July 2020
**Business and the view from here**
I hope this email finds you well. Here, the gallery is open, but we are strict about wearing masks and social distancing. There is always a number on the door to call, and I am just across the street. If you are visiting the area, and would like to stop by please call or email me. COVID 19 is here. I personally know five people who have it. We went from 1 to 142 cases since my last email. Big Bend Regional Hospital is not staffed or equipped to handle severe cases and they were being sent to Odessa. Odessa is not accepting those patients any longer. Brewster County is one of the riskiest counties in Texas for COVID right now. We are very vulnerable. Please adhere to social distance and masks to protect us. Big Bend National Park is closed once again.
Marci has cancelled the M2M for 2020. Here is her announcement sent to racers and Facebook.
“With a heavy heart and a lot of thought, I am cancelling M2M 2020. I am one to push through adversity, but pushing through this puts the health of my community and my racers at risk. M2M is so much more than a race. It is about helping each other and I just don’t see how having M2M 2020 would adhere to that same spirit. I am looking forward to better times in 2021. I hope you all stay healthy and safe.
**M2M – October 23, 2021**
For those of you who had reservations in Marathon, please consider transferring them to 2021 so our local businesses won’t have further financial hardships.
All the best,
Marci”
**A touchy feely guy after Me Too and Covid 19**
My mother’s birthday is July 4th. I can never look at fireworks without thinking of her. She would have been 89 yesterday. But she was never going to live that long. She died at 70. She was diabetic, a constant smoker, and didn’t take very good care of herself. When I looked back at all my images of her. I think there were two where she didn’t have a cigarette in her hand. One because she was holding her dog, and the other a bouquet of flowers at her third wedding. She was a hard headed woman from Italian descent, short fused and quick tempered, easy to raise her voice over the simplest of things. She had a warped sense of humor, and it could be difficult to understand how she could laugh in some certain situations. She didn’t suffer fools, she liked a good joke, distasteful or not.
She raised three boys on her own after she left my father who wasn’t with her at the hospital when their 4th child was stillborn. I guess that sums up the relationship. She moved us back to Philadelphia, where she was born, and we lived there and in South Jersey until I left in 1980. My mom worked very hard to raise us up. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I learned very early that I needed to earn money on my own, if I wanted anything. I had paper routes from when I was 12 till I started driving. My route was in the “projects” and most of my clients were retired women whose mates were gone. I loved those old women. They never tipped. The paper itself a luxury at 42 cents a week.
What my mom didn’t give me in piano lessons, more than one pair of shoes, or material things, she gave in love and sweet affection. I always knew I was loved. She was demonstrative that way. She gave me confidence too. She instilled that you can be anything you want, if you are willing to do the work. She adored us all. We never watched TV without one of us being in her
arms, being petted or rubbed. She was touchy feely. I have a lot of those qualities myself.
When I first moved to Texas, I went out for a drink with a friend and his sister. As we were walking in the bar she pinched my butt. No woman ever did that to me before, and I thought it must be a Texas thing, like y’all and bar b que. For years after that I pinched girl’s butts, until someone called me on it. I swear I had no clue.
Growing up like I did, hugging and expressing love for people very easily, you can’t imagine how hard it is for a guy like me in this current world. After the Me Too movement, I really had to learn to not hug a person. That they actually might be offended by it, or see it as an advance.
Marci always tells me I don’t understand boundaries. Now with this current pandemic, where it is a mandatory distance, and you have to wear a mask I feel like a flower with no water.
I wish I could hold and be held by my Mom. She would know exactly what to do.
Thank you for all your support and love during these strangest of times.
Happy Full Moon. Get outside.