By John Estridge
I think most of us can agree this has not been the best year in our lives.
What with the COVID-19, riots, killer hornets, Saharan dust storms and pepperoni shortages one wants to scream: “Where’s the humanity?”
Most of my life has been spent living in small communities. Usually, I like all the aspects that go along with that lifestyle. However, being in a small community means one usually knows everybody. And if one doesn’t know every single person, they know some of their relatives and/or some of their friends.
With this COVID-19, to date, 22 people have died in Franklin County of COVID-19-related reasons. And the fact about small communities holds true with those 22 deaths. I and/or my family have been touched by each death and that doesn’t even begin to talk about those who were physically ill with it, some critically, for months at a time.
Lives have been forever changed.
Now I hate the politics that goes with anything that happens in the 21st Century, but many people downplay the current virus. With knowing all those people, both who have succumbed and those who have been ill, I cannot.
When I grew up, I did not always have a smooth road. There were very bad bumps along the way. So to keep some of my sanity — yes I believe I have kept a little bit of that — I used to search – and still do – for the good within the bad.
Thus, with this mess of the world today, I also do that.
To date, I have found two very good things that have come out of this stupid virus: Zoom meetings and a very deep friendship with my better half, My Long Suffering Wife Ruth.
I have written before how God-blessed I am to be able to be a journalist. I love every minute of it and have since I first started doing this in the 1980s. However, one negative aspect of journalism in small communities is attending governmental entity meetings.
For the most part, those are incredibly boring and mundane.
After being fired from my editor’s position on Jan. 30, as the newspaper was going in a new direction, I did not have to attend any meetings until I started this blog. That was in June. And when I did start covering meetings again, there was this wonderful new aspect called Zoom meetings.
At first I was very skeptical as I am very technologically challenged and suspect of anything new. I grumbled about it as I sat in my easy chair, sipped coffee or a cold beverage of choice, watched a muted TV of the Reds lose yet another ballgame, and watched a meeting take place.
Now my late father might disagree with this but sometimes I am blessed with common sense. And as I sat there in my home with all my comforts and watched a boring meeting play out, I realized this Zoom was really a pretty good thing.
The local government entity who gets the award for best Zoom meeting is Brookville Town Council. Whoever came up with its plan I will take out to dinner. Not only do they do the meeting live, but it is also recorded on the Town of Brookville’s Facebook page. Not only do I not have to attend in person, but I don’t have to watch it while it is ongoing. Watching the recording, if I have questions, I email clerk/treasurer Gina Gillman and/or town administrator Tim Ripperger. Both are very nice people, and they get right back to me with answers.
One of the first things I had to do after I got my first full-time journalist job at the Connersville New-Examiner was cover a Fayette County Council budgetary meeting. There was a lot of drama in the Fayette County government at that time. Many of the personalities did not get along. A request for a copier at one of the offices was held up for months just because people did not get along. It was a little crazy.
The copier dilemma was front-page news during that time. There were no pandemics in the late 1980s.
Anyway, the budget hearing that year went on until 3 a.m.
After it was over, I had to trudge across Central Avenue and write up my article for that day’s paper. I was up about 40 hours before I went to bed. It gave me a bad taste for budget hearings.
Franklin County Council went through the 2021 budget workshop, as it is now called, from Monday through Wednesday, August 17-19.
I did not take part Monday, having covered FCC budget hearings/workshops since 1989, I knew Mondays are set aside for budgetary presentations from elected officials and department heads. Not much in the way of budget cutting gets done that day.
So, I followed the link to Zoom on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. One of the mind-numbing things that council always does during budget time is go line by line through the very large budgetary hard copies in front of each council member and cut $100 here and $200 there from each and every line. It is necessary, but it is also the definition of drudgery.
With Zoom, one can mute one’s audio and turn off one’s video so we, who attend via Zoom, remain unseen and unheard.
I made coffee, got snacks, read chapters and chapters of John Sandford’s new book Masked Prey on my Kindle. When Ruth came home, we talked about many, many things while she ate her lunch. I waited until council took a late lunch to catch up on my blog entries and then when council came back into its afternoon session, I ate my own lunch.
Recently, I dropped my pocket tape recorder after owning it for a decade or more. It was like losing a valued pet. Sunday, Ruth and I drove to Richmond, and I found one almost like mine at Best Buy. It was a bit pricey, but I splurged. All this is free, and I make no money, but Ruth seems to like my doing it, so we happily purchased it.
One aspect I really like about my dead and new recorders is they have a relatively large screen to see where I am on the tape when something important happens. It counts the minutes into the recording. Thus, if someone says something noteworthy, I just jot down the minute count and when I go to write the article, I know to fast forward or rewind to that exact minute.
Also, with Zoom meetings, I take hand-written notes in my tortured writing/hurried printing. My Events I Can No Longer Talk About but Always Do (2008 strokes) has left my handwriting illegible even for me and my hand stops early and often. Before I can get it to start again, the people talking are way ahead of me. Thus, when I attend meetings, I type meeting notes into my computer. With my using my computer to Zoom, I must hand write my notes.
Thus, my notes for Tuesday afternoon are like this: (43) – this is the minute readout on the tape player – “goofing off, but it sounded important.” I did that over and over. After Ruth got home at the end of her workday, I read some off to her. She shakes her head a lot when I do things like that.
And that brings us to my next really nice outcome from this stupid virus.
When we went through the Shutdown, I read many, many items on Facebook talking about tensions between husbands and wives being cooped up with each other. Most of those were in jest, but we have a scanner, and it seemed to us the domestic dispute calls went up quite a bit during that time.
Ruth and I never had a disagreement. She may have a different story, but I’m sticking to mine.
She has always been my best friend since we started dating way back in 2004, but we became better friends through that time. We talked about everything. We did watch some old movies, read books, she sewed while I read and wrote. Sometimes, we just held hands.
It was tranquil. It was nice. We almost felt guilty as we enjoyed our time together while people we knew were suffering.
So, there you have it. My list of good to come out of this virus does not go any farther than these two examples. But that is something.