Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

On the first full weekend in March, we flew from Ohio to Virginia for my 93-year-old mother's funeral. That alone would have had me thinking about the impermanence of life, although it is hardly the only death in the family. Both my wife and I lost spouses. My father died more than 20 years ago. Both of my wife's parents are gone. Last year we bid farewell to a beloved uncle. There had been many months of late when Mom's various ailments had me wondering when the call about her would come. Yet when it did, it was wrenching; I still have those times when I think I should be calling her, and she has been in the front or back of my mind ever since she passed. Moreover, our funeral travels took place during the beginning of the larger national grappling with mortality. COVID-19 was in the air, and the alarms about it visible at airports, where the desks by the departure gates had bottles of hand sanitizer and you could begin to see people in gloves and masks. We returned t...

Like most of you, I have been trying to find ways to fill the days. There has been work, still, as I struggle to teach online, and the bride wrangles church work.We've been catching up on home projects, or starting new ones. Yesterday I put together new porch furniture we ordered -- although it won't be going outside until after an expected windstorm has passed. We have posters to put up in one of the rooms, and may have figured out the wall arrangement; we're one frame order away from getting that done. I reconfigured some things on the walls in my room. There has been TV watching -- Little Fires Everywhere, the completely nutty season premiere of The Good Fight, a slow binge through Rizzoli and Isles (easy to kill time when the brain demands little, but not something that I  feel guilty about watching) and, recently, a march through the Fast and the Furious movies, seeing the transition from a movie that took itself seriously to one that saw amusement in its core to th...