your daily dose of the Ponds & friends

Yep, I Tested Positive

I thought I was coming down with the same bad cold that Bob was slowly recovering from. I don't get colds all that often, and I'd thought this one would pass me by, but nope, it appeared eager to settle in my head. Well, dang ... I headed for bed, hoping it wouldn't be too bad in the morning. 

Around 3 a.m. Saturday I woke up with aches that signaled a potential temperature. And indeed I had one; 100.7, significantly higher than the 97.9 I usually run. I knew that colds don't feature fevers so I tested myself for COVID. 

I didn't even have to wait the requisite 15 minutes, both lines were there in bright red within 30 seconds. 

Welp. 

I've felt like I've been hit by a truck ever since. I keep telling myself it's a smaller truck than it might have been, thanks to the booster shot I got last year (of course, I can't recall exactly when I got it, but I think it was in mid-summer.) but it's still a truck. I ran a lower temp on Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday, today, I haven't had a temperature since then and today I retook a test. At first, the only reaction was the control line. Huzzah! I was certain I'd gotten the first of the two negative tests I'd need to declare myself COVID free. As I said, Huzzah--

--except at the end of the 15 minute wait time, there it was, a faint but definite second line. 

Welp. Again. 

And it's still like being hit by a small truck. 

Ah well, I'm getting some work done on my NTBP* novel, escaping a corner I'd painted myself into. And I'm also making some bread. That always comforts me. 

And here, have something I wrote about cold decades ago. Since we're still in single digit temperatures with subzero windchills, it feels the same to me, although this was written after a relatively rare ice storm during a cold snap.

. 
* not to be published

He Had More Than a Dream

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had grit and determination, and strength and righteous anger that he controlled in the name of peaceful progress, and pride that he wanted Black Americans to recognize and adopt for themselves. He believed in this country - god knows why, given how much hell America put Black people through, all the way from 1615 to the then-current day - and he worked like hell to make it a better one. 

He risked himself and his family, with constant death threats and a firebombing at his home in 1958. He almost died after being stabbed in the same year. He risked his reputation and his legacy, surviving several arrests and jailings. He risked those who believed in him and in what he had to say, because he knew those who hated him would hate those who believed in him.

He fought for what he shouldn't have had to fight for; true understanding of what Black Americans deserve, and what White America has resolutely refused to admit was required.

He fought against nasty, petty, and powerful men like J. Edgar Hoover, who spread filth and lies about Dr. King. Why? Because he was afraid of Dr. King. He hated what Dr. King stood for, so he tried to erase the man. He wasn't the only one. 

After his stabbing, Dr. King had one more decade to shake the foundations of this country, to start the Poor People's Campaign and to oppose the Vietnam War. And then White America killed him. 

Who called for the assassination? Did someone pay James Earl Ray?  All of that kind of misses the point. Ultimately, the real conspiracy is what people in this country have insisted on doing ever since that April morning at the Lorraine Motel.

For more than 57 years America has worked tirelessly to erase his truth. America wants everyone to remember him only as he spoke during the March on Washington, choosing to turn those powerful words into an anodyne formula they want to speed the erasure of real history. Some of them manage to listen to Dr. King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech and cry tears about his unnervingly prophetic commentary. 

But they don't like reading his letter from a Birmingham jail. They can't stand his anti-war stance. They loathe his pro-union beliefs, his support of poor people of all colors. 

It's still White America that fears him the most; rich white Americans, anti-union white Americans, pro-capitalism white Americans, the people who understand that he had grown so much larger and more dangerous to their power than they'd thought he would be. 

Let's remember him for what he was. A warrior.

And I'll try not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution, as difficult as that will be.