, but they had a drive thru that had been added very recently. My guess is the owner knocked a hole in the wall with a sledge hammer though I can’t confirm that theory. The drive thru lane was about six feet long. And apparently DQ is the only game in town because the line awaiting the drive thru was down the street. We, however, parked on the other side of the building because I had made us sandwiches. We also saw that they indicated they had car hops.

After a wait of about 20 minutes (during which we ate our sandwiches), a very confused-looking woman appeared asking if we wanted to order anything. “Yes,” we said. “Two hot fudge malts. And a bathroom.”

She looked like a deer in the headlights. It seemed the front door was locked because the manager had left with the key. So no bathrooms. It really didn’t matter, because we weren’t in a desperate state. See above: limited coffee. I admit to being a bit concerned about the DQ employee’s safety given only one rear exit. Perhaps that’s why she looked so confused.

We left, and headed towards Gallup, which is the first town in New Mexico on I-40, and the heart of the Navaho Nation. You know, the same Navaho Nation which has been drastically hit with the coronavirus. But my dime-sized bladder was being stretched to its limit, and a visit to a ladies’ room was a must at this point. As we got off the highway, we noticed that traffic going into Gallup was backed up. However, our favorite truck stop, cleverly called Navaho Travel Station, was the other direction. We made a quick stop. The clerks were all wearing masks as were we. A thorough hand wash and plenty of disinfectant lotion made us feel pretty good. The line was still backed up as we got back on I-40.

That night, as we watched television in our hotel room in Albuquerque, we learned that the city of Gallup WAS CLOSED. As in NO ONE IN, NO ONE OUT.

Yoiks.

The rest of the trip was uneventul. We left Albuquerque the next morning, and made it to Trinidad, Colorado, before our stomachs were growling (no sandwiches that day). We drove through Wendy’s and parked to eat our sandwiches. We had entertainment as the first marijuana store in Colorado coming in from I-25 was right there. And they were doing a frisky business. In fact, there was a line out of the door. To be fair, they were carefully allowing only one person in the store at a time. Their parking lot was full of out-of-state cars there to visit the essential business of recreational marijuana. That’s okay. I need my martinis.

We made it home without any problems, and now we just return to a quarantine life with new walls.

Practically since birth, our grandson Micah has loved music. He was very young when it became clear that he has perfect rhythm. He remembers the words to songs. He likes many different kinds of music. He says he wants to “make music and live in a van” when he grows up. Believe me, it’s practically certain.

I got a text from my daughter-in-law earlier this week in which Micah is proudly displaying his 100 Days of Practice Award. That would be for piano practice, thank you very much. It looks like his pride is showing forth. It also looks like his getting his hair ready for the making music and living in a van. Or maybe there’s a quarantine. Or both. Congratulations Micah….

Have a great weekend.

I know this has happened to all of you. You hear the faint sound of an alarm. Bink. Bink. Bink. Bink. And you can’t tell where it’s coming from. You think it’s your imagination. But the binking sound is incessant. And it’s driving you crazy.

There are certain noises that explicably drive me nearly insane. Noisy fans. Car radios that aren’t turned up loud enough to hear and are only background noise. A rattling car window. And a faint sound of an alarm that you can’t find.

The thing is, Bill’s hard of hearing. There is a range at which he can’t hear a thing. An example is every morning when the coffee pot turns off, there is an alarm alerting us that we’d better go grab our last cup before it gets cold. He simply doesn’t hear it. Nor does he hear the sound the smoke alarm makes when the battery is low. He is completely unable to hear that extremely annoying sound. Woe betide him if he’s ever alone in the house and an alarm goes off alerting him to something dangerous.

So, we’re sitting quietly in the living room, and I am reading. All of the sudden, I notice a binking sound — three shorts binks and a long bink, a pause, and repeat. And repeat.

“What’s that sound,” I asked him.

Of course, his response was, “What sound?”

“Seriously?” I asked him. “You can’t hear that noise?”

He couldn’t. So I am running around the house like a madwoman, putting my ear next to everything that could possibly have an alarm. Our phones. Our pads. The water dispenser. The refrigerator. The alarm clock. I’m getting warm. I’m getting cold again.

“Please help me,” I said. “I know you can’t hear it, but just help me know what could possibly be beeping.”

He got up to help. I was standing by the water dispenser and the noise was louder. It had to be the dispenser. Except then it wasn’t. By then, we were both wandering around.

“The smoke alarm,” I said excitedly. We both ran into the den and sure enough, the sound was coming from the smoke alarm.

“I’ll have to take it down,” Bill said, and wandered off to gather tools.

And the sound became faint.

And a light bulb went on over my head, just like the cartoons.

“Come here,” I shouted to Bill. “I think it’s you. I think it’s your pump!”

As you will recall, Bill has participated in a study since September 2018 in which his very important Parkinson’s medication is continually pumped into his body. The pump runs via a battery. And though he wears the pump for probably 12 or 13 hours every day, the battery has never indicated it was getting low. I have commented on it many times to his nurse. She always nods, telling me they last a long time.

But it’s time was up. So I put on my face mask and ran to CVS to get the necessary battery. When I got home, we opened up our handy dandy instruction manual. The first instruction was to turn off the pump. Only it wouldn’t turn off because, well, the battery was dead.

Plan B: We called our helpline and talked to David, who frankly IS the helpline. I wrote a blog about it. And when we told him our predicament, he said, “Oh, oh.”

Oh-oh? It turns out the pump should have alerted us that the battery was running low. It did not. The bad news was that if it has to be reset, that can only be done at the doctor’s office. You know, the one in Denver.

I quickly envisioned packing up our car yesterday afternoon, and driving all day today to get to the doctor’s office in Denver before Bill had to go cold turkey without his meds.

But once again, God provided. David (who is one of God’s angels) talked us through a procedure that he HOPED might work. And it did. Bill is happily hooked back up to his pump, and we can return to Denver this weekend as planned and at a normal speed limit!

I’ve had a lot of time to think for the past 40 days and 40 nights (or however long this quarantine has been in place). I let my mind wander a bit between watching Inspector Morse slam his third or fourth glass of whiskey as he solves the murder anyway, and seeing Miss Marple figure out who murdered the seemingly harmless college professor without ever putting down her knitting.

And one of the things I have been thinking about is what three people I loved who are now in heaven would think about what’s happening in our world right now. One is my friend Megan, who died 11 months ago from cancer. Another is my mother-in-law Wilma. The third is my own mom.

Megan was one of the smartest people I have ever known. But she was more than just smart. She had a way of looking at things more clearly and objectively than most people. Politically, she was a registered independent. And she really was an independent. She liked President Obama, but she also liked former Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. She loved statistics, and even more important, she understood them. She made her living that way. I would give just about anything if I could sit down at the Imperial Café in Denver and discuss the coronavirus and our world’s reaction to it over some sesame chicken.

Wilma was another very smart woman, who faced life and its challenges head-on. I asked Bill the other night what he thought his mom would think about the quarantine. He thought for a moment and said that he would guess she would compare it to other health scares she faced in her long life. She was born in 1917, about the time that the Spanish influenza was hitting the United States. That pandemic lasted 36 months, and some 500 million people were affected. Death toll estimates range from 17 million all the way to 100 million. She would have been just a baby during the worst of it, so likely didn’t remember the fear that the world felt. However, her parents probably talked about it. She would have thoughts, for sure.

As for my mom, I hardly can imagine what she would think about all of this. While she wasn’t particularly an outgoing and social person, she loved her family. I don’t know if she would have embraced the technology available to us now that could have connected her to her kids and grandkids while we all sheltered-in-place. I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t easy to understand, she wouldn’t have had the patience to try and figure it out. But I’ll bet she would have had a thing or two to say about sheltering-in-place. I’m pretty darn certain my dad would have gotten an earful. Every day. Perhaps he does anyway.

There is that age-old question: If you could have dinner with five people, who would they be? For me, at least today, I would choose those three, and forget the other two. More food for us.