I woke up this morning with my usual pandemic dread – what’s going to happen next?  But as has been my wont these past months, my brain automatically changed tracks. I thought of our previous good night phone call, of the intricate knitting pattern I’d been working on all evening, of a planned granddaughter dinner later in the week.

But what was I going to write about this Monday morning? Nothing came at first until I realized what this dread was all about. I’m really mad.

Mad that at 76 years old so many of the good things about my life are gone. When will I ever see my lifelong sister-friend in Virginia? Will I see my actual sister again, deep in Louisiana, or ever get to know the rest of my siblings (there are five others on my birth mother and father’s sides). Four sisters-in-law, three in their 80s – one in Augusta, are all dear and now only a voice on the phone or an email message. And how about the niece Wally called ‘Uncle Susie’?

Four granddaughters, teens all, after months of doing jigsaw puzzles with Mom and Dad when they should have been huddling with friends, are only now able to venture out to the truncated version of school we adults have been able to offer. Everyone knows how precarious “in-school learning” is these days, ready to shut down at a moment’s notice. The oldest is writing her college admissions; what will college life be like for her? At a time when kids need to be stretching the ties to home, learning to be independent adults they’ve been pulled firmly back into the bosom of the family.

The two grandsons, still young enough to be happy chasing each other around, miss their friends too. There were two drive-by birthday visits for the boy turning 9 last week, and sometimes a letter for one or the other turns up in the mail, addressed in pencil in a childish hand.

Four other grands, my oldest son’s, are navigating life in a boarding school where Bill is a teacher. He and his wife are dorm parents, living adjacent to a dozen teen-age boys from all over the world. Two of theirs are remote learning elementary students, one is enrolled in the boarding school, and the oldest is in college. None of their lives are “normal.”

My youngest, at 2, is experiencing outdoor school with other toddlers. What happens when it gets really cold?

My solitary friends weigh heavily on my mind, living alone, often a dog for a companion, or, worst case, only Alexa to talk to. Many are widowed, so they’re coping with the sad absence of the one they loved most, and at the same time separated from the rest of society. Our Monday night knitting group has morphed into an afternoon spent sitting appropriately apart under Julie’s trees or on my deck, each bringing her own utensils for the potluck lunch we share. What will we do when it gets really cold?

I cynically dismissed the idea of a “church family” for years until I found myself in the middle of one. Our United Christian Church family has been zooming for months now with only a couple of outdoors in-person services this summer. There we sit, every Sunday morning, at our computers and wave to one another as the Zoom screen comes up. A few, without the tech know-how or equipment, join by phone. We see their names on the screen, a blank spot where their face should be. I want to smile at Mary, at Lori, at Pene.

Soup Café, a Thursday noon fixture at the Community Building for several years, is sorely missed. We ate, chatted, and when someone had died, mourned with one another, always accompanied by several harmonicas in the background. Sometimes a dozen, sometimes 40 people came by for soup and friendship. Will we ever get to meet again over soup and conversation?

Nursing homes – care facilities I guess we call them now – are the worst, keeping visitors away for the safety of all, and in many cases, kept in their rooms. A piece on Tall Pines in the Bangor Daily News a few months ago highlighted Pat Pendleton and her daughter, Ruthie, separated by a window, unable to hug or even talk to one another. Ruthie still visits her mom, outside her window every day (and sometimes more than once) even in the rain, keeping both their spirits up. According to his sister, when Owen Weyers died last week he hadn’t been able to see his wife in months.

Other than a handful of Friday nights this summer, sitting outdoors at the Pub, listening to music, eating our way through a plate of wings, social life for my friend and I has been bleak. And starting to get downright chilly.

So, mad at the virus that’s sweeping the country? No, it’s time to say it. The man in the White House (or more correctly, in Walter Reed Army Medical Center) is and has from the beginning, shown himself totally unfit to lead our country. Any president in my lifetime, Eisenhauer through Obama and all the ones in between, would have told us what we had to do to get through a pandemic.

No excuses, no lies, no blame, just give us a plan. Call together all 50 governors, both the “red and the blue” (isn’t that a ridiculous way to characterize our states?) and work out a strategy. Make it clear that our economy, our very lives depend on everyone cooperating. Invoke the act (I can’t think of the name) that requires industry to retool and provide the critical PPE that still is in short supply. Have the Federal Government distribute the stuff. Encourage states to work together, not undermine each other. Always wear a mask.

Enact contact tracing. Engage social media, set up a task force. Get Silicon Valley involved. Hire all the folks who’ve been thrown out of work, then train them. How about a Peace Corps like force of the young? The ideas are out there.

Tell us the truth.

I thought for a minute or two Trump got it when he talked about being a wartime president, ready to gear up and fight the virus. But that phase passed quickly, as his focus changed to the next shining object to distract us.

Instead, our President, who’d already scrapped the detailed instructions for dealing with a pandemic left by the Obama administration, played it down and played on our divisions. Wearing a mask was for pussies, for those Liberals. Real men knew the whole thing was a hoax.

You can still see it here, right in our own town.

He couldn’t have done this alone. If the members of his own party, the Senators and Representatives who are supposed to speak for us back home in Lincolnville and every other town, had disagreed with him, criticized him, held him accountable, stood up for our country for goodness sake, his incompetence would have been exposed.

For quite a while I imagined that Susan Collins would step into Margaret Chase Smith’s shoes with her own Declaration of Conscience, criticizing the President and those in her party who supported his mishandling of the pandemic. Instead we see her trying to play nice with both sides, telling each what they want to hear. If her recent history is any sign, she'll talk a good game, then vote with her party wherever it goes.

Many Republicans (and former Republicans) have spoken up, but they’re not the ones in power, the ones who are up for re-election. This past week-end Ted O’Meara, one of those former Republicans, laid it out in an op-ed in the Portland Press Herald. I’m proud to be related to Ted, married to my second cousin, and not afraid to say it like it is.

I expect this column will generate a lot of heat. And that makes me sad because I know I’m speaking directly to many in our town whom I consider friends. We’ve probably never been on the same side politically, but there was a time when our political affiliation was only one part of who we were. You and I were also neighbors, customers or store keepers, fellow members of this or that organization, perhaps relatives. Today, for a variety of reasons too tangled to go into, we judge each other first by whether we’re for or against you-know-who.

Wally had a unique position in the early days when he was the principal at LCS for a number of years; he was forming bonds with families all over town. When an older, bearded fellow knocked on my door a year or so ago saying, “Diane, I want to give you a hug” I didn’t hestitate to open the door and invite him in. At first I had no idea who he was, but knew he was probably one of Wally’s students. No, he was a classmate of my son’s, as I figured out pretty quickly. But that’s the way it is in this town.

The goal of my career, and truthfully, writing about Lincolnville has been my career, has been to help us see each other as a community. From back in the day when an out of stater moving in next door was a big deal (have I ever told you the stories that circulated about us back in the summer of 1970 when Wally and I bought this house?) to today’s diverse population of young families, retirees, and singles from all over the country I’ve tried to highlight us all. Our diversity is what I love most about our town. The last thing I want to do is throw away those relationships. But today I’m so mad.

Wally died about a week after the Inauguration four years ago. The last words he said to us  were: “Trump’s all yours”.