Friday, December 18, 2020

A Week From Today

I have a beautiful library. It has a wonderful desk with a perfect chair. I use it every day. Whenever I have serious work to do, or serious writing, that’s where I am. But not in the morning. I write this blog between the hours of 5:00 and 8:00 am and 90% of the time I’m sitting on the sofa in the family room with this for my view...


It’s comforting, even without all of the Christmas finery, but once the tree goes up its positively magical. A week from today, this room will be filled with every member of my family and three dogs. Those stockings will be stuffed to the seams with presents. There will be a gigantic box in one corner for all of the spent wrapping paper. The smell of sausage, eggs and cinnamon rolls will be in the air. The dogs will add comic chaos to the scene. I will begin the proceedings with the official distribution of the presents from underneath the tree. I will read with great flair the To: From: tags on each one since in our family they can be quite entertaining. Pam and I always use names of significance only to us from things that happened during the year. Since we watched Better Call Saul this year I can be sure one gift will be To: Saul Goodman, From: Kim Wexler. After watching The Crown, Pam will get at least one gift To: The Queen From: Prince Phillip. I know its silly, but it’s also tradition, and on this day, tradition is everything.

In the middle of all the unwrapping we will take a break for breakfast, another tradition with a set menu. There will be much laughing, and compliments to the chef. All six of us will be dressed alike in the matching pajamas that we received on Christmas Eve from Pam. Even this is a tradition started years and tears ago. My armoire has an entire drawer dedicated to nothing else except Christmas pajamas. I’m not kidding. I was thinking (hoping) that this particular tradition would have run its course by now, but then Patrick married Sarah, who so adores the idea that it has been given a new lease on life. When it is finally time for me to enter a nursing home one day, I will be the only resident who has a different set of pajamas for every week of the year.

When the presents have all been opened, the rest of the day will be spent in casual repose, each of us playing with our toys, drinking coffee and hot chocolate. At some point we will have to perambulate the beasts, which if the weather cooperates, will be a group effort with lots of pictures. Late afternoon will be for more lounging around with hopefully exhausted and napping dogs. Then once its dark outside, the kids will insist on a round of game playing. This isn’t my favorite part of the day, but everyone else loves it. I’m not talking charades or Monopoly here. No no...this is modern board gamery which features all manner of cooperative team building stuff. A couple years ago we actually played a game whose object was to cure the world from a raging pandemic before all of mankind was wiped from the face of the Earth. The only way this could be accomplished was with teamwork...working together, or in other words...the exact opposite of what the board games of my youth were about—-world domination and the complete annihilation of your enemies. Since I’m essentially a does not work well with other kids sort of guy, I am at a natural disadvantage when it comes to these cooperative adventures. I find myself internally scheming a way to find the cure for the pandemic, then figure out a way to corner the market and charge the other players ridiculous prices for the vaccine! Ha! Just kidding. I’m hoping that Patrick and Sarah leave that game at home.

Each of you reading this could tell me stories about your family traditions. Each are unique and special, a defining characteristic of your history as a family. This is something to celebrate. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ, Emmanuel-God With Us. But its also a celebration of what it means to be a part of a family.


Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Christmas Came Early at Dunnevant Financial

So, my assistant shows up yesterday with Christmas presents for me. The fact that it was only December 15th didn’t seem to matter to her. She marches to her own drummer so I didn’t make a big deal of it. Anyway, she has been working for me for seven or eight years now and needless to say...she has picked up on several of my, er, tendencies...



The beef stick is already gone. I plan on wearing those awesome Christmas tree glasses every day until Christmas, and the cigars will be smoked with my boys out on the deck over Christmas. As far as the socks go, I couldn’t be more thrilled. Speaking of Dad Jokes....

Chinese take out: 8 dollars. Tip: 2 dollars. getting home and finding out they forgot part of your order...

Riceless.

No matter where I go, I like to bring my ukulele, then, whenever someone asks me if I play an instrument, I say...

I play a little guitar.

It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay or bisexual...

At the end of the day, it’s night.

I have a friend who writes songs about sewing machines.

He’s a Singer songwriter...or sew it seams.

I ran out of toilet paper recently and had to use the newspaper. Now the realization has kicked in that...

The Times are rough.

What do you call a knight who is afraid to fight?

Sir Render.

In Sweden the CEO of IKEA was just elected prime minister.

He should have his cabinet put together by summer.

Is it ok to start drinking as soon as the kids get to school...

Or am I just a terrible teacher?



Tuesday, December 15, 2020

The 12 Days of Christmas (in a pandemic)

It is perhaps the most unavoidable trap of the human condition to fall into during a crisis...despair. For most people, despair is the default human response to great and overpowering conflict. It takes a while. We do put up a fight, we do battle, mount a resistance. But most of us eventually begin to lose hope. When that happens, despair follows like night follows day. It takes a special person to stay positive in a sea of bad news. We all know someone who manages it though, don’t we? There’s always that friend or family member who seems to take whatever gets thrown at them and turn it into something amazing. For me, that person is my wife.

Don’t misunderstand, she has been discouraged by 2020 as much as anyone else. C, in particular, has caused her no end of anxiety and worry. She worries not just about getting it, but worse...giving it to someone else. Like the rest of us she gets anguished over how to interact with family during a pandemic, Christmas in particular. How do you plan Christmas with such a large and separated family? How do you spread Christmas cheer virtually? But instead of defaulting to despair, she does what she does best. She gets creative.

Like any other decent human being, she worries about her parents. She senses their growing frustration and isolation and can’t imagine them having Christmas in the middle of this mess. So Pam being Pam, she comes up with an idea. She fires up her laptop and starts shopping. Pretty soon she has curbside delivery pickup of 12 presents for her parents. She brings them home and wraps each one. Then she delivers them to her parent’s front door with instructions...Each day over these 12 days of Christmas you are to FaceTime me so I can watch you open one gift. But, before you open the gift each of you must share one Christmas memory with me. Last night was day one. Right around 6:30 she got a FaceTime call from her parents...a first! They sat on the sofa and talked back and forth, smiling and laughing and telling Christmas stories. For this one night they were not isolated. For this one night there was Christmas cheer. There are eleven more sessions to look forward to. Mission Accomplished. My wife is a genius.

It’s gotten me to thinking about doing something similar with my brother who is up in Maryland. This morning he beat me to the punch, FaceTiming me at 7:00 am to tell me a couple of stories about Dad he had been recently told by our Aunt Emma, Dad’s youngest sister, a hilarious story about Dad’s first car and the swindler who sold it to him. Great stuff.

So, I share this story in the hopes that it might spark even more creativity out there as we all adapt to this Pandemic Christmas season. 

Hope beats despair every single time it’s tried.

Monday, December 14, 2020

Fabulous News

Pam and I just received the fabulous news that all of our kids and all of their dogs will be spending six whole days here with us for Christmas. Plans had been up in the air because of the C word. That’s right, here at the Tempest, I have made the executive decision to use a capital C when referring to the viral elephant which has taken up lodging in every room of our lives. I’m tired of the word, tired of speaking it, tired of writing it. Anyway, news that all of us will be together for nearly a week is fabulous indeed. To prepare for the week, we have instituted a sort of quarantine-lite here at Dunnevant Central. It’s not a real quarantine or even a lockdown, more like a strategic withdrawal from our public lives. It works this way.

At work, it will be a mask-wearing affair with limited hours and interaction. Church will be live-streamed, ie...sofa church. Grocery store trips will be strategic, rather than random. All other store visits will be of the curb-side pickup variety. Interaction with friends and family over the next couple of weeks will be front porch affairs. Last night, for example, we invited my sister and her husband over to our back deck for a fire in my awesome solo stove. It was great to see their faces. Unfortunately, a quick glance at the weather forecast for this week doesn’t afford many more opportunities for outdoor meetings. Bad weather makes inventions like FaceTime and Marco Polo invaluable. In addition to these magical new communication tools, my wife’s feverish creativity has turned to very old communication tools as she plans out what Christmas with C will look like. There will be pajama-wearing, doughnut-eating Christmas caroling, front porch gift exchanges, to go along with some sort of digital, virtual, talent show/singalong thing she has flying around in that head of hers.

None of us want this. I hate the isolation. I hate not being in a crowded house with 25 members of my big, loud family. I hate the cloud that’s hanging over all of us, the realization that if one of us gets C everything gets blown up. But, this is the world we live in right now. There is nothing to be done about it besides being as smart as we can, doing everything we can to lower our odds of getting the dang thing.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about all the front line doctors, nurses, and hospital workers out there who are battling C non stop. What will their Christmas be like? What about the workers at Pfizer toiling around the clock to produce the vaccine, the truck-drivers on the road at all hours in horrible weather racing to deliver it to us? When will they get to spend time with their families? It occurs to me that compared to so many other people in this country right now, we have it easy. While the heroes all around us are working their fingers to the bone, I’ll be in my beautiful house surrounded by my beautiful kids trying to figure out what to do with these guys...


2020 is not the new normal. It will not always be like this. A day is coming when the curse of C will lift. It won’t be tomorrow, next week or next month, but the day will come when we can all embrace those we love without hesitation or fear. Until then, don’t lose heart. 



Saturday, December 12, 2020

Knuckle Dragging Work

Here’s my day yesterday captured in one photograph...


No, I didn’t stuff 62 thirty-nine gallon bags with leaves in one day. This is actually two months of bagging leaves. Yesterday I gathered them from their various locations and dragged them to the curb where the Henrico Department of Leaf Removal has promised to take them off my hands. Actually, I dragged 40 of them to the curb, then added another 22 that I stuffed full yesterday. Although I am paying the price this morning, doing this type of knuckle dragging work is about as satisfying as anything in my life. Why? It’s complicated.

I handle money for a living, a decidedly non-knuckle dragging occupation. When I come home from work and Pam asks me about my day sometimes its hard to give her a direct answer—“Well, I had an annual review with the Blogdonovich’s who informed me that their retirement date has changed, so I’m going to have to rework their portfolio, blah, blah, blah...”  But, when I work in my yard, I don’t have to wonder whether or not I’ve done any good at the end of the day. I don’t even have to say anything, all I have to do is point to that giant pile of bags...That’s what I did today! There is concrete, undeniable evidence of my labor. 

It all started when I was a kid. Dad gave me the job of cutting the grass and getting up leaves and everything else that had anything to do with the yard when I was eleven years old. He made a big dramatic deal of it..Son, this is a big job, a big and important responsibility I’m giving you. Don’t let me down! I complained at first, pointing out the salient point that I knew not one single other eleven year old who was so employed. Dad’s response was something along the lines of, And isn’t that a shame? There was no arguing with the man. But I soon discovered that I actually liked the job. In a weird way it was...fun. Still is.
One key difference between then and now is the level of my physical decrepitude. I can still do the work, still enjoy doing the work. But, I have to pace myself, and even then I wake up the morning after a day like yesterday feeling as if I have been the loser in a prize fight. 

...but just look at those bags. Is that not the most beautiful sight?


Friday, December 11, 2020

The Fall

Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s life had been an unqualified success right up to the day he took a drink from an unopened bottle of water he found while jogging in a park less than a mile from his house. At least that was the initial conclusion which most of the family had settled upon after every other explanation for his implosion had failed to withstand logical scrutiny. So bizarre were the circumstances surrounding his metamorphosis that a family of educated people had been reduced to believing an unproven and unprovable theory involving a random bottle of water that had never been found or tested for toxins that might have explained how an otherwise circumspect 56 year old man could have so suddenly and spectacularly gone off the rails. The Fitzgerald family, being as unaccustomed to and unprepared for scandal as any tribe in North America had not handled the drama well. Accusations began to fly within the family, blaming everyone from his wife of 30 years, to his impossible to please father, to his meddling mother, all the way down to his disrespectful children. But, the writer has gotten ahead of himself. The reader by now is naturally wondering about the nature of Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s metamorphosis, and not nearly as concerned with the infighting of his extended family. I will attempt to tell the tale honestly without bias or judgement, for in the day and age in which we live, this story needs to be told.





1. Family History





William and Margaret Fitzgerald carefully considered the name they would bequeath to their first born in the fall of 1963. The Fitzgeralds were second generation wealthy, William having inherited a small fortune from his self-made father and having married into the Sebastian fortune which had flowed to Margaret upon the untimely death of both of her parents, who had tragically perished when the catamaran they were sailing capsized during light winds in the Chesapeake Bay less than two years after Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s birth. A manufacturing failure discovered within the workmanship of the mast ultimately added to the Fitzgerald fortune in the form of a settlement check from lawyers representing the boat company. William...it was William, never Bill, or worse...Billy, had for years been embarrassed at his wealth for the old fashioned reason that he had done nothing to deserve it other than being fortuitously conceived. His own career as a lawyer served only to provide him a place to go every day and a respectable answer to the oft-asked cocktail party question, “So William, what do you do?” The answer that he was an attorney quickly led into a pleasant ramble about his time at Princeton, and the early years of clerking for this judge and that. But as a matter of profitability, his law practice netted him barely enough money to cover his ample overhead. He had enough skill and connections to make an honest go of it but found the lack of urgency too much to overcome. Being independently rich, he discovered, had sapped him of any work ethic he may have inherited from his father. Eventually, William and Margaret had made peace with the happy accident of their births and stopped feeling guilt about their wealth. They had come to see their good fortune as, in fact, the very embodiment of the American Dream. They had come into their money the truly old fashioned way...by inheritance and summary judgments.


So, the choice of a name for what was surely to be the third generation of prominent and successful Fitzgeralds was crucial. Consideration must be given to tradition, the family tree and proper nobility. For William this meant a name that did not lend itself to truncation, or the degradation of a nickname. Daniel Sebastian checked off all the boxes, Daniel, after the Old Testament hero of the lion’s den, and Sebastian, the surname of his wife, the family name that provided 60% of the Fitzgerald net worth. However, William would ultimately regret the choice. It took virtually no time for little Daniel’s school friends, even those well bred enough to attend St. Paul’s, to twist Daniel into a hundred ugly iterations. Dan the Man, Danny-Boy, and the especially infantile Book-em Danno had all taken turns as the nickname of choice during Daniel’s middle and high school years, bringing his parents untold grief. When, over the course of time, it became obvious that nothing was to be done about the fact that their son would forever be known as Danny, William and Margaret accepted it as the price they would have to pay for raising such a popular and winsome boy. For Danny had turned out to be everything that his parents weren’t, optimistic, fun loving, adventurous, gregarious, empathetic and magnanimous, all traits that hadn’t appeared over several generations of either branch of the family tree. The Fitzgerald’s had largely been known as a stoic lot, full of industry and toughness to be sure, but not known for the warmer gifts associated with the human condition. Grandfather Fitzgerald, builder of a thousand brick ranchers and split levels throughout central Virginia, was an efficient and meticulous businessman known for being a fair boss, excellent craftsman, and ruthless negotiator, but in all of his life no one could recall him donated a single dime of his considerable fortune to a single charity beyond his church. His personality, such as it was, could best be described as distant. William had inherited all of the distance, none of the industry and all of the money. Although Margaret had been blessed with respectable warmth and charm along with a passable sense of humor, she had inherited the Sebastian family pride, the imperious kind that served as a stiff arm to the lower classes who were unlucky enough to stumble onto her path. Her single purpose as a mother to her son had been to protect him from bad influence which she narrowly defined as those outside his rank and station. To her eternal consternation, every such effort had failed. Danny counted among his friends an endless succession of misfits and ne’er do wells who brought with them their course language and sloppy manners. There was simply nothing to be done. Their son had developed a tendency of attracting friends everywhere he went, for good or for ill. His parents had been reduced to glorified overseers, doing their best to influence their son towards the right friends and away from the wrong. Despite this troubling tendency, Danny had given them not one minute’s trouble. He was respectful of their authority, dutiful and obedient, an excellent student and well liked by everyone.


Then he met Kate.


Kate, (not Katherine, the birth certificate actually said Kate), Buchanan had crashed into the Fitzgerald family like a runaway freight train in the summer of 1982 when Danny announced to his parents that he had met the love of his life and that she would be spending a week with them at the river house over July the fourth. Kate Buchanan had been exactly what Margaret Fitzgerald had warned her husband would happen if he permitted their son to attend Virginia Commonwealth University instead of Princeton. It should never have been allowed in the first place, their son matriculating at a state school known for nothing other than a basketball team and a campus life littered with drugs and bohemian habits. Princeton would have delivered the world to his doorstep. With VCU they would be lucky if he graduated without a stint in rehab. But here was Margaret, looking on in wordless horror as Kate Buchanan exploded out of the passenger seat of Danny’s BMW, dressed like a gypsy, radiant smile beaming out from under that ridiculous Panama hat, running up to engulf her boyfriend’s mother in an inappropriately familiar embrace. It had been the beginning of the most awkward week of Margaret’s life, filled as it was with the realization that her son was irretrievably ass-over-tea-kettles in love. Meanwhile, William had been struck mute by the presence of the girl, barely contributing a word to the conversation for the first hour or so, overwhelmed as he was by the pure novelty of someone who combined outrageous fashion and personality with such astonishing beauty. As the week wore on, Margaret and William were united in their belief that the girl would be an unmitigated disaster for their son, but equally convinced that the relationship would never last. Danny would soon tire of this whirling dervish. How could he not? The child babbled on all week about every conceivable topic that people like Margaret and William couldn’t possibly have cared any less about, while Danny sat there bewitched, hanging on every word. 


He had met her in an introduction to sculpture class, the sort of class he never would have taken had he gone to Princeton, when fate had placed him next to her on the back row. She had arrived to class carrying nothing with her that might have identified her as a student. No back pack, no books, no purse. Just a loose fitting tie-dyed T-shirt, no bra, and her angelic face. For Danny it had been love at first sight, or at least lust, which at 18 years of age amounts to the same thing. At the end of class during which not a single word of conversation had passed between them, she had extended her hand to him and said, “My name’s Kate. You’re cute.” Thus had began the manic affair that now had belched itself upon the banks of the Rappahannock River. Margaret and William smiled knowingly at each other. He would tire of her in time. All was well.


But like millions of parents before them, Margaret and William had underestimated the enduring power of both passion and love. By the time Danny had graduated with a worthless Bachelor of Science in Advertising degree, they were still in love and announced their intention to marry at the earliest possible date. When Margaret and William had objected to the match, Danny and Kate had responded by eloping, then sending his parents a postcard from Key West, officially beginning a 30 year strained relationship between Kate Fitzgerald and her in-laws. Although the arrival of grandchildren, a girl, Caroline, and a boy, Teddy (not Theodore), had softened the general frostiness of their discourse and injected a touch of warmth on both sides, animosity still hung heavily in the air whenever they occupied the same space. Despite the animosity, Margaret and William always managed to cover over their disappointment with the pleasant veneer of manners, never revealing too much, never letting slip any openly hostile words, always preferring the veiled insult, the soft contours of the pulled rhetorical punch. It infuriated Kate to be on the receiving end of their passive aggression, to the point where she had begun to take great delight in offering translations in real time to anyone who might be within earshot.


Margaret: Kate, my dear, you look healthier every time I see you.


Kate: What Grandma means kids is that Mommy’s getting fat!


Ever since the children had arrived it had become one of Kate’s joys in life to refer to her Mother in law as “Grandma.” Margaret hated nothing in the universe more than the ghastly title, always answering with, “Grandmother.” Of course, the children picked up “grandma” and used it gleefully as soon as they learned to talk, a delicious victory for Kate and a thorn in the side to Margaret who visibly winced at the sound of the word. Such pettiness was unlike Kate, a fact that her husband often reminded her after each family visit. Kate could only admit the truth.


“Yes,” she would reply. “When it comes to your mother I can be a real bitch. I should just ignore her, but I can’t help it. I do so love watching the way her bottom lip quivers right before it stiffens up and pushes out whenever one of the kids says ‘Grandma!!’ You’ve got to admit, honey. It’s pretty funny.”


“It’s hysterical,” Danny would always respond. “But what’s the point? It only makes things worse between you two.”


“Actually, it makes no difference whatsoever. Your mother will be your mother for as long as she lives. And as long as I remain your wife she will hate me, and never in a million years will she ever admit to hating me. Am I right?”


“Yes. You are right.”


Thirty years of the battle between wife and mother in law had raged without any meaningful cease fires. Even once Margaret became an octogenarian she still delivered her patented silk-covered verbal bricks in nearly every conversation. After watching Kate remove an over-cooked roast out of the oven, the silver-haired, face-lifted matron hadn’t missed a beat, “It is quite remarkable how unspoiled by failure you continue to be.” But on the fateful morning when Danny had stumbled back home from his Saturday morning run, white as a ghost with a nasty abrasion on his forehead, Kate’s skirmishes with her in-laws would intensify into a full blown war.


Thursday, December 10, 2020

Wearing a Mask

You know what the worst topic for a blog is right now? Anything having to do with COVID. I’m so fed up with this pandemic I can hardly bring myself to type out the word...COVID. But, here I am writing about it because, just like those annoying AMWAY people from the 1970’s, it just won’t go away.

After a summer of relative progress, cases are skyrocketing again. Yesterday we set a death record of over 3000 in a single day. Hospitals are filling up and various jurisdictions around the country are attempting to institute lockdowns with varying degrees of success. Ordering Americans to do anything in unison is much like herding cats. Apart from the official numbers published by the agencies and departments of government keeping tract of the pandemic, there are  personal experiences to consider. For months and months when this all first started, Pam and I didn’t know a single soul who had COVID. All that has changed in a big way over the past couple of months. Suddenly, people all around us have come down with it, close friends, neighbors, members of our own family. It has become more real to us, less theoretical. 

But, there is also good news. There always is if you take the time to look. There is a very low mortality rate associated with this thing. The people we know who have tested positive have all recovered or are recovering...a very good thing. However, when I see what it has done to my dear neighbor, who has been sick as a dog for over a week now, I want no part of this thing, and neither do you. Also, a vaccine is on its way, a ray of hope that at some point next year we might actually get beyond this miserable nightmare.

In the meantime, it seems to be spreading like wildfire, prompting government officials to issue new edicts to battle the spread. Here in Virginia, our Governor plans a 2:00 news conference this afternoon to announce the latest measures. Close to half of my state’s population will reject whatever words come out of his mouth instantly, regardless of what he says. The reasons are complicated. Part of it is...he’s a jackass. Ralph Northam gives people lots of reasons to dislike him. In many ways he is the quintessential do as I say not as I do political hypocrite. Old blackface is a slippery one. But, as much as I dislike him and his Alfred E. Newman face with its condescending uplifted nose, I actually think that his handling of the COVID spread in Virginia has been exemplary. Our numbers have compared favorably with most other states and that is in no small part to the proactive steps his office has taken over these past 8 months. But for  many Virginians, the fact that he is a liberal Democrat means that everything he says is suspect. Like literally everything else in America in 2020, COVID has  somehow turned into a partisan issue. Indeed the simple, basic task of wearing a mask has become a type of Rorschach Test for politics. To some, wearing a mask in public is just a basic preventative measure, the very least that one can do to protect themselves and others. Its an easy ask. To others not wearing a mask has become a badge of honor, a stick it to the man statement of independence, a proclamation that they will not bow or bend to anyone attempting to take away their freedom. So, no matter what the Governor proposes this afternoon, expect more of the same, polarization and division.

My view is pretty simple. Since I have no idea whether or not I have COVID, I would rather not take the chance of spreading it to total strangers at the grocery store or at the bank, or at my church. So, while I am inside those places, I’ll be wearing a mask. No matter how unlikely it might be, if I discovered that my not wearing a mask ended up spreading COVID to someone else, I would feel terrible. A secondary reason for wearing a mask is my desire to lower my chances of catching it from someone else. 

Something I have read a lot over the past few weeks is some version of this...I’m just going to live my life without fear. After all, God is in control. Many, though not all, of those who are of this mind are also against wearing masks. Setting aside the theological aspects of free will and the sovereignty of God for a moment...the one thing I would like to ask those who fall into this category is, “Would you leave for a long car trip without a spare tire in the back?” I mean, why bother taking precautions if God is in control? Look, if its God’s will for you to have a flat, why fight it, right?

As an imperfect and highly flawed Christian, I believe I have a responsibility to others to model humility and grace in my dealings with them. This includes, for me, wearing a mask during a pandemic. Because I am told in scripture to consider others concerns more than my own, I feel compelled to set aside my own feelings about wearing a mask—the discomfort and annoyance—for the greater good it can do of halting or slowing the spread of this viral pandemic. It has nothing to do with politics or my notions of freedom or individual rights. It’s more about common decency and respect for the human beings around me.

Of course if you believe that COVID is a fake news media creation designed to usher in totalitarian governance and make money for pharmaceutical companies and nobody is dying from COVID, its all a hoax and masks are worthless in the fight because there is no pandemic...then none of what I wrote will matter to you. But...for everyone else? Wear a mask.