I miss Tommy. I especially feel his absence in December given the marathon of activity that accompanied our holiday season in our years together. Thanksgiving with my family in Seattle from which he would need to depart early in order to prepare dozens and dozens of wigs for the huge cast of Red Mountain Theatre Company’s Holiday Spectacular. Then on to getting the kids of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham ready for their pageant – he produced, directed, musical directed, costumed and I ran around with duct tape, safety pins, and hot glue keeping everything together. (It was a real challenge the year we were having the house painted in December and we were busy assembling everything in a rather cramped extended stay hotel room). Then he moved on to Opera Birmingham’s holiday concert – Sounds of the Season where he did the setting, coordinated the production logistics, ran the box office, and put together the patrons’ buffet. I was usually in a holiday show of some sort with its tech week and performance schedule (there was one memorable year where I drove across town between the matinee and evening shows of A Christmas Carol in order to help him with the tech/dress of the children’s pageant). One or the other or perhaps both of us would sing The Messiah with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. Then it was on to Christmas itself – Christmas Eve service at church (more children’s music and adult choir performance) forllowed by formal sit down dinner for his family which he cooked from scratch. Somewhere in there I had to get the house fully decorated and all the trees up. Christmas Day was usually low key and then it was balls to the wall to get everything ready for our holiday open house for our friends, traditionally the Sunday after Christmas and one of the must do events for Theatrical Birmingham. Again, Tommy made all the food from scratch while I had to rearrange the house for two hundred guests. And people wonder why we rarely went out for New Year’s Eve. We were pretty much passed out at that point.
The holidays are far less hectic these days. I’m appearing in Miracle on 34th Street for Encore Theatre this next week but other than that, the schedule is relatively empty and very quiet for me the weeks of Christmas and New Year. I’m not traveling as I have to take time off in January for various reasons. I have vague ideas of sitting around reading trashy novels and catching up on Netflix for a few days. I’m sure I’ll find something to fill my time. Maybe I’ll put up all my Christmas decorations. I did very little of that last year. I even had a little time to read some poetry for Birmingham’s Krampuslauf. I wore a holiday variant on my plague doctor outfit.
As I’m not overscheduled to the nth degree, I’ve had the chance to attend some of our holiday traditions that rolled around again this year in a non-participatory mode. The UU Church Children’s pageant was this morning. When I looked at the Christmas tree in the sanctuary, I realized that the prop presents under the tree were ones Tommy had made for some pageant years ago. This afternoon, I went to the opera’s Sounds of the Season. Same thing. There were various pieces of the setting that I recognized as having been devised by Tommy for a previous edition, including a couple of prop presents. Tommy continues to live on. Tommy loved certain aspects of Christmas – the food, the music, the decorations, the fellowhip. He absolutely hated gifts and gift giving. How ironic that it’s his prop presents that survive. Someday they will rip or fade and be replaced by something new but this year, at least, they were unexpected reminders of a life that used to be mine.
Per usual, there is a great deal I could say about modern politics and the current administration. I am choosing, at the moment, to avoid thinking too much about it for my personal mental health. I’m not depressed but I could probably nudge myself that direction if I spend too much time railing against things over which I have no power. I’m going to have to let a number of things based in domestic and foreign policy slide and care for themselves. I will, however, make note of a few things that have bearing on my life as people have asked about them.
The first is the announcement that the VA is going to cut 35,000 staff jobs (including doctors and nurses) on top of the 30,000 cut this past year. To put this in perspective, the VA employs about 470,000 people nationwide and there was a push in 2023 to hire 30,000 new staff to gear up for the needs of an aging population and to assist with the new directives allowing veterans to use VA benefits to seek care outside of the system in the community. So that first cut basically clawed back the increase under Biden and the second cut represents about 7.5% of the workforce, It’s mainly going to happen by not filling vacancies rather than firing staff but it’s not going to make my life any easier. The VA program I work for, Home Based Primary Care, brings fairly complete multidisciplinary primary care clinic services to the veteran’s home if he or she cannot easily access a VA medical clinic. Our goal has been to expand the program so that all veterans in the Birmingham VA catchment area of North-Central Alabama can enroll no matter where they live. We’re close to attaining it – we don’t have coverage in the far Northwest corner around Florence or on the Georgia border to the East. Two more teams would allow us to finish it out but with this latest announcement, that’s not going to happen. We also have a number of team members of retirement age (including yours truly) and it’s going to be very difficult to hire replacements over the next few years when the time comes. Services in general will be harder and harder to come by and weight times will be longer. But that’s been happening throughout the medical system over the last couple of years as there is a collision of an aging population, the changes wrought by the pandemic, and my whole generation of providers stampeding for the exit. Almost none of the specialists I’ve referred to for decades remains.
There also appears to be mass chaos within the health infrastructure of HHS given the caliber of individual elevated to positions of power. This is causing incredible stress to the research arms of academic health centers. As these institutions have been designed over the last eighty years or so to be knowledge factories, significant interference with the funds flow which allows this mission to be completed has led to everything being a bit off kilter. UAB seems to be weathering the storm at the moment but there are signs everywhere of fiscal retrenching and money not being available to hire support staff or upgrade facilities. What is all of this doing to the average American? There is no real health expertise or guidance working with congress on the issue of the spiking healthcare premiums caused by the Big Beautiful Bill and what this will do to both the health of citizens and the health care sector of the economy. We have major outbreaks of eradicated diseases such as measles. There is a coordinated attack on science and reason for political ends happening throughout the government. Can’t have facts that might contradict political narratives getting in the way.
Meanwhile, the Baby Boom enters its eighties in two weeks, there is no policy in place to deal with the very real problems this is going to represent to society and this particular Cassandra is packing up his megaphone and looking for other ways to expend energy. Thirty five years is enough time to have spent on that crusade.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 