Mid-January

April may be the cruelest month, but January is my least-favorite month.

I live near Boston, in a house built in 1941, so during the cold weather months I’m always checking the furnace’s water level and whether or not the space heater is on in the garage (to insure the water pipes don’t freeze and burst like they did a couple of years ago).

Walking is my primary form of exercise, but most days in January are not fun for walking outside. So I’m forced to walk at a mall or a big-box store like Costco. This is kind of fun most of the time, since retail has always been in my blood, but when it has to happen more than once or twice a week it gets old very fast.

These are surreal times.

The hope that existed early on during the Covid-19 pandemic that things would return to the way they were before the outbreak - the Before Times - has vanished. There is concern about new variants of the virus. The breakdown of social norms over the past five years worsens, and we retreat deeper into our own personal protective chambers.

It’s more and more difficult to imagine things getting better anytime soon. In fact, it feels like they’re going to get worse. But I remain hopeful. And baseball is just a couple of months away.

So to occupy my indoors time, I treated my Martin D-18 to new strings and a thorough cleaning and polishing. Now that I’ve built up some calluses again, my fingers are starting to remember songs, riffs and melodies, especially Bob Dylan songs from the mid-to-late 1960s, like My Back Pages and Desolation Row, when I engage with my guitar and with these songs, memories of the times that were changing then flood back, and that suggests other songs.

I’m good.