We had just arrived in San Antonio, Texas, checked into our hotel and decided to walk around downtown. Our hotel was only a couple blocks from the Riverwalk and for late February, it was a perfect mid sixty-degree temperature. Elsa had an inspiration to search for a local whiskey which might endear us to Texas the way local wines in Oregon had endeared us to the Willamette Valley.

As luck would have it, google maps pointed us to the Maverick Whiskey bar that was just 1 block from our hotel (which was itself 1 block from the Alamo).  So, we ambled over to the old bank building and looked for the tasting room, stepping past the large stone pillars and into an empty restaurant lobby. A hassled-looking maître d' eyed us curiously when we asked about whiskey tasting. “This is our opening week and we haven’t even promoted ourselves. How did you find us?” We told her that the whiskey bar showed up on google maps and she paused a moment before flipping her pony-tail and gesturing toward the elevator. “The bar is upstairs.”  

A short ride later we emerged into a lovely modern restaurant with windows overlooking the distillery, and a marble inlaid bar at one end that curved around the bartenders who were serving …absolutely no customers. We had the place to ourselves, but then again it was 3:00 in the afternoon of a random February weekday so what did we expect? (Okay in Portland the whiskey bar would be packed at 3pm on a random February weekday; that’s what we expected).  “We would like to try your whiskeys,” I told the young woman who was our bartender.  “Well,” she said, “we just opened this week. Our whiskey, in order to be considered whiskey, has to be aged in barrels for one day… so the one whiskey we have is aged in barrels for exactly one day.”   Needless to say, whiskey that has been barrel aged for one day isn’t up to the standards of a whiskey that’s seen a few years in a pinot noir barrel. This one-day whiskey was like eating a bad avocado or putting on a scratchy sweater, it was unpleasant and unsatisfying. We left our tasting unfinished, paid our bill and wandered on.  Everything about the Maverick Whiskey bar seemed promising. It looked good, it was conveniently located, the ambiance was awesome. But when it came to delivering the goods, the experience was profoundly disappointing. I think 2020 was bit like that whiskey bar.

<-- This is the good stuff. Made in Oregon.

During so much of this year, the opening lines from this well-known book ran spuriously through my memory.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

And then because I was a precocious teenager, I had memorized the rest of the paragraph.

“… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”

The lines continue to call out the “noisiest authorities” who insist on using superlative comparisons. Who knew that Dickens in 1859 could so eloquently capture 2020? But then maybe that is exactly why A Tale of Two Cities resonates. Our human frailties keep dragging us through the same lessons every couple of generations. We forget the hard-fought lessons learned by our great grandparents; the unprecedented times are hardly unprecedented at all. As a species, we’ve been through all of this, (all of this!) before. It’s only new to us because our lives are short and our memories are shorter.

Elsa and I started 2020 with such promise. The first two months were amazing.

In January we crammed the month with visits with friends and family; we were social, we saw some of our favorite people. In February we traveled to Sedona with my Aunt Bernice and then took a spontaneous aforementioned trip to Texas because we wanted to experience Austin and San Antonio.

We even toured the LBJ presidential library and stumbled upon a Bernie Sander’s political rally in Austin which was a total head-trip. But there were rumblings in February about a virus in China that was causing concern. When we ate lunch in the Austin airport on February 29, just prior to our departure back to Portland, we didn’t know it would be our last dining-in experience for the year. On the plane, a couple was wearing face masks and we thought they were being overly cautious. Wasn’t the virus just like the flu, didn’t the CDC say face-masks weren’t needed?

And then you all know what happened. The cascade of closures and stay-at-home orders and an escalation of cases that caused New York and Italian hospitals to be overrun, a panic rush on toilet paper and bread flour. I remember seeing people running….RUNNING… down the aisles at Costco to be first in line for a toilet paper shipment that had just arrived. With shelves cleaned out and the aisles for bleach decimated,I trundled home with six bottles of wine and a Honda-civic sized bag of potato chips which is really all we thought we needed to survive a three-week pandemic shutdown. Well, that plus face masks. We ordered ours from a woman in northern Mexico who sold handmade embroidered masks.

The theme for the year, contrary to our expectations of the roaring 20’s was “endurance.”  In March, Elsa’s job prospects evaporated. The calls to my consulting company simply stopped. Everything was on hold, on pause. April just disappeared in a fog. Time became unpredictable with days passing as weeks and months passing in seconds. Events from yesterday seemed like last year.

That’s not to say there wasn’t some productivity in our household. Uninterrupted by pesky work projects, I started and finished a massive bathroom remodeling project that we have been needing to do for 15 years.

Now with a walk-in shower and heated floors, starting the morning is a joy instead of a miserable reminder of the decrepit decorating taste of the previous owners of this house. Finally, our bathroom belongs to this new century.

Then immediately I ripped out the old rotting deck where the hot tub had been and began excavating a space for a new improved spa area. There were concrete pillars to remove, dirt to transport, a concrete pad to pour, and a new deck and stairway to build. I could spend the days in the sweet embrace of home remodeling projects that took my mind away from the daily headlines of street protests, advancing COVID cases and the rancorous presidential race.  This is how I coped.

In May, I turned 50. Instead of the fancy dinner we had planned, Elsa surprised me with a video of well-wishes from friends and family. I’ll admit I was touched by the thoughtful things people said, tributes that one normally never hears because the sentiments are typically expressed only at one’s funeral. So, to hear these things shared was a gift that has carried me through this year.  I reciprocated with a similar video for Elsa on her 50th birthday in December.

Some of my friends arranged a virtual escape room, played via zoom, that was actually pretty fun.

Once the trails were open again, Elsa invented a new game in June that also helped us endure. The game was called, “Let’s find some tough new hikes and do them.”  We started with Silver Falls on my birthday,  Crystal Lakes in early June when the uppermost lake was still covered with snow, then Palisades, then Devil’s Peak, and Third Burroughs, Skyscraper peak, Shriner Peak, Grant Park, Dege Peak, Hamilton Mountain, Dog Mountain, Palisades Lake (different from Palisades), Fremont Lookout at 5am… I lost track when our cumulative total for the summer exceeded 100 miles… and each hike had substantial elevation gains which made them ass-kicking.

Owyhigh Lakes and Tomanos Peak were bonus hikes that involved an overnight camping trip. When we couldn’t hike in the mountains, we did daily 3-5 mile walks in our neighborhood. So, in 2020 we got outside! I think both of us are in the best shape of our adult lives.

But so much of 2020 that we experienced was what you experienced. COVID affected everyone. And it affected us all the same and differently. We felt fortunate to sequester at home with each other, but we too had to navigate the early days of uncertainty, the delicate dance with friends who felt more comfortable socializing in person than we did (are we tight-asses or just being safe?).

We suffered the scare of having massive wildfires move to within a few miles of our house, and a week of suffocating smoke with hazardous air quality conditions that exceeded the ability of the measurement tools.  Then on the day the smoke cleared, and the rains came, RBG died, setting up another liberal loss for democracy. The anxiety of the election and the daily stress of wondering what new crazy thing the white house occupant would perpetrate onto his weary electorate was exhausting.

So much of the year was just getting by… we went through a lot of whiskey and wine this year. Eric whittled away 42 evenings with two college buddies (Glenn and Jake) playing Civilization6 on PlayStation.  Elsa wrote in her journal, held happy hours with friends, looked for work watched reruns of old TV shows.  Both of us consumed the entire Lord of the Rings and Hobbit Trilogies and then moved on re-watching New Girl and ER. (It holds up!).  There has been a lot of pain, loss, suffering, and anxiety for our community. The charm of Portland, a city we love, is boarded up behind graffiti-covered plywood after months of protests and social unrest. The restaurants and bars which gave the city life are closed, the offices empty, the normally bustling max trains are running with only a handful of passengers on-board. The museums and theaters have no patrons. Entire towns and massive forests in Oregon were devastated by the wildfires. Schoolteachers are exhausted and our friends who have small children are frayed to the breaking point.

But it wasn’t all apocalyptic gloom and binge-watching Hulu. Eric’s work picked up in July and held steady through the end of the year. Elsa was able to stop her 12-year-old prescribed reliance on blood-thinners. We re-fell in love with our house and we found a litany of things for which to be grateful, including each other.  

Eric’s co-authored book on nonprofit board leadership was finally published and Elsa landed a job in December that has fully engaged her (finding a job during COVID is no small feat). We travelled to Walla Walla on November 11 and picked up 27 used wine barrels from Nina Buty’s winery which I have subsequently begun making into rustic furniture.

And in spite of the COVID social distancing lockdowns, through the power of Zoom, we enhanced connections with friends through a regular cadence of virtual happy hours and long phone conversations.

It’s true that 2020 wasn’t the year we had planned or expected. But it also, at least for us, wasn’t so bad.

The food supplies held up. We drank some amazing wine and whiskey. We sat on our deck in the summer and looked at the mountain and sat by the fire in the winter talking of life and dreams and what the future holds. We took naps in the afternoon and never had to get in a car to commute to our jobs. We hiked, Elsa worked out every day, and for the most part, we were pretty healthy. We missed seeing people and hugging people and seeing smiles. We missed traveling abroad (but not as much as we thought).  For us the hardest part of the year was just not being able to visit people in person, not being able to host gatherings of friends in our home.  This was a year, perhaps, of realizing the things that we had taken for granted (grocery store clerks, hospital workers, clean air, the ability to visit people) were critical to our health and happiness. This was a year when hugs became precious and take-out food became a calculated luxury.

Which brings us to the beginning of 2021. I wonder if there previously existed a time in history when all of humanity was united in looking forward to a new year as much as this one. It arrives as every new year does with glistening promise and endless possibilities. Three hundred and sixty-five days from now, we’ll know whether our anticipation was well founded. But for now, we can dream of all the things we want to do, the places we want to visit, the people we want to hug, and the dining experiences we will once again celebrate. This new year will doubtless bring new challenges and unforeseen losses, but hopefully we can reconnect in person and hold each other just a little tighter, having discovered the happiness of being together again, an activity made precious by this long COVID season of darkness.

So with optimism, we say, “we look forward to seeing you in 2021!”

Love,

Eric and Elsa