I can tell it isn’t going to be easy. When you are on a vacation, it’s easy to think of things to report in your daily blog. When you are back home again, things become more difficult, murkier. And for the rest of the month, we are going to be back home, with little on our schedule.

But I need to get into a groove, and to report on things that might be interesting to a growing group of readers. How to do that? That is the question.

Often there are thoughts about events in the news that could serve as the basis for a post. But I really haven’t paid much attention to the news for the past several weeks. And I certainly don’t have anything profound to say.

I have been thinking about my social interactions, and whether or not they are still affected, directly or more distantly, by the COVID pandemic. I am part of several groups that have been meeting on Zoom, and I have been the coordinator of three or four of them. But, to tell you the truth, I am tired of what are often repetitive conversations about the same subjects, every two weeks or every month.

I do have some friends I occasionally have lunch with. I like that, and would like to do it more. And, as a couple, I think we used to go out with others more in the evenings – to dinner, to friends’ houses, or they to ours. This has not picked up after the pandemic waned; it has slowed down.

But maybe all of these reactions are simply because we are older, and because our friends are older and, sad to say, several of our friends who we saw on a fairly regular basis five or so years ago are not here any longer at all. Perhaps all of this is inevitable. Just like it might be unsurprising that, while we see friends less often, we see our immediate family more often, and obviously that is a positive.

I am going to leave this at that. We don’t call people, and people don’t call us as often as before. I guess that’s just the way it is. And maybe that’s for the better. And maybe nothing I am saying here is even accurate. Who knows?

OK, let’s move on a bit. Do you know that if the Nats beat the A’s today, and the Mets lose to the Braves, the Nats will no longer be in last place the National League East? They will be a half game ahead of the Mets. Who would have thought that even possible? Just like the Nats and the Cardinals now have identical records. That is another impossibility. But those of you know follow baseball probably already know that, and those who don’t are saying “who cares?”. OK, I get it.

One more topic. I continue to read my old Penguin paperbacks. I took two on our trip to Portugal. The first was D. H. Lawrence’s “Aaron’s Rod”. I have read quite a bit of Lawrence and enjoyed virtually everything I have read. “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and “Kangaroo” are the two most recent, and I have read a couple of his travel books (travel one hundred years ago was much different than travel is today you know). And I have several Penguin editions of Lawrence Books (including “Women in Love”, which I know that I read at one time, but remember absolutely nothing about) which I guess I will be reading over the next year or so.

But I must say that “Aaron’s Rod”, published in 1922, left me totally cold. Aaron worked in a coal mine, living in an English village with his wife and three young children. In his spare time, he played on his flute (strange as that may seem). One day, after helping decorate the Christmas tree, he went to the pub he frequented, spoke with the strange characters he always spoke with, decided that the was leading a life not meant for him, and – carrying his flute with him – simply didn’t go home, and started walking. He wound up in London, he played the flute in various ensembles, he met people, he sent money back to his wife and children, he hit hard times, he lost his flute, and life lost all its promise.

I understand that Lawrence was trying to tell us something, and I could come up with a number of things he was saying but, truth be told, none of them was very interesting or important in my humble opinion. So, there…..

Now I am reading Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”, published in Germany around the same time. “The Magic Mountain” tells the story of promising young Engineer Hans Castorp of Hamburg, Germany, who goes to visit his cousin Joachim in a TB sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland, for a few weeks. Just to say “hi” and to have a rest. But Hans himself becomes diagnosed with TB and now, halfway through the book, Hans has been in Davos for over a year.

Of course, the problem with “The Magic Mountain” is that it is over 700 small print pages long, and filled with detail and tedium and many philosophic conversations, mainly about the nature of life, death and time. This is all brilliant, if not always comprehensible or stimulating, because reading “The Magic Mountain” is like being on the magic mountain yourself. You are too in Davos and you don’t know how long you will be there or what will become of you and you, in your own way speculate about life, death and time, and see you see your friends get sick and die, or get well and leave, or just hang on.

I read “The Magic Mountain” once before – when I was in basic training in the Army in 1968, 55 years ago. Basic training was also a kind of magic mountain, where similar thoughts apply. I debated whether I wanted to re-read it, but knew that I had to.

So here am I, hanging out in Davos (without Bill Clinton and his buddies) wondering how long I will be here, whether I will ever get to climb down the mountain and whether, if I do get down to the “flat land”, I will wish I were back up in Davos, whether the routine of my life was out of my control and all I had to do was look around me, and think about things that I wanted to think about.

That’s it for today. Come back tomorrow.