I didn’t realize what effect the pandemic had on me until today, when it dawned on me that I had not spoken to my friend George since it started.  Nobody wanted a visitor, even with a mask, and at six feet distance.  But that’s not the whole of it; everything was just different.

That I had been a terrible friend did make me feel regrets.  What have I done in the past for situations like this?  I never had a situation like this; we always got together eventually.  It is a good thing to believe that a kind God rules the circumstances of our lives.

Not that this lets us off the hook.  But it helps us deal with something new and part of a planned out drama, with doom and chaos safely averted.  I still like to live, even though I may not handle it competently at all times.

Sometimes when I barely brush the screen, the picture changes, and other times I can pound it with my thumb and nothing happens.  The phone is a gift of my son, to help me get rides from Uber when the trip is more than I can handle or Loretta has the car.  I am eternally grateful for his intention.  But hey, Steve Jobs invented this gadget?  I don’t have $500 for something like that.

It doesn’t even come with an instruction booklet.  I know, there are people who use it and who learned by themselves.  But I don’t have time like that to play with it.  It proposes to do all kinds of things that I don’t want when I’m trying to make a phone call.  Isn’t a phone call its primary function?

I think Steve Jobs wanted to humble guys like me.  We made him feel belittled with our quotes from literature and the Bible.  He didn’t know he was working in an environment created by us.  He would never have gotten anywhere if someone hadn’t taught him to read.

Yesterday we commemorated the 103^rd anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima.  It was predicted by three children, the oldest no more than ten, to prove they had seen the Virgin Mother at Fatima.  It   happened on Oct. 13, the same day the Russian Revolutionaries met in Moscow.

One of the predictions was that until the faithful turned to prayer, atheistic Communism would rule the world.  It did.  We foresee the ascent of ideologies just as bad, and that was why we met during this pandemic.  The prayer of choice was the rosary.

Jesus warned about repetitive prayer, but since the rosary on a mature level is meditation, with the prayer acting as a mantra, we humble human beings continue to say it.  According to the Blessed Mother at Fatima, heaven not only puts up with it, she encourages it.

I love the Mediterranean diet, especially the Italian one.  Of course, in my lifetime I’ve gotten used to several, thank God, and never to the starvation diet common in other parts of the world.  There was the Swiss diet, (somewhat Teutonic), and the American, so plentiful.  There are vegetables galore in all of them, and I stayed healthy.

I though being Swiss right back to Caesar’s time would make me immune to the bad effects of too much cheese.  Wrong.  I needed a quadruple coronary by-pass operation in 2013.  Now I’m on the By-pass diet, which is adequate but less fun.  Hey, what do I want, heaven on earth?

I just made a Swiss plum pie, the kind they sell in the Jungfrau Joch, in the restaurant above the timber line.  I accidentally had thrown out the recipe, so I improvised from the American Joy of Cooking book.  I made the custard from memory.  The taste tells me I’m still an amateur.

There is an ice cream house in the center of Mattituck (I love going out to the North Fork of Long Island) called the Magic House, and I always order two scoops of Black Cherry Chocolate Bourbon.  Can you beat that for a title?  It’s the little things in life that make it so worthwhile.  I don’t know how they get that bourbon flavor into an ice cream, but it would be too expensive if it were real bourbon.

Yes, the little things, like the smile on a four-year-old or a seventy-year old.  The young one never tasted strawberry ice cream before, and the older one recalls her first taste of whiskey.  That was terrible stuff, right?  I made sure when my sons asked for a taste of hard liquor at about nine years of age I gave it to them, (much to the upset of their mother) because they never asked for it again.  It’s not made for young taste buds.

Of course, we skirt damnation often in life, as we pray to avoid, and surviving to adulthood is an accomplishment.  We never think of it that way, but we miss so much of what we’ve really done.  Done with the help of God, of course.