In this video link to the image above, two Italian men – likely somewhere in the Lombardy region – obeying strict lockdown measures, come up with a unique, creative, and safe-distancing method to engage in a pickleball rally from their balcony windows. As a relatively new convert to the sport, very much have I missed the game, its challenges, and the people I have come to know in playing pickleball.

A very clever neighbour demonstratively made a COVID exclamation mark-costume

As the month of March crawled toward its end, articles like David Kessler’s appeared in prestigious journals like the Harvard Business Review. Associated with the image above, Kessler, the world’s foremost authority on grief, was interviewed about the importance of naming and acknowledging our grief during pandemic times.

Compassionately, we watched nurses trained in traditional Chinese medicine teach Tai Chi to coronavirus patients in Wuhan, China, the original epicenter of the virus.

On 27 March, the acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, under COVID lockdown for almost 3 weeks in a deserted Rome – pictured above – wrote an impassioned letter to fellow Europeans “from your future.” Published in The Guardian and made available online to everyone, Melandri poignantly laid out the range of emotions people were likely to go through over the coming weeks. It was both sobering and a source of sage advice/predictions.

Thousands of people became enchanted listeing to sir Patrick Stewart, he of Star Trek fame, read Shakespearean sonnets, one per day on Twitter.

So many images of the virus emerged; the one above fronted the publicly-shared piece by Charles Epstein’s remarkable essay on The Coronation. Reprinted here with permission, Epstein took a giant step back from the pandemic to ponder, to question the global impact and repercussions of what we experienced and the process of transition due to the COVID-19 outbreak and international perfusion.

AND is a more powerful, more inclusive, and deceptively simple word in the English language. The examples reminded us all that we were and are at choice, as difficult as those choices might be.

Music stirred our souls, like this composite and stunning adaptation of famous dances and dancers – Jennifer Beals, Michael Jackson, Gene Kelly, and many more – moving to the beat of Footloose.

Just stunning how many people knowingly put themselves in harm’s way – from front line medical personnel to truckers to shelf-stockers at grocery stores…

How indomitable is the human spirit and how important is a sense of humor, always

Sometimes, zealous Facebook posters gave false attribution to pithy expressions. The one above, by Sonya Taylor, was attributed wrongly to Brené Brown, a fact Brown acknoweldged and corrected publicly. The message remains vivid, starkly so…

For some reason, of all the sayings, cartoons, articles, and images posted on Facebook during COVID, this one, with the parachute analogy, struck a chord of metaphorical truth for me. And, it is still valid, in my view, at mid-May….

Jonathan Smith, pictured above, is an award-winning lecturer in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases and Global Health at Yale University School of Public Health. He wrote a piece called Hold the Line intended for people in his neighbourhood. Hold the Line was reprinted by Elemental and made public for everyone to read. The article was a late March, early April frank and tough assessment of what the next weeks and months might bring – and why social distancing is so crucial in the fight against the coronavirus.

Clever postings like the one above challenged us to calculate our next travel destination. No matter how you do the math, the answer is/was always # 9, Stay at home.

Here is southwestern Ontario, we started to follow the articles written by Dr Andy Thompson, a Canadian rheumatologist working in Arva, Ontario at The Arva Clinic  He founded RheumInfo.com In this particular piece, Thompson compared Canada to the USA and the rest of the world in terms of cases and deaths per million population. His analysis included a countdown of the top 10 worst places on Earth for COVID-19.

Even at the end of April, it seemed reminders about social-physical distancing needed to be made as per the probability of contagion image above and below, the grim reminder of the Philadelphia Spanish flu epidemic and that city’s premature end to quarantine:

On May 4th, Dr Thompson distributed his, The First 100 Days of COVID-19: A Reflection. The piece was a fact-based retrospective of the coronavirus showing worldwide cases, deaths, trajectories, landmark moments, and his inferences about the flattening of curves in different countries.

The Zoom platform along with other virtual media forms have loomed/zoomed large in our lives; they enable us to connect virtually similar to more common formats like Skype or Facetime. For the Longest Time was a social distance-sing project, quarantine edition with original lyrics and music by Billy Joel, adapted for this incredible, choral ensemble of magnificent voices.

In the same vein as the above vocal production, was this rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone virtual choir and orchestra created among 15 countries and 300 people:

Skeptics abound/ed throughout the stay-at-home time; they still do – some with very radical views, even conspiracty theories on the ‘plot’ and ‘hoax’ aspects of the global situation:

In the Atlantic magazine article, image-header depicted above, staff writer Conor Friedersdorf pondered the different perspectives on whether the US, the current epicenter of the virus, should begin easing lock- and shut-downs in that country. Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously as the title suggested, was its author’s advice on listening to all viewpoints on the viral situation.

A few days ago Dr Thompson wrote this COVID update:

In Don’t Eat the Cake, Thompson analogizes the situation we face in easing social-physical distancing restrictions to the dilemma facing a chroic diabetes’ sufferer. In the comparison, the person struggling with diabetes has behaved admirably, following a careful diet and exercise program; to reward themselves, the person with diabetes comes home and eats a piece of sugar-rich cake. Thompson’s evidence-based advice is clear, don’t eat the pandemic cake assuming all is well or that the virus has somehow disappeared.

To paraphrase Lennon’s song, So This is COVID…and what have we done. How have we been? So much has been written, so much reflected and held up to us reminiscent, to me, of Hamlet pondering humankind and the fleeting nature of life as he holds up the skull of his friend, Yorick. In these coronavirus times, days melt, time slows, we hunker down, and we wonder, live, love, agonzie, grieve, celebrate, despair and always look in our various mirrors, like Facebook, to see ourselves. On May 10th, I celebrated Mother’s Day on Facebook with this image:

My mother, Marion Grant McCullough 1919 – 1957. A Registered Nurse by profession – I wonder  what her response to the pandemic would have been…

I tumble home to my thoughts and postings about COVID and the infinite meanings and experiences I have, we have, and others not nearly so fortunate as us have. I leave this blog with an apt quotation from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.