Day 341…
Among other things, St. Valentine is also, fittingly, one of the patron saints of plagues.
There are three saints in the Catholic Encyclopedia that share February 14 as a feast day: one in Africa and two in Italy. Nothing much is known about the guy in Africa, and it is possible that the two in Italy may actually be competing versions of the same person.
The two Italian Valentines share the same basic story. While under imprisonment for preaching Christianity, their captors told them that if they could cure their family member or members of what ailed them - blindness, or what have you - that they would then, themselves, convert. The Valentines, of course, made with the healing, and the captors did, indeed, then convert and free them. Later on, not being able to keep their mouths shut, the Valentines continued to proselytize got caught by somebody else and were both put to death in gruesome ways. Relics from one or the other are scattered throughout Europe.
It is thought that Valentine may have been a physician, what with the curing and all, so, after sainthood, he started to be called upon whenever a plague descended upon a community.
Much later, probably with Geoffrey Chaucer, St. Valentine started being associated with courtly love. That then led to the exchanging of valentines and our custom of giving our beloveds roses and chocolates which gave shopkeepers something to pin a few sales on in the depth of winter.
Shakespeare mentions him. Ophelia, having been abandoned, sings a little song about his feast day in Hamlet.
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed.
The superstition was that if you were the first person that someone saw on Valentine’s Day that that person would fall in love with you. The maid, or, in other words, the virgin, having been espied, would go into her beloved’s chamber and once in, her virginity, haven been taken, would never come out.
Having been used and abandoned, Valentine’s Day for Ophelia becomes the opposite of a day meant for celebration.
This year, maybe more so than any other year, many people must have had a rough day of it. The isolation and separation that we are all feeling just seems more pronounced on a day when everyone is posting pictures of their family and loved ones.
Lysander, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Too much of anything, be it separation or togetherness is not necessarily a good thing. Maybe I should speak for myself, but most years, we probably find ourselves moving from one state to another, trying to land on that sweet spot in the middle. This year, of course, we are pretty much stuck in just one of those conditions. We have to figure out other ways to achieve a balance.
The impeachment trial already seems like something from the distant past.
There was a flurry of activity before the inevitable end, when wanting to get the testimony from Republican Senator Jaime Herrera Beutler from Washington, Democrats asked to be able to call her as a witness. She had overheard a heated call between the ex-President and the House Minority Leader that the Dems felt further contributed to the ex-President’s guilt.
The Republicans said that if that happened that they would call 300 witnesses in response and stretch the trial out for months. There are also reports that they threated to filibuster anything and everything that the Democrats might try to legislate before the midterm elections.
In the end, both sides agreed that Senator Beutler’s testimony could be included in the final record and that no witnesses would actually be called by either side.
At the trial’s conclusion, which happened surprisingly quickly, 57 Senators, including 7 Republicans voted to convict and 43 voted to acquit. Even though it was the largest percentage of the chamber to ever historically vote for impeachment, it was not enough to carry it and the ex-President was acquitted.
Immediately afterwards, the Senate Minority Leader, who had just voted against impeachment, made a speech excoriating the ex-President.
It was a rather desperate political move. He is trying to walk a tightrope between mollifying the GOP’s base while at the same time trying to separate the GOP from the ex-President. In his speech, he pushed his opinion that the ex-President should now be tried in a court of law. In other words, he thinks the guy’s guilty but didn’t have the courage to stand up and say so himself.
The supporters of the ex-President have seen their beloved leader exonerated. That’s all that matters to them. He can continue to fight for them.
43 Republican Senators have sent a clear message that, no matter what, they will stand by the ex-President. They have made sure that he and his supporters will be a permanent part of the GOP moving forward. To that end, the 7 Senators who voted against him are now all facing censure from their state GOP parties.
The GOP had their opportunity to move forward without him, and they chose not to take it. Whatever happens moving forward is firmly on them. Bed made, time for them to lay in it.
In the long run, though, calling witnesses to add to an already overwhelming body of evidence would probably not have changed the outcome at all. Those 43 Senators had made up their minds long before they entered the Senate chamber. Those Senators would have proclaimed him innocent regardless of how many people offered evidence that he wasn’t. An endless stream of witnesses from the defense would only have muddied the waters. Better the waters remain clear and clean for future historians to look back upon and shake their heads in disbelief.
While the effects of the acquittal will be felt by all of us for decades to come, the trial itself is now over and the actual business of the running the country can now continue unimpeded.
This morning, I was able to schedule an appointment to get my first dose of the vaccine. It’s not until April 2 and it’s over four hours away upstate in Syracuse, New York, but it’s a start. I could use the roadtrip.
Monitoring and refreshing vaccine scheduling websites has become a blood sport. Thank you to my friends who have sent me links.
While there are massively huge inoculation sites set up all over the state, there is not enough supply of the vaccine to make them useful. Here in Manhattan, the Javits Convention Center has been organized to look much like the customs hall at JFK. Endless stanchioned paths wend their way back and forth through the gigantic open space to private screened off areas where the shots are administered. There are only a handful of people there, though. Not nearly enough to warrant the massive array of barriers.
A couple of days ago, President Biden announced that we would be buying an additional 200 million doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna by the end of July. This will go a long way towards ensuring that the majority of Americans be inoculated by the middle of summer.
Besides starting to be on vaccination websites, nothing much was new for me this weekend. Yesterday, I walked all the way downtown, deep into the Lower East Side and then eventually over the Brooklyn Bridge and into Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).
Where I live on the Upper West Side, the population tends to be older. Downtown on the East Side, however, it is trendier and full of much younger people. There is far less social distancing going on in restaurants down there than there is up here. Certainly, up here there is still the occasional bar or restaurant that you can look in on from the street and it feels like you are looking at 2019 inside it, but that is relatively rare. Not so downtown. Downtown, packed restaurants and bars seem to be more the norm than the exception.
The vaccine does not mean that the pandemic is over. It just means that we are being provided with a better weapon to fight it. We are going to need to remain vigilant for many years to come.
What that future existence will look like is anybody’s guess. We should call upon St. Valentine to intercede now that his feast day duties are behind him for another year.
Michael is filming an audition in the living room today, so rather than sitting on the couch, I am in the bedroom.
It’s cold and quiet in here. It’s alternatively tempting and horrifying to consider staying in bed all day. I am leaning towards the latter at the moment, so I am going to get up and take a shower and vacate the premises until the shoot is over.
Snow is on the way again. It is just warm enough that it might end up being more of a freezing rain that will cover everything with a slick layer of ice. That I won’t be able to walk in, so I better go while the going is good.
We had a nice day yesterday. We bought chocolate for each other.
It might not seem like it, but we are making some progress towards beating back this pandemic to where some semblance of our normal lives can resume.
Now is the point where we just want it to be over. It’s at this point that we start thinking about doing stupid things.
Don’t. Stay safe. Wear a mask and keep your distance.
It’s not over yet, but we are getting there.
❤️....you were in Brooklyn?..... yes, continue to stay safe, wear a mask and practice social distancing....a gift of love these days beginning with ourselves