A Year Out The Window
All Dressed Up… (Retiro Way #07734)
This title alludes to two things: for an entire year, it meant “All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go,” but, blessedly, at pandemic’s end it will finally mean “All Dressed Up & Ready To Go.” The number in the subtitle becomes the word “hello” in an old-fashioned digital calculator when looked at upside-down, and here hints at the fact that, although many may be ready, eager even, to emerge and get going after our lives having been dramatically disrupted for so long, things might feel rather awkward when we finally do emerge, and for a good bit thereafter — more so if we take the opportunity, in the words of writer and human rights activist Arundhati Roy, “to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. [This pandemic] is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Only then will it not have been a year entirely out the window.