The Year That Wasn't, 2020. We got slammed by the pandemic, for which we were thoroughly unprepared and remain so even now under the current "leadership," in early March with a general lockdown and it hasn't relented yet 10 months and 340,000 deaths later.
I was terribly sick on Valentine's Day and remained so for the rest of the month, but fortunately, in a brief window of "normalcy" in the time I had left in March before the sudden shutdown, I was able to complete the rehabilitation of my right eye (detached retina) which had necessitated four eye surgeries (two of an emergency nature) and two separate grueling weeklong face-down recovery periods, by completing yet another eye procedure of the affected eye. My sight in that eye has recovered to near what I had before.
Then the only real break I had from the daily grind of pandemic protocol was a three day trip to North Carolina in August, my "summer vacation," when I went to check up on a college buddy who had broken his leg and undergone surgery to repair it. I received a call from a college friend whom I hadn't been called by in decades about our mutual college buddy Jimmy who every one of his friends from college (he has a wide circle). I lived closest to him so I was the obvious choice by them to go down.
It's 360 miles to Jimmy's house on stilts on the Inner Banks down there and I drove down on a Sunday when traffic wasn't so bad on I-95, as this was at the height of the pandemic. I got there in the late afternoon and we had a spaghetti dinner that he cooked and we reminisced about the old days in the seventies at CU-Boulder. He graduated in five years and I, ahem, took eight years, being between semesters for four years at the conclusion of my sophomore year so I could winter in Aspen and summer in Nantucket during that delightful period in the life of a young man.
The first full day in Vandemere I helped Jimmy move a few small articles of furniture into his new house in Oriental and I went to the John W. Bond Beach Park in that town, a tiny strip of sand on a tidal river flowing into the Neuse River that empties into Pamlico Sound. I had to wade out a quarter mile in mostly sticky mud underfoot before I got to deep enough water to dive into without scraping my belly and I dog paddled back like a log on the surface of the water. I was fortunate when a boat passed by behind me in the channel that provided a tiny wake that I was able to surf up on the beach upon. My trip to the beach. That night I cooked chicken thighs for us that I'd bought at the Piggly-Wiggly. Going to a Piggly-Wiggly in the south is a real trip.
The next morning I got up early to take pictures of the sunrise over the water and then we drove to New Bern where Jimmy was seen by a leg specialist while I went to a Civil War battlefield, where the Yankees rousted the Rebels from New Bern. The town was an important east coast port at the time on the New Bern River, and the Union troops freed the artisan and tradesmen slaves there and occupied the town for the duration.
When the patient got out of lockup, we spent a half hour in downtown New Bern where we visited an old style hardware store which sold nails by the handful from steel bins and axe handles, in case your axe blade became dislodged from your old axe handle after thirty years use, and visited the town's tiny beach under the New Bern bridge. I would call that spot Pigeon Beach.
Back in Vandemere we spent an hour, "happy hour," at a local bait store called Squidders, owned by the mayor's son, where we palavered with the proprietor and a few other good ol' boys and apparently we didn't offend anyone even though we're both from New York and certainly damned Yankees and probably effin Democrats too. We're all Americans after all.
In the early evening the mayor of the town dropped in on Jimmy to see how he was doing in his recovery and, I think, to see who his visitor was and if I needed to go into quarantine since I was an outsider. That night we ate fish as befits a town on the water.
I came back the next day, anxious to leave before I got slapped with a quarantine order somehow, a lightning trip masquerading as a vacation. But I did get in a swim at a beach and visited a Civil War battlefield. And that's what I did last summer.
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