My mother always used to say, “If you can’t say anything nice about COVID, don’t say anything at all” — which was quite prescient on her part!! But that little pearl, that nugget of wisdom, explains my 8-month absence from this blog. Now, I could get all retrospective here, talking about the pandemic experience, but it seems like whatever I would say could never capture what so many have gone through. I’ll leave that to others to try to express. Let me just say that I’m now double-dosed, and glad to be rejoining the world.

For me and my family, thank the Lord above, we’ve come through unscathed and have tried to make the best of a really bad situation. We did get to bond more closely than ever — our house just isn’t all that big. But as I’ve come to learn, there’s a fine line between bonding and just being annoyingly close.

Apparently, I’m a hover-er.

Since there really weren’t many people around my house to interact with, I started to just hang out wherever Carrie was. You can guess how thrilled she was about that!

“Why are you just standing here? Go do something,” Carrie would say.

“There’s nothing TO do,” I’d reply.

“Then just get away from me,” she’d say. “You’re hovering.”

“I’m NOT hovering,” I would say. “I’m just hanging with you, because there’s nothing else to do.”

“No, you’re hovering. Go hover somewhere else.”

So I’d laugh to myself, and think “What a maroon!” You can’t hover someplace else. You have to hover OVER something, and since Carrie most of the time was the only other thing in the house that moved, it was simply more interesting to hover over her. Watching her make lunch, watching her make dinner, watching her load the dishwasher. I was fascinated. She, on the other hand, felt something else. Finally, she said something like — actually EXACTLY like — “You have nothing to do? How about showering? Brushing your teeth? Getting dressed? General grooming?? ANYTHING!!???!?!”

WIngs clipped, my hovering days were over. Just like that.

I also learned that I’m a lot like my aforementioned mother (may she rest in peace) when it comes to playing games, which we did a lot during the lockdown. I learned that like her, I have no tolerance for slow play. Our go-to during the pandemic has been “Yahtzee.” It’s a stupid dice game over which you have no control. (Full disclosure: we must have played 100 games of Yahtzee, and I did not win ONE!)

You get three rolls of five dice to make poker hands. After each roll, you have to decide if you are going to go for a straight, or multiples of a kind, or a full house, etc. You could decide to keep some dice and roll some , keep them all, or roll them all again. Oh, if I could have back the literal hours of my life lost waiting for those decisions to be made. I would feel the burn slowly rising, much like Ralph Kramden, then erupt with a big “GET OUT!!” For some reason, after a time, we just stopped playing. And I can’t decide if I somehow had something to do with that.

Anyway, that’s all behind us now. It’s spring, flowers are blooming, people are vaccinated and coming outside (most with masks). Now that I think about masks, during the pandemic, I’d wear masks all day, then go to bed, and put on a mask of a different kind — from the dreaded sleep machine. My face has more lines on it than the tables at Studio 54! (Throwback joke #71)

Speaking of getting high, smoking pot was made legal here in New York during the pandemic. We went to a restaurant last week with some friends, and were seated outside, but in an area apart from the other outdoor seating. So without delay, I suggested we smoke a bowl. “C’mon, it’s legal!” I said. (Of course, in the law’s fine print, it DID say something about not being able to smoke weed in the same places you can’t smoke cigarettes — like restaurants.) But we were outdoors, and not really “in” a restaurant, so if we ran into legal trouble, I firmly believe we had a case.

We smoked, and I left my bag of weed right on the table), and when the waiter came to bring the bill, he saw it but said nothing. As if it happened all the time.And If I have anything to say about it, it WILL happen all the time.

Just call me Mr. Happy!