I have a rare night off from rehearsal. I’m starting to feel pretty good about Seven Santas. The monologue is solid and the lines for the big complicated scene are mostly coming out where and when they are supposed to. We have one more week before a paying audience so I can relax a bit. I find that if I run my part in my head when I first wake up in the morning and again at least once during the day, it serves to keep it sitting in the part of the brain where I can access it appropriately. I just have to make a couple of simple props tomorrow sometime and then I think all the other pieces are in place. My five pound tin of Danish butter cookies came in. No, I’m not eating them all at once but I do have to eat about a dozen each run. This show may cause me to put my Covid weight back on.

Speaking of Covid, as we all know, it has not yet gone away. I haven’t looked at the numbers for a bit as they are no longer gathered and parsed in an easily digestible format as they were during the pandemic emergency. From what I have been able to find, there are a couple of things going on. First, ER visits and hospitalizations have gone up about 10% this past week over where they were. It’s probably due to the change in weather and behavior that accompanies as we enter the traditional cold and flu season. It’s a bit early for Thanksgiving travel to have had much of an impact. Covid numbers are way up in Nursing Homes, likely due to the reduction in precautions and the weakened immune systems of those who reside there. As far as mortality, for the month of November, Covid was responsible for about 2.5% of deaths. This is way down from peak pandemic numbers but still alarmingly high.

The current rapidly spreading variant is known as BA 2.86. It’s still from the omicron lineage. There hasn’t been a major shift requiring a new Greek letter for a couple of years now. It has the same general profile in terms of infectivity and symptoms. It’s numbers, however, are accelerating rapidly in wastewater sampling and other epidemiological measures, having tripled in prevalence over the last few weeks, suggesting it’s pretty good at out competing earlier omicron strains. The recent booster, which was formulated against the later omicron variants out there, appears to be covering it and other currently circulating variants relatively well so it remains a good idea to stay current on vaccinations.

The thing that’s really spreading at the moment is RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). Pediatric hospitals are inundated nationwide. It’s quite a nasty disease in young children. In most adults, it’s a bad chest cold (unless you have serious underlying immune issues or pulmonary disease). This is the first fall in four years that the majority of the population has been living in relatively normal patterns. This means we have four years worth of young children who were not exposed to most circulating viruses as we tried to keep them free of Covid who are now running into RSV and other such things and so a large population is getting them all at once. The good news is there is an RSV vaccine. If you’re a healthy adult, it won’t hurt you to get jabbed, but I don’t think you need to race out and get one. Most everyone I know has had the sniffles recently. It’s the same thing. You’re just running into what was always there and the viruses are making up for lost time in terms of spread. There are also a few running around locally that are causing some nasty diarrhea. Avoid those. Do you need to mask up? If you want but the most important thing you can do is keep those hands washed.

I try to read or (audio listen to) at least one literary classic every six months or so that I missed along the way. I also have a goal to make sure I read all of Dickens’ novels before I check out so my current car book is Martin Chuzzlewit. I knew the title, but really knew nothing about the book other than it was not one of his more successful novels from the height of his fame. And I’m wondering why more of us don’t read it. It’s really quite good and I am enjoying it a good deal more than some of his more famous titles. I assume the reason it is not as well thought of this side of the pond is due to it’s nasty satirical look at America and American society of the 1840s. The chapters involving young Martin’s adventures in New York, full of Dickensian side characters worshipping at the altars of land speculation and profit, are so incisive that they could be about our society of some 175 years later. Donald Trump would fit right into the story. He even has an appropriately Dickensian name. Next up for me is Ken Follett’s most recent sequel to The Pillars of the Earth taking fictional Kingsbridge up to the Industrial Revolution. I enjoy soapy historical fiction but I wish Ken would either learn how to write a sex scene or would just leave them out. His are painful to get through.

Today is my father’s 91st birthday. I had the good fortune to be able to see him in the flesh last week. He continues to do quite well for his age, stumping around independently with his stick and his scooter for longer distances. I hope I got some of the good pieces of his genome along with the bad British teeth genes that put me in the dentist chair far more often than I would like. Raise a glass and give him a toast this weekend. I know I shall.

It’s something after midnight, Birmingham time, and I’m sitting in the departure lounge of the Seattle airport waiting for my red eye flight back to Atlanta – at which point I get the wonderful job of driving for three hours on next to no sleep in order to get home. The combination of short staffing at work and a show in rehearsal have made leaving town for anything other than the briefest periods a tricky business so this particular Seattle trip was just a bit over 48 hours. It was long enough to catch up with the family, have Thanksgiving dinner with as many of the tribe as were in town, and get the holiday shopping done for everyone so that I could get it wrapped and leave it behind me and not have to worry about shipping it later. I have become the dotty old uncle that gives everyone a book. The younger generation are now fully adult and I’m not around enough to know their wants and needs and books have always held a place of high esteem in my family. I suppose in another five to ten years, the next generation will start to arrive and I can switch back to educational toys. I only have one hard and fast rule. I don’t provide anything that makes noise. I leave it to parents to make that mistake.

Tommy’s great nieces and nephews are still children but I don’t see them all that often so they get age appropriate books as well. Which means I have to sit down every year and try to remember their approximate ages so I’m not giving a copy of ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ to the fifteen year old. With them, I tend to go with classics that I enjoyed in my childhood or with those kids reference books full of facts that ten year olds love like the amount of poop the average elephant generates in a year. I don’t know that it will ever get me a nomination for great uncle of the year, but I probably have a better relationship than Scrooge and his nephew Fred pre ghostly visitations.

I did put some work in on my lines for Birmingham Festival Theatre’s production of Seven Santas which is slated to open on December 8th. I have the monologue more or less down. I know my lines for the scene work, but not firmly, and I probably won’t be able to fully get them into my body until we’re actually doing that very long and complicated scene on its feet, off book, every night this next week. I tend to polish my performances organically and I have to have the sound of others voices and my blocking and other people to react to in order for everything to fall into place the way it’s supposed to. Tickets are for sale on line for all six performances if you really want to hear me curse routinely and get violent with Mrs. Claus.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rather hopeless situation in the Middle East. The news has been appalling from all quarters and, unfortunately, people are oversimplifying matters and leaping to postures of virtue signaling without having any real understanding of what’s going on or why. I am no expert in Arab/Israeli relations but I have been around long enough to know that Hamas, which leads the Palestinians in Gaza, is a terrorist organization (their actions on October 7th certainly proved that if nothing else). On the other hand, Bibi Netanyahu’s governmental policies towards the Palestinians have also been outrageous for years. American Muslims are not responsible for Hamas and American Jews are not responsible for the depredations of settlement so the uptick in Antisemitism and Islamophobia are heinous and show how much we have abandoned critical thinking for Tik-Tok video propaganda. Whose side am I on? I am on the side of life, of the innocent who suffer on both sides for decisions they have no voice in, and I wish my Jewish and my Muslim friends nothing but peace.

A dear friend of mine and sometime writing partner wrote a musical many years ago called ‘Abraham’s Land’. In its initial conception, it was a fable in which an IDF soldier, Yitzak (Isaac) and a Palestinian student Ismail (Ishmael), end up swapping places and each of them learns important lessons about the other side. Over the years, she has rewritten and revised it and with each subsequent draft, as the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians has become more fraught, the material has become more complex and darker. It finally received a production a year or two ago (delayed by Covid) and I thought that she and her collaborators, Jewish and Palestinian alike, had succeeded in holding up a mirror to both the region and to our attitudes toward the conflicts creating a balanced look at all of the heartbreak. If Equity will allow it, it would be a good time to get the pro-shot Video of the show out there. Sometimes the arts are what we need to show us our true selves. Of course, the hyperpartisans on both sides would likely object to the humanization of the ‘enemy’ but isn’t the first role of religion welcoming the stranger and offering hospitality? It’s the first step in making a perceived enemy into a friend.

They’ve opened the boarding door. Time to get on the plane, wedge myself into my corner, and try to snooze for a bit so that I have some energy for unwritten progress notes and a rehearsal tomorrow.

Rosalynn Carter died today at the age of 96, shortly after entering hospice care. She is survived by her husband of 77 years, Jimmy. Given Jimmy’s 99 years and devotion to her, I won’t be in the least surprised if he boards his train in the very near future. I’ve learned a lot about humans in my thirty plus years in geriatrics and one of them is that elderly men who choose not to survive the death of their long time spouse often don’t. I was in high school during the Carter presidency. He wasn’t held in particularly high regard in the social circles of Seattle through which I moved as a teenager. He was somewhat naive as a politician on the national stage. But for decade after decade both halves of the couple have served as shining exemplars of humble service to humanity. I doubt we will ever see as good an ex-president again. The temptations of world wide celebrity and highly paid speaking tours and multi-million dollar book deals are just too great.

Jimmy was a World War II vet. There aren’t a lot of them left. To have been 17 in 1945, one must have been born in 1928 because math so in 2023, you turned 95. Given that life expectancy for men is mid 70s, the surviving World War II vets are the outliers. I have a few on my VA house call panel. You don’t get to be that age if you haven’t taken care of yourself and made good life choices so they tend to be healthier than my Vietnam era vets who often didn’t. We’re reaching the tipping point which happens for all historical epochs where World War II is passing from living adult human memory. In another decade or so there will only be child memories of the events left in some very aged people and then, another ten or so years later, there will be no living human memory left of the Anschluss, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, the Holocaust, Stalingrad or any of the other moments that seared public consciousness in the late 30s and early 40s of the last century.

This process, which has always happened, turning real memories of real events into history and myth and legend, will continue on throughout the 21st century as each of the tumultuous decades of the 20th century recedes further and further into the past. ‘Happy Days’, the TV series for young people of the 70s which was a nostalgic look at adolescence a couple of decades earlier, will have its 50th anniversary in a couple of months. The lead edge of the Baby Boom is just a couple of years shy of turning 80. It won’t be all that much longer until the Summer of Love and Woodstock fade out of living adult memory as well. And I suspect the Boom is going to rage, rage against the dying of the light. They remain trapped in their thinking of themselves as the younger generation. And they tend to internalize the outliers as norms. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to patients in their 70s and their normal symptoms of aging are not related to disease. They always have a story about someone ten or twenty years older than they who doesn’t have their issues and they’re upset as they think they are entitled to the same good fortune. They don’t seem to realize that these people they hear about, often through media reports, are extreme outliers and that’s why they generate media interest to begin with.

I just passed the half way point of my 62nd year this past week. And I can tell that I am not the same being either physically or cognitively that I was a couple of decades ago. I don’t fuss about it for the most part. There’s not a lot I can do about the aging process. Anyone who thinks that a geriatrician has some sort of elixir of youth needs a psychiatrist. I can’t fix my aging problems any more than I can fix those of my patients. What I can do is sort out the things that have helpful interventions from those that don’t. I also seem to spend a lot of time adjusting to my ever changing body and continually making new friends with it as it decides to pursue new and unusual patterns brought on by time. Geriatric medicine really boils down to a couple of essential principles. How to keep people on their feet without falling over, how to keep people from poisoning themselves with medications they may not need, and how to keep people eating and dealing appropriately with the waste products of metabolism. The general health system does very badly with most of these so we geriatricians have carved out a niche area which no one else really wants to fill.

My biggest aging challenge at the moment involved my memorization skills. I used to be able to memorize enormous amounts of information relatively quickly but that skill seems to have subsided some with age. I can still learn things but it takes longer and requires more perseverance on my part than it used to. The play I am currently rehearsing, Seven Santas, is a bit of a challenge. I have a monologue (not overly long and it’s coming – I can now do it with just my cheat sheet (first letter of each word) and without script but I’m not quite at the point of being able to it completely off book. (I have one more week). What’s defeating me is the 40 minute scene where are Seven Santas and Mrs. Claus are busy having knock down drag outs at one wild AA meeting and where I have a hundred lines and very few in the form of direct dialogue. Have one more week to get that down as well. There are a couple of cross country plane flights in there in which I can work on lines – if I can stay awake.

The third book is out and orderable. You can get it on Amazon or any of the big national retailers through their on line presence. But I always find it more fun to ask your local bookstore to order it for you. They can always then order a couple of extra copies for store display. I will do some signings in the next few months but not before the holidays. I’ve got too much going on. If you want me to sign copies for holiday gifts or other such things, I am happy to do it, just slide into my DMs or give me a call and we can make arrangements.

Three more work days before a couple of days off. And then twelve days before Seven Santas are unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

I am writing this in my usual position, propped up in bed with my laptop balanced on my lap. I hadn’t been able to do that for a few weeks as the tip of the power cord had broken off inside the socket and gotten firmly stuck there. It has now been repaired and my trusty laptop, on which I have written pretty much all of these musings, is back in service. It is now five and a half years old, about as long as a laptop lasts. I shall replace it next year sometime when I have a little extra money lying about. I need something with a bit more memory as more and more of the ephemera of my life becomes digitized and needs somewhere to repose until such time as I can sort it all. I keep threatening to do that but other things keep getting in the way.

Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of my first day of work at UAB. A quarter century. Coming up on a third of a century in geriatrics as a whole. (That date will be just a little less than a year from now 10/31/24 to be exact – which will be the 26th anniversary of the day Steve and I arrived in Birmingham to begin a new life). I always assumed my career in medicine would span about 40 years – that anniversary is either August of 2024 if we use the day I began medical school or June of 2028 if we use either the day I graduated from medical school or the day I began my residency. No matter how you slice and dice it, I’m looking towards the end game after a life time of saving the world, one patient at a time. Do I end with a bang or with a whimper? Do I continue to tilt at the windmills until, like Don Quixote, I drop in harness? Do I just get up from my desk one day, square my shoulders and walk off into a glorious technicolor sunset while the music swells in the background? I haven’t figured that part out.

I am keeping my head above water at work. It isn’t easy. On the UAB side, my nurse practitioner has departed and it will be some months before we can find and hire another one and I’ll have to cover more than usual in order to keep everything going the way that it should. On the VA side, the leader of our department for the last seven or so years is moving up the ladder and we are uncertain how that will shake itself out. The administration at the VA has been known to make some very odd decisions when it comes to organizing senior leadership and we’re all crossing our fingers that someone who knows nothing of the eldercare world is not installed at the top. My current plan is not to change anything appreciably in 2024 presuming life doesn’t throw me a curveball. Knowing my past history, that may be too much to ask for.

I had first read through on my next show today. It’s a scabrous holiday dark comedy by the same author who wrote the Reindeer Monologues. This one is called ‘Seven Santas’ and it has, for the first half, the same monologue format with different aspects of Santa filling the audience in on the more sordid details of the goings on at the North Pole and then, in the second half, there’s a significant battle of the wills between the various aspects of Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the whole thing becomes a demented twelve step meeting. It’s the sort of entertainment you need after one too many Hallmark Holiday movies with Lacey Chabert. It should be fun. There’s a couple of people in it with whom I have worked before but most of the cast is new to me and I always enjoy getting to know new folk in the theater community.

I’ve had a head cold the last couple of days (home Covid test negative) so I’ve been taking it easy this weekend and not doing a whole lot. I’ve been working on some PR for the book. (It’s available Wednesday but you can preorder on Amazon now if you so choose). There should be a couple of local signings and readings over the next few months. If you have contacts in easy to reach places like Atlanta or Nashville or Chattanooga or New Orleans or Memphis that would like a reading or signing, send them my way. Further afield and I’m happy to do it by zoom unless someone is willing to pick up the travel tab. Several people have suggested that I should concentrate on travel writing for my next project. If you can find someone who will fund the travel, I’ll be more than happy to send a daily stream of travel columns back to the source. I wonder if Conde Nast has an opening.

I am here through Christmas other than a very brief trip for Thanksgiving. Give me strength and memory capacity to learn my lines for this show. At least the next one is going to be easy…

It is finished. Today really needs to begin with a biblical quote. After three and a half years of writing, editing, agonizing, and anemic sales, I signed off on the final proof of the third and final volume of The Accidental Plague Diaries and told my publisher to flip the switches and send it out through the usual channels. It should be up on Amazon by the weekend and I’ll let everyone know when I spot it there. But is it really over and done? I have to get off my butt and see if I can gin up some interest and see if I can get some copies sold and make my publisher happy. I’ve never been good at PR and selling myself. I’ve always kind of hoped that if I do good work, people will notice but that’s really not how American culture works with its emphasis on hype and media attention. It’s no accident why we hear about some things and not others. There’s a multibillion dollar industry out there devoted to making sure we hear about whatever it is their clients wish us to. I’m not part of that landscape. I’m not sure I want to be. I decided a long time ago that I might not mind being famous for having done something of import but I’ve never had any desire to be a celebrity in the modern sense of the word. I prefer to do my grocery shopping without creating a mob scene.

Although the books are done, there are a few more things still to be considered. Putting out an e-book version for Kindle. Doing an audio version (and I would need to do the narration- the material is too personal for an objective voice). The man I sold my Forest Park house to is a professional audio book narrator. He converted Tommy’s wig studio into his workplace where he records audiobooks for a living. I might be able to get a deal on studio time. But I don’t know a thing about editing or distribution to Audible or other platforms. And there’s still the thought about turning some of the material into a Spalding Gray type theatrical monologue/one man show. I have a director who has expressed some interest in shaping the material. Now that I can breathe, I’ll take him to dinner and we can start discussing what would have to happen for that to take shape. Great – another monologue to learn. And one of about ninety or a hundred minutes rather than ten.

This weekend was about children. I got up Saturday morning and trudged out to one of the suburban high schools where I was a judge for the annual Trumbauer competition. It’s the state of Alabama’s annual competition for high school theater students in both performance and technical categories. There aren’t enough theater teachers in the state to act as judges for all the entrants so my theater teacher friends are always reaching out into the local theater community looking for adults with experience who will give up their day to judge. I try to do it every year unless I have something else going on that day I can’t get out of. I usually end up judging a musical theater performance category (although one year I was given classic dramatic monologues – lots of mangled Shakespeare). This year it was dramatic musical solos from the modern literature (1980-2016). The Disney shows were big. Lots of ‘Anastasia’. Lots of ‘Dreamgirls’. A few who didn’t understand the assignment and sang from ‘Godspell’ and ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’. There were some very talented kids. And some… not so talented. But we’re not supposed to say ‘Have you considered a career in construction?” But rather give them encouragement and constructive criticism and focus on what they are doing well. Sometime’s it tough when they’re singing a song from ‘The Hannah Montana Movie’ in a dialect where every word is unintelligible. I and my judging partner did our jobs, passed the worthy on to the state finals, and ate too many chocolate muffins.

I also got up Sunday morning (thank you time change), this time to make it to church and pinch hit in the elementary Sunday school class after service. I’m on the teaching roster but was supposed to be off this week but they were one short so I did my Good Samaritan turn for the week and showed up. (The lesson was actually on the parable of The Good Samaritan and its implications – at least for those 8-10 years old). I enjoy teaching Sunday school. It gives me kid time that’s strictly time limited. At 12:30 PM they are no longer my responsibility. We have a very strict rule at church regarding children. Any activity involving those under 18 must have a minimum of two unrelated adults present to prevent any sort of inappropriate behavior or allegations and we are all background checked. I think that’s pretty standard in Unitarian Universalist congregations and I’ve never heard of the grooming and predatory behavior that seems to happen with great regularity in more conservative denominations happening. This means we always team teach and I am usually paired with someone who has kids or a background in childhood education of some sort.

When I’m working with the kids, I try to remember how I was parented and bring some of those things forward. I encourage them to think through things. I tell them to look things up. I give them suggestions of things to read. They’re sponges at this age, very bright and often come up with some very insightful questions where I have to think a bit about how to answer them with concepts that they can understand. I often do that through storytelling (it makes me feel like a tribal elder). Some of them are from literature or myth. Some from my own experience but they can get the gist of what the concept is from the story and we talk about the meanings of such words as metaphor and allegory. I worry sometimes about what the congregation thinks of the sixty something year old gay man working with kids but I’ve been around so long, they’re used to me and know I’m pretty harmless. One of them asked me yesterday how old I was so I told them. They were surprised. They had decided I was in my late 40s. I was gratified. At least they’re seeing me as a parent figure rather than as a grandparent figure.

I’ve been told I’ve been cast in a holiday show so that will give me something theatrical the next couple of months and I know already what I’m doing in January/February and in April so the season is pretty full. Further details as I know them. Will the books being done leave a hole that needs filling in life? I don’t know. I’ll have to see how it feels over the next couple of months. If anyone wants to introduce me to a literary agent, that person might point me towards something that may sell. I don’t want to get rich but it would be nice to know that people enjoy what you labor over.

Tommy’s father passed away in the early hours of Halloween morning. It was unexpected, as he had not been particularly ill recently, but not a shock as he had not been in good health for some years and was well into his 80s. He was very much an Alabama country boy, from a coal mining Walker county family. He loved his cars, and was an expert restorer of classic models, working with his hands, and his family. I first met him when Tommy was moving out of his previous domicile and back to his parent’s house before he moved in with me some months later. We were dating at the time, but hadn’t yet become serious. Louie Tommy Sr., or LT eyed me a bit suspiciously at first but started to warm up when he found out I was a doctor. It was the beginning of a relationship of mutual respect. He respected me for my accomplishments. I respected him for his integrity and for having sired and raised Tommy.

To this day, I have no idea of how Tommy with his love of music, performance, visual art, cooking, and understanding of systems – human and otherwise, emerged from his family of origin. His family had moved down the hill from Walker county to Forestdale where Tommy grew up and went to Minor high school. As the family were Church of Christ, his coming out as a young gay man in his early 20s sent shock waves through his parents that took some time to heal but people were getting along relatively well by the time I came along some fifteen years later. I guess his parents figured out that I was the type to be in it for the long haul and would be able to support him in his various enthusiasms. His father never did quite figure out what choral music and opera and theater were all about but he would dutifully show up when asked and seemed to enjoy himself. He and Tommy just happened to be two completely different types of people, despite sharing the Sr./Jr. name.

I learned how to interpret LT’s jokes, how to bounce them right back at him. How to make him feel important and how to help him not feel steamrollered by the sometimes forceful personality of Tommy’s mother. Ultimately, I ended up getting along better with Tommy’s parents than he did and have continued in the family circle even after his death for holidays and family dinners. I’m going to miss the old guy but know he was ready to go as his health conditions were precluding his being able to get out in his garage and tinker with the eight or nine cars he had out there in various stages of restoration. Tommy’s brother is going to have to figure out what happens next in that department.

There is a family visitation tomorrow. I shall go to honor and pay respects. It’s going to be a bit rough for me, going back to that same Jasper funeral home for a family gathering in a time of sorrow that I had to go to five and a half years ago after Tommy’s sudden and unexpected passing. He will be laid to rest in the family plot in Parrish where Tommy lies. I shall not lie there when it is my turn. I don’t want to be buried. Feed me to the flames and transform me into ash and wind and water vapor. If someone wants to come along and scatter a bit of me there and a bit of me with Steve in the Ania-Borrego desert, that would be OK. Perhaps there will be a third husband who will require more of me still. I’m not holding my breath.

Rest well LT. See you on the other side.

I’ve been back for a week and you think life would be balancing itself out again, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. First off, this was rehearsal week for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra chorus. This weekend’s Masterworks concert included the Faure Requiem. It’s not a difficult sing and, with the ASO chorus, the Samford University Chorus and the UAB Chorus all in the choral balcony at Jemison concert hall, my puny contributions weren’t going to amount to much at either sotto voce or full throttle. Two hundred voices is about as big as we get and when that many people belt out Dies Irae at fortissimo, it will make your hackles go up the way they should. I’ve now sung most of the big orchestral/choral Requiems. The one I’m missing is the Britten War Requiem which I imagine they’ll program some time in the next couple of years while I’m still an active singer. It did occupy every weeknight this past week on top of trying to catch up at work which made for some long days.

I am pretty much caught up at work. It took some doing on the VA side as I had several days of not being able to connect properly to the computer system from my home office. We all still have to work from home as they still have not completed the repairs to our building from the flood of several months ago. The rumor is that we will be back in place the second week of November but I learned long ago to distrust rumors in health care settings, especially when federal agencies are involved. I’ll be back at my desk when I’m back. I can’t say I particularly mind working from home as it’s only the paperwork part that has to be done here. My field visits continue as normal. The computer glitches did put me behind a couple of days but I think they’ve all been worked out. The magic solution was to carry my laptop into a VA facility and let it connect directly to their wi-fi. Apparently some needed patch or update sprang out of the ether and into its little electronic brain which could not be transmitted across my home network.

Reintroduction to UAB work life was a little smoother but it didn’t take long for the various pieces of the system to figure out I was back in the saddle and the inboxes, physical and electronic started to fill at a rapid pace. On line portal communication with ones provider, now an industry standard, is a mixed blessing. It really wasn’t used that much prior to the pandemic. The pandemic shifted everyone’s ability to visit healthcare in person and set up a reliance in patients on electronic communications systems – the ease with which this works from the patient end has changed behavior. In the past, patients and families would save up all their questions and concerns for the next appointment and they would come in and we would run their list. Most of the things on their list were usually not particularly worrisome but until there was the imprimatur of the doctor on the answer, it would be a concern. Now, as a question occurs, they fire off a portal message. I sometimes get three or four a week from the same household. Each one must be read triaged and. If it cannot be handled by staff through protocol, sent to me. I read them all – call sometimes, write answers (as succinctly as possible) sometimes, or give instructions to staff how to answer sometimes. It takes a while. The trouble is that most people seem to think that when they hit ‘send’, the message is downloaded into my brain automatically and that they should receive an instantaneous reply. And they send repeated messages when they don’t hear back right away. I will answer, but I may be busy with other patients, out in the field with the VA, or taking a bathroom break and will get to it when I get to it – which is often late in the day. As a tech savvier generation continues to age, this is only going to become more voluminous.

I have no artistic obligations set the next few weeks. This means I can finish reviewing the proof copy of Volume III of The Accidental Plague Diaries so we can announce a publication date. I’ll be glad that the project is done but in some ways, the writing of the books seems easier than the selling of the books. My publisher wants to see if we can move a few, now that the pandemic is starting to be visible in the rear view mirror of societal consciousness and we can read and think about it with less of an immediate negative emotional response. So, if any of you have connections in the book/literary world and want me to do a podcast, book discussion with a book club, interview, signing event, or anything else of the type, slip into my DMs as the kids say. Still don’t know what comes next.

Trying to track what’s happening with Covid in real time has become more and more difficult as fewer and fewer media outlets of any stripe are providing any coverage. I’m glad we all feel that the long nightmare is behind us but I remain unconvinced that we’ve heard the last of Covid. It continues to develop new variants. For the last couple of years, they’ve all been subspecies of omicron but that could change. The most recent variant, HV.1, is spreading rapidly as detected by wastewater surveillance. It doesn’t seem to be causing more virulent disease than other omicrons but every time a new variant emerges, the gods roll the dice and humanity will eventually fail its saving throw. The issue with HV.1 is that it seems to be pretty nimble at evading vaccination immunity from the older immunizations and boosters. The current booster, which became available in late September, seems to do pretty well against it but only about 3.5% of the US population that could benefit from it has gotten it. The expiration of the emergency has thrown back manufacture and distribution on the usual systems without governmental interference and they seem to be working as well as everything else in the health system. If we get a variant that causes really serious issues, we may only have weeks to get an updated vaccine in place and the politicization of immunizations will almost certainly prevent that from happening in our current political climate. People will get sick and die who need not. It’s all very depressing when I think about it too much.

Dateline – Berlin, Germany –

And so another adventure draws to its inevitable conclusion. Just when I’ve adjusted to the schedule and the time zones. One of these days I will be retired and can take more than two weeks or so but that day is not yet. I technically have one more day but as that is again devoted to three flights, four airports and 24 hours of discomfort beginning at 2:30 am local time when I have to have my luggage ready for the bellman so that I can be picked up at 3 AM for my 6 am flight which is the first stage of the long journey home. I should be home late Saturday evening Birmingham time giving me a day to sleep and adjust before hitting the ground running on Monday morning with all of my usual. I’ve decided, as I have to be up in four hours anyway, that I’m not really going to bed tonight. Hopefully that will allow me to sleep some on the transatlantic flight and give me a bit of a head start in terms of adjusting.

The weather remained rotten today. Cold and wet and gray with that damp chill in the air that makes it seem much colder than it actually is. After breakfast, and some more puzzling through Aida and still not understanding some of the more outre directorial and design concepts, it was time for a tour of World War II and Cold War Berlin. As noted yesterday, the city seems to be trying to remove all vestiges of the Cold War as rapidly as possible but there is still one portion of the wall preserved which we saw (not as big and imposing as I had believed it to be but then again there’s no no man’s land around it these days). Other stops included the museum of German resistance, housed in the building in which Stuffenberg planned his Valkyrie plot (and in whose courtyard he was executed), the site of the former SS headquarters (destroyed in the war and not rebuilt and now home to a museum about the excesses of the SS, SA and Gestapo called Topography of Terror, the old Tempelhof airport due to its importance with both the Nazis and the Berlin airlift, and the site of Hitler’s bunker, now a ramshackle parking lot. What is it with autocrats ending up under car parks? Hitler, Richard III. I suppose they’ll discover Julius Caesar under a parking structure off the Palatine next.

The afternoon was unstructured. I started with a walk in the Tiergarten (cut short as it was just too danged cold), a trip to the art museum to see some of the painting collections, and then a nap before dinner. Dinner, as it is the last night, was a highlight. We were bussed to the Reichstag (not really necessary as it was all of about half a km away but when you have a number of guests in their 80s, I can see why they do it). Into the building, after passing through security (all too necessary for symbolic public buildings these days) and then up the elevator to the roof. When the building was rebuilt after reunification (having been mainly a ruin since the infamous fire in 1933), most of the original facades were kept. The original dome, was not salvageable and there was discussion of reconstructing a fascimile of the original or doing something new that evoked the past. This is the idea that won out and the new dome is an engineering and architectural marvel made of glass and steel, open in some ways to the elements, funneling natural light into the parliament chamber through mirrors, and easily toured through a helical system of ramps on the inside. Spiraling up to the top and then down again for the views and then to dinner in the restaurant on the roof of the Reichstag. (Dinner at the Reichstag was not on my life goals bingo card but I can now say I’ve done it). Four course meal with multiple wines. Most of the food was very good other than than a second course of gnocchi with pumpkin that was definitely overcooked. I ate it anyway.

Berlin has made me want to breathe life back into Politically Incorrect Cabaret. It’s 20th birthday is this coming April and maybe we should do an anniversary show of some sort. If it’s going to continue, however, it needs some new blood. The original cast of zanies has aged into middle age and beyond and a few of the key folk have departed to the next realm as well. It needs to be handed over to some energetic folk in their 20s and 30s with an interest in street theater and satire and improv and Berlin Kabarett forms. If we were to do a 20th anniversary edition, I would love to construct it as a passing of the baton to a new generation. If anyone knows some Gen Z type that would be interested in continuing this type of work, send them my way.

This is more or less the end of this particular travelogue. There will be more but I don’t see myself doing anything terribly exotic travel wise for about a year. I’ve got a book to get out, a play, a musical, an opera, and a couple of symphony concerts between now and the spring and maybe even a couple of other surprises which I’m remaining mum about until things become firmer. So there should be something to write about. See y’all on the other side of the pond, If you don’t, all I can say is that there will be several Birmingham cultural institutions who will find themselves with improved cash flow.

Dateline – Berlin, Germany –

Today is Lotte Lenya’s 125th birthday so how apropos that I spend it in Berlin, considering my long association with Brecht, Weill, Berlin Kabarett forms, and other artistic expressions of the Weimar Republic. I will admit to humming some of Pirate Jenny at breakfast. The waitstaff were mystified. But then they all looked like they were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

After breakfast, it was out into a cold, dreary day with low cloud cover and occasional drizzle. It couldn’t be more Seattle if it tried. Fortunately, the first bit was a bus tour of the city for an hour or so. I hate seeing cities by bus but it is useful to get oriented and a feel for distances and how the various pieces relate to each other. And it was certainly warmer than walking the streets of Berlin. The city gives me the vibe of New York, had New York geography allowed it to spread sideways rather than ascend vertically, or perhaps Philadelphia (although I haven’t really spent enough time in Philly to truly understand that city and its moods). It’s modern, efficient, full of people intent on getting somewhere quickly.

I had expected the city to be still scarred by 20th century history but it doesn’t really give that vibe at all. Germany is prosperous enough that in the former West Berlin, damaged monuments and imperial buildings have been reconstructed and in the East, they’ve wasted no time pulling down the ugly Soviet style blocks and redeveloping with more classical streetscapes. As a matter of fact, it strikes me that the good Berliners are on hyperdrive to erase the physical signs of East Germany as fast as possible and, in another couple of decades, it will be gone. The wall is fully gone at this point. There’s a decorative cobblestone pattern that traces where it ran through streets and neighborhoods and there’s a recreation of a Checkpoint Charlie guardhouse for tourist photos but that’s about it.

After the bus ride, we ended up on Museum Island with a visit to the Pergamon which has an amazing collection of Babylonian, Hittite, Sumerian and other near east ancient civilization antiquities. This was followed by lunch at a Hofbrau consisting of beer, bratwurst and sauerkraut. I did not eat this last. Cabbage and I don’t agree with each other. I was then cut free of the group and, as it had warmed up a bit, I spent a few hours walking around and taking in the sights.

Then it was time for another impulse visit to the opera, this time the Berlin Staatsoper who were doing Aida this evening. Again, like in Vienna, musically sublime but suffering from modern European director syndrome. I have no issues with non traditional stagings and designs but they need to clarify story and theme, not confuse it. This Aida featured was staged in a white box with various carefully chosen colored fabrics which became flags and such. There were projections ranging from Sinking modern cargo ships to a midcentury American supermarket full of frenzied housewives. (No, I don’t know what they were supposed to mean). The chorus were at times abstract, and then showed up in full 1860s Victoriana for the triumphal scene. Perhaps the hoop dresses were on special at the local department store…. Then there were the clowns vaguely styles on Ronald McDonald. During the boudoir scene, the whole female chorus put on clown faces and long blonde wigs. At another point, at the end of Act II, the chorus produced what I think were supposed to be happy meals and threw them at the audience.

I shall have to think about this one…. But I think I prefer my Aidas with elephants and the occasional diarrheal camel.

Dateline – Berlin, Germany –

Welcome to Berlin. I am a camera. Unfortunately a far more talented writer than I used that metaphor many years ago but I will have to admit that the stories and memoirs of Christopher Isherwood of 1930s Berlin and all of the works derived from them over time have been running through my mind all day. The vamp to Wilkommen being particularly strong in my head as our train arrived at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (which looks nothing like the opening sequence to the movie version of Cabaret).

The day did not start out in Berlin. It was supposed to start out in Regensburg but low water in the Danube prevented the ship from getting that far upriver. We instead had to get up and packed and off the ship an hour earlier than planned to be transported from whatever little Danube hamlet we could dock at by bus up to Regensburg. Like Passau, I had been to Regensburg before. While Passau is a baroque town that survived World War II relatively unscathed, Regensburg is more gothic having been around since the ancient Romans. (Part of one of their gates to their fortified camp on the site still stands.). It became an important trading center in the later Middle Ages due to its proximity to the Danube and due to their having built one of the few bridges across the river (still in use 800 and some years later). Much of the town center dates from about 1350-1550 and, unlike most other German cities from that era, was pretty much untouched by World War II as it was a provincial backwater in the 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the presence of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis (who had become and remains exceedingly rich through the invention and maintenance of a reliable postal service in the Middle Ages – their current money comes from brewing).

I did a walking tour, poked my head into the cathedral (one of the towers is covered with restoration scaffolding. Tis the season I guess), and did a little shopping. (You can’t find good advent calendars in the US these days but they remain very popular in Bavaria and I was able to find an attractive selection at the bookstore on the cathedral square.). It was also a bit nippy out with temperatures in the 30s and low 40s so I found a coffee house and had a very good bowl of cream of potato soup and a large latte in order to warm up again.

Then it was time to herd the cats once more and get us to the Regensburg train station in order to catch an express for Berlin. German trains aren’t particularly luxurious and this one was 20 minutes late but it stuck to schedule and got us to central Berlin in five and a half hours after quick stops in Nurenburg, Erfurt, and Halle. Our hotel is the Adlon, famous from pre-War Berlin. Not the original, however, as it was flattened as was most of the city in the closing days of World War II but built in the 90s on what was no mans land outside of Checkpoint Charlie, just yards from the Brandenburg Gate. I can even see the sculpture on the top of the gate from my room window. It was pushing 8 pm by the time I was settled and, as we had no activities tonight, I wandered down Unter den Linden and through the general vicinity looking for something to eat. I found a little Indian place and thought it might be a nice change from schnitzel and fish. It was the blandest Indian food I’ve ever eaten. I don’t know if that’s a German thing or it was just an off night. Up tomorrow to see the city.