20

Cinco de Mayo. The Mexicans defeated the French at Puebla in 1862 on, you guessed it, the Fifth of May. The victors lost the war, but since life is an unending war that we're destined to lose, only the battles matter.

For the next several days the weatherman is forecasting temperatures in the mid-nineties. This was our third hottest April since stats were recorded in the mid-1800s. There are only two seasons in Brownsville. There is the hot season that begins in April and lasts through September and there is the cool season that lasts from October to March. For six months we are the land of the eternal spring. There are days in December and January when we are the hottest city in the United States, somewhere in the 85s when the rest of the country is freezing.

For those of us who deal with the heat, we don't deal with the heat. We eliminate its existence. We live in air-conditioning, moving from cool structures to cool vehicles. We avoid the heat during the day at all costs. I am so effective at this strategy that I cannot say if last summer was hot or not. Based on past experiences and off-handed comments, I assume it was unpleasant.

We are in the middle of a drought, which isn't uncommon for this region that survives of the edge of civilization and was one of the last frontiers in North America as the population increased and expanded. The railroad didn't arrive until the early 1900s. Though the ground is barren with the exception of fields of well-irrigated crops, the land, a river delta that stretches 100 miles from the Gulf of Mexico westward, is rich from centuries of the Rio Grande's deposits. Rain falls and the landscape explodes in green.

Droughts don't receive their just due when they are diminished by plagues. Deaths in the United States crossed 70,000 today (We are losing this battle in spite of a general who is telling us otherwise) with cases passing the 1.2 million mark. We have one-fourth of the world's death total and one-third of its cases. Italy is second with 28,000 deaths and Spain is second with 220,000 cases.

Trump, sitting beneath the Lincoln monument in Washington for an interview because he is a megalomaniac with no sense of decorum, humility and history, spewed that nobody is doing a better job at combating Coronavirus than the democratic dictator himself. From a hoax to COVID disappearing miraculously to injecting disinfectant to clear Coronavirus corroded lungs, this is the mad man who ran on the quixotic crusade of making America great again. If we ever were, we sure aren't now.

You can hear the Chinese laughing all the way across the Pacific and other countries nodding unsympathetically that hubris precipitated our downfall. We used to ridicule other foreign countries because their citizens had to wait in long lines only to find the supermarkets' shelves empty. How things have changed.

Trump refuses to learn the lesson that as individuals we must remain humble and solely open our mouths to give thanks for our blessed circumstances. As mentally ill as he is, what does it say about the millions who follow him? What does it say about the Religious Right who consider this bad apple rotting and riddled with worms their savior? 

Should we be surprised that an educated and intelligent society like Germany could succumb to Hitler's mystique when we are witnessing our own perverted Pied Piper turn millions of mentally sodomized homo sapiens into zombies whose attitude is to let the chips fall where they may. If thousands have to die in order to reopen the economy, then Trump and his Darwinian grunts have no alternative but to weed out the weakest and rejoice at their bravery for making the tough decisions.

Maybe if Hitler had adhered to a more subtle strategy rather than resorting to the quick-fix solution of concentration camps and having to confront the repercussions of adverse publicity, he might have produced a superior race. In Trump's mind, we are a superior people but returning the runts to dust can improve our genetic makeup.

The common trope among millions if not billions of Trump critics in dealing with the financial crisis is that businesses can recover but dead people can't. As Texas nears 1,000 deaths and the Rio Grande 20, businesses are slowly reopening. (Brownsville has had one official death, which raises questions in the minds of the doubters about limiting movement and large groups since many more die from flu and pneumonia here every year.) It's the big gamble.

When Cameron County eliminated its curfew and shelter-at-home ban, few people flocked to the streets although there were reports that two days ago on Sunday there were cars lined from the entrance to Port Isabel, stuck for hours on the Causeway before emptying onto the Island. Mick, who has shown no signs of cabin fever, told me that he wanted to eat at Wings & Rings when restrictions lessened. I wasn't prepared for an adventure of the Island's magnitude, but I do my best to please my baby and we went for wings. The joint was one-tenth filled at best and for the first time in weeks I downed draft beer.

This outing hasn't incited my interest to leave the house on a regular basis. With the Coronavirus cloud hanging over us and projections dire as experts predict that more social contact will have deadly outcomes, I am inclined to stay home and maintain my distance from human interaction. To be honest, I have not missed social activity during the Coronavirus crisis. As I finish my third year in retirement, I have withdrawn to a quieter existence. With the writing, reading, exercising, studying Spanish, Portuguese and French as well as my every-day interactions with Olivia and Mick, I don't have extra time.

I'm not bored. When I choose to relax, there are many excellent movies, series and documentaries on television that I'm entertained. If I want to spice up my evening, I fix a plate of salami, cheese and crackers and pour myself a glass of wine. I pop a Xanax, take two Tylenol PM and drink a cup of tila tea before I go to bed. I sleep like a dead man. I rise the next morning and repeat my daily ritual. I shop at HEB every three or four days and return the greetings of acquaintances whom I don't recognize. They are hidden safely behind their masks. That suffices for rubbing elbows publicly.

Financially, I am in the best shape of my life. I'm not spending money eating out or paying the inflated prices for beer and wine. Both are cheaper at HEB. Besides my substantial teacher's retirement, I receive a small monthly allotment from social security and The Murphy Report yields me botana money through ads, extra cash for the youngest son's regular requests. Yesterday I doled out $300 for his driving lessons.

We are not going to escape alive and in my most depressing moods I feel the walls enclosing around me. I'll be 70 this year, my body aches, impending health issues fill me with trepidation (Coronavirus is gas on the fire) and there doesn't appear to be any exotic voyages on the horizon like taking the train in Cuba from Havana to Santiago or in Portugal from Lisbon to Porto. Time speeds past so fast. If time were an animal, it would be a cheetah and not a turtle.

As long as I have my health and bucks in the bank, I am a stoic at heart who has paltry materialistic needs. I lived for the last seven years in a hotel without a car or any other possessions such as furniture or appliances. I have never desired much. The basics have found their way to me without much effort because I have held steady, decent-paying jobs. Now that I have reconciled with Olivia, those absences have been alleviated and I go with the flow.

I am blessed with a modest ego. Some individuals are burdened with the need to be told that they are great or special. I prefer hearing nothing at all. I know who I am. I know my strengths and my weaknesses. My strengths give me the confidence to forge onward and my weaknesses give me pause to think twice before I make the same mistake again. I chuckle that life is a joke except when misfortune befalls a family member or a friend and the laughing matter returns to a mournful reality.

I give thanks that I chose the socialistic rather than the capitalistic route in my professional career. I would hear acquaintances bluster about being their own bosses and not having to take orders from others, but there is no worse taskmaster than oneself. I became a teacher by chance and remained in the profession for four decades. Olivia is a teacher and she's not worried about reopening a business. The roof at her school could collapse and she would have a job just as she is receiving her regular check staying home during the pandemic. She would have no reservations about social distancing for the next ten years until she retires.

Meanwhile, those in the private sector are suffering with an uncertain future awaiting them. Under the best of circumstances, their recovery will be slow and painful. There are many former patrons like myself who will remain at home fixing their own meals and sipping wine rather than risking their health and paying high prices. I hadn't paid a restaurant tab in so long that I was taken back by the $50 bill at Wings & Rings when before the outbreak I didn't think twice about spending $100 two and three times a week.

So life, as well as death, goes on as I allow The Coronavirus Chronicles to write itself. I am preparing to post my 17th book on Amazon--The Master. It is my amateurish tribute to Zen. If it weren't for my insatiable animalistic appetite, I'm a monk at heart. This is my shortest book. In contrast, and for no other reason than you take the inspiration and the idea to wherever they may lead, The Coronavirus Chronicles will be the longest. This article appearing on the blog will make a second appearance in the final version as this undertaking is arguably a diary rendered artistically in the fictional/realism genre.

Though The Master is short, it is complete. I anticipated a longer work, but that muse was more like a one-night stand. The coupling was consummated.