As the spring 2020 semester lurched toward its online denouement, it was difficult not to think about the world that year’s graduating class would be confronting. The coronavirus, despite Donald the Obfuscator’s assurances, was not going away, the economy was in freefall, and uncertainty reigned. The closest recent analogue to these students’ circumstance was the class of 2009, the group whose prospects had been buffeted by the Great Recession. The class of 2020 faced a highly contagious, deadly disease and a depression-level economic dislocation. Nothing like that had ever happened to me; however, my grandparents had endured the Great Depression and there was perhaps a lesson to be had from their – especially my grandfather’s – experience.
I wrote a brief essay. It’s the most personal item on the blog. It was too long for an editorial, so the question was where to send it or even whether to send it. I contacted the editor of The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise and give him right of first refusal since the essay dealt with someone from the region. Radio silence ensued, so I withdrew it and sent it to Style Weekly. I should have gone there first. Style Weekly is Richmond’s alternative newspaper. It is a boon to the city that it survives online and especially in print when so many, like The Boston Phoenix and The Providence Phoenix, have folded. It’s been staple reading for me since The Better Half and I settled here.
“Lessons in Sacrifice,” Style Weekly, 20 May 2020, 11 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/lessons-in-sacrifice/Content?oid=16027130).