The Days the Earth Stood Still

The Days the Earth Stood Still

It's the last weekend of March, 2020, and it is an historic time, for some sad and scary reasons.

This Saturday morning I am not going to play basketball at the church up the road with my friends as I usually would. The chapel is closed down, off limits. For the last two Sundays we are not congregating at our local church, either, for regular worship. We have been authorized to conduct our own private services in our homes.

Is it the end of the world? Not quite, but it has been the end of a lot of things. At least for now, for most of us, and in a more terminal sense, for the victims of the Corona respiratory virus.

This morning, before the sun came up and while the damp mists and rains alighted on my home not far from the Potomac River,  I was going through some of the saved Internet pages of my cell phone. I have some URLs set on regular feeds or settings, like sports pages that track scores, other sports pages that follow my teams, news pages, pages that inform about religious or other specialty subjects that I like, my own blog, the emails, the social media pages set for me, and some other apps.

The college game scores ended while my Hoosiers were full throttle in the Big Ten tournament. Worse yet, my BYU Cougars had the best chance to make a run through the NCAA than they had had, in perhaps ever. We will never know. The NBA was in its last 5 weeks or so, preparing for the playoffs that would wind up in June. Lots of fun stories to watch there.

This morning I checked my ESPN.com NBA scores page, the one that shows the daily or nightly scores. I saw what date I had left it on.

March 12. All games that evening: postponed. There were about six or seven games scheduled for that day. 

I saw a good one at the bottom of the list on that page, where the Houston Rockets were playing last, maybe against the Lakers. The Los Angeles Lakers, a team I have rooted against since 1983 or so, who have a couple of the best players in the Association this year, and were favored by many to win the whole thing. The Rockets play this run and gun shoot a ton of threes offense, and they have probably the shortest lineup I have ever seen in the NBA, since I started paying attention in the 1980s... Which can be fascinating to watch. Plus they have a former IU player that I have followed more or less closely the last dozen years, Eric Gordan. I like to check his stats.

Not since March 12. Today is the 28th. 16 days of no Rockets, no Lakers, no Pacers, who happen to have my favorite player, who was my mom's last favorite when she was still alive, no Bucks, who were having a phenomenal season and possibly going to the finals for the first time in forever...

But no. Not since March 12 do we observe.

So no, nothing on that day. Not now, a fortnight later. We are on a sports lock down. Nothing for the foreseeable future for months. I hope we will have some baseball and later American football by the end of the summer.

I am teleworking, my wife and kids are shut out from their schools. Including college.

Despite the shutdown of the basketball seasons, the indefinite postponement of baseball, at the youth, college, and pro levels, the upcoming summer Olympics, I am personally okay.

I have my health, I am gainfully employed, my loved ones are safe and healthy, I have time to write and play and read, I have finished up some good books, I am writing a novel that has me motivated...

My personal life is all right, despite the world crisis. 

The world has electricity and food, the problem is ventilators and transport.

Part of the problem is a Chinese government that seems to be a cool customer on one hand while the other hand has some mighty crazy weapons and threats behind their back. They show you one in public but we know that behind the scenes, China kills people that they are not happy with.

Perhaps it was all an accident, like epidemics and pandemics of the past. Some day we may find out, and maybe the revelations will be innocent and by then irrelevant.

Here in the United States many people are dying, others are suffering economically, and I have put it out there to my family and a few coworkers that I believe the poorer nations will suffer from this virus worse than us, hard to believe after seeing the devastation. And the health care workers who have died to save others! China, Italy, Spain, New York... It will go on and on.

Some think that I am morbid or out of bounds, or off topic for discussing, analyzing, estimating the human tolls of this pandemic. COVID-19.

I think this is how I deal with things. Look at a problem,  observe the trends, watch the results of changes over time, calculate the risks and possibilities, assess the issues, re-assess and estimate, analyze, predict, take in more data, inputs, look at some outputs.

80 million will die from it, I think, but admitting that it will be impossible to know for sure because of places in the developing world that cannot keep the tallies.

The days will stand still for many a human in the next year. And sadder still, many of the loved ones will not even attend their funerals or see the bodies of the loved ones lost.

We will stand still for them and mourn.

We will shed a tear, many tears, for the lives lost, the heroes struck down.

This spring it could have been my BYU Cougars versus Kansas in the Final, we will never know. The Cougs were that good, an ESPN model had them in the championship versus Wisconsin.

The Bucks could have played the Lakers in June.

We will never know.

One of the things that we do know is that we hold on tight to the blessings we are dealt.

Thankful, grateful, that our earth has a chance to take a time out, suspend a season of hope, and live for another day. Count our blessings and remember the high costs.

Stand still and reflect. Pause and take a few deep breaths, as some cannot. Life will take up again. And so will sports. And the economy.

Life will move forward, march on, and we will recollect the days like these when things came to a odd and somber halt.