Just one other thing

A Coffee & TV interlude

Hello. I have found it impossible to read or write or concentrate or really do much besides doom scroll and watch CNN on mute since (shrugs/gestures around/weeps) but I thought today maybe I could tell you guys about just one other thing.

So just one other thing is, last year my sister and I purchased very expensive tickets to the US Gymnastics Olympic Team Trials, which were originally scheduled to take place June 25-28 in St. Louis. I had never been in the financial position to go to such a “big-ticket” event until right before these tickets became available, and (as longtime readers know), gymnastics is one of my many mutilatingly-embarrassing niche interests. Plus Simone Biles, GOAT, etc, live in person, possibly competing several eponymous skills. These were truly exciting times.

As the end of March approached it still seemed vaguely possible a large-scale event might take place in three months’ time, and then on March 30th the IOC announced the Tokyo Olympics would be postponed until late summer 2021. The USAG, one of America’s longest-burning trash fires, took its sweet time in refunding our many hundreds of dollars/announcing the new trials date. On July 17 I received an email from Ticketmaster saying the competition was rescheduled for June 27, 2021, still in St. Louis, and I had 30 days to request a refund.

I called Mary yesterday to discuss another One Thing, our brother’s wedding, which was originally scheduled for August 29 and is still happening albeit under radically different/despairing conditions.

“We have to make up our minds about those tickets soon, don’t we?” she said.

“Yeah, lemme find that email. Here we go. ‘If you do not choose a refund by August 16, 2020, your tickets remain valid for the rescheduled date. Once this option is selected, it’s final and cannot be changed.’ So we have like, what, ten days? What do you think, are the Olympics still happening in Tokyo next summer?”

“That’s not the relevant question, Ruth,” Mary said. Her tone of voice was not one I felt she had used on me often or ever - patient yet authoritative. Like she was giving someone bad news about their international tax liability, which, she actually does for her job.

"The question is, will we be in a place, in eleven months, to have large scale, indoor, events…in Saint Louis, Missouri (here the tone lost a bit of patience), and if so, would you feel safe going or want to go to an event like that?”

I stared out the window, past my makeshift ‘home office’ setup and into my next-door neighbor’s yard, which has been abandoned since mid-March. I had been ‘keeping it together’ for a while at this point but something about the way she phrased this felt like a key had turned somewhere and what happened next would be new and possibly unbearable.

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“OK then.”

I said I would set a reminder in my calendar for August 14 so we could talk about it one more time but obviously we’re not going to the US Olympic Trials in St. Louis next year. I don’t know the next time I will do anything different at all from the same limited rota of things I’ve been doing for the last four and a half months.

If you’re reading this, I’m sure I miss you.

xx

Ruth

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