By this point, the Covid Pandemic, or at least the part of it that befell us from 2019-2023, has had some profound impacts---not least on this writer.

  The sign and oral announcement on London’s “Tube,” or subway, more or less sums it up: ‘Mind the Gap.” While intended to keep the uninitiated or oblivious from stepping into the void between the platform and the train at some of the tube stops, I view it as the way Covid impacted me.

Thus far, I am lucky in not having had the virus, although friends have, and some did not make it unscathed. Yet there is still a space in my now elderly life that the pandemic caused. If you will, it produced a “gap” in my life experience which still affects me today.

Where did the time go? What experiences were foregone in order to shelter here in the forests of the Front Range that now are lost to time? Is my life now less than it might have been because of it? Of course, many other choices made have also added or deducted more or less to my experiences, but something about living through a pandemic adds a layer that never occurs for many. You had to be there.

I still tried to be useful, producing writings for the Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (where the abject poverty made the pandemic far worse), but somehow the isolation, the “shelter in place” wearing a mask, seemed like a step away from anything I had ever experienced. I know I am not alone in this feeling, but want others to reflect and consider what the pandemic did to them. Hopefully, it will help us appreciate one another more, albeit that the current political milieu in this country might make one feel differently. We are in it together, as we were during the “gap.”

Did I mind the gap, or did the gap mind me?

Ask yourself the same question as we careen into the future, and more gaps!