Patriots' Day 2022

I'm pretty broken-record about it, but Patriots' Day is a holiday that I really love. The reasons - Massachusetts' own, spring, baseball, the Marathon - are summarized in this post from 2014. Now 2014 was pretty much an annus horribilis for me. My husband died in February, and as of my 2014 Patriots' Day post, one of my oldest and dearest friends was in hospice, two days from her death. So, annus horribilis alright.  

By the way, if you think that I'm familiar with the term because I took four years of Latin in high school, you would be wrong. I know the coinage from Queen Elizabeth's use of it in 1992, when she used it in a speech to refer to what had been a horrible year for her: separations (Andrew-Fergie), divorces (Princess Anne), scandalous pictures (Fergie), scandalous books (Diana), and a fire at Windsor Castle. The fire at Windsor was pretty substantial. Repairs cost in the tens of millions of pounds, and Queen Liz herself chipped in a couple of million. As a result of the fire, people had to start paying to get in to get a gander at Windsor and Buckingham. And as a result of this tax on the royal-loving public, the Queen agreed to start paying taxes on her hefty income. So an annus horribilis by anyone's standards.

As for the origins of the term. Hard to believe that in the thousands of Latin-as-a-language living or semi-moribund years leading up to 1891 it had never been uttered at least once by someone or another. Surely, the Romans experienced an annus horribilis or two. But the first usage that Wikipedia points to is this one. And it's a lulu. 

The phrase "annus horribilis" was used in 1891 in an Anglican publication to describe 1870, the year in which the Roman Catholic Church defined the dogma of papal infallibility. 

Question: Could I love this more?

Answer: No. 

Anyway, as anni horribilis go, this isn't one for me personally. Things keep chugging along and, while the Ukraine situation is heartbreaking and scary, and it looks like we'll never fully shake covid, mostly things are okay. For me. Personally. But ask me in November if a certain autocratic, fascist-adjacent tending political party has wrested control of the House and/or the Senate and are rubbing their hands together in drooling anticipation of sticking it to us coastal elites by destroying democracy altogether, and this may well turn into an annus horribilis yet. 

As for now, things are looking up a bit, at least on the covid front. It's still lingering, but for now it seems as if the worst is over. Those of us who've been religious about vaccination, and at least semi-religious about masking (I'm still an in-the-store masker), seem to be exempt from the worst of it: hospitalization and death. And other than having sympathy for those who cannot for some reason be vaccinated, and for folks with kids under the age of five, I am completely drained of sympathy for anyone who has refused to get their jabs in.

And other things are good (enough).

The flowering trees in Back Bay are flowering. The swan boats are once again gliding around the Public Garden lagoon. The runners are running. And, as of Friday, the Boys Are Back. (That is, the Red Sox are playing at Fenway.)

Although you have to fight through the Marathon-watching

crowds to get in and out of Fenway Park, the Patriots' Day game - and the Red Sox are always home; and the game is always at 11 a.m. - is much my favorite of the year.

The weather can be chancy. A few years ago, the game was canceled because it was in the forties with howling winds and icy rain. (Poor runners! The Marathon ran on.) But sometimes the weather is gloriously balmy. Today the weather will be okay. Sunny-ish. Cloudy-ish. In the mid-fifties. A tiny bit chill, but I've sat through worse. And it is good for the runners, which is as it should be. 

The Sox are off to an erratic, bouncy start, but what else is new?

I've got great tickets, and will be there with three of my favorite people in the world: my sister Trish and my nieces Molly and Caroline. My only quibble is that it's no longer possible to get physical tickets (unless you go through some sort of antler dance and prove that you're over 80 and don't have a smartphone or something). You have to have the MLB app on your phone, and for some reason they don't give you the bar codes for your tickets until a day or so before game day. (This is a post for another day.)

Meanwhile, I'm happy it's Patriots' Day. I'm happy it's spring. And I'm happy to be watching baseball.