A small story:

Consort called from the road, to tell me he'd be back in an hour, we'd get the recipes from yesterday's class out for folks. Two minutes later, he called back.

"You butt-dialed," I shouted as I picked up because this has happened before.

It wasn't that.

"Laurie just called me," Consort said, sounding smaller than usual, "Clark died this morning."

"Oh, honey," I said and we were quiet. Clark was one of his oldest friends; Consort had married Laurie and Clark. For the past few years, he'd been living with early-onset dementia.

Three years ago, I directed a short. Clark, newly diagnosed but still eager to help, to use what he still knew, worked on the crew. Hell, along with a friend of the Kid, he and Consort were the crew. They had worked together for years; I watched their shorthand, now imperfect.

A few times during the shoot, I saw Clark explain something camera-related to Kid's friend, show him a trick or a shortcut for when you have more creativity than time or money. Even in the insanity of shooting I thought, "Remember this moment."

Clark had gone to film school but much of what you learn as a DP you learn through oral history, who you work for. He worked his entire adult life behind the camera, often with legends.

There is a saying to the effect that every time an elderly person dies, a library is destroyed. Clark wasn't elderly, but in his craft he was a library.

Every day, a shelf of books was being burnt up.

That day, he saved a few books by handing them off to an 18 year old kid.

Humans are notoriously bad at measuring risk and loss. We may understand that over 250,000 Americans have died of COVID but I defy you to give that context without using a football stadium.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. People who are afraid of vaccines which, statistically will never give them more than a briefly sore arm will shrug off an easily-passed lethal virus as "I know I'm safe."

I offer them this. https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu 
They will go anyway.

A single small wedding in Maine led to outbreaks in a long-term care facility where six people who didn't make the choice to attend a mask-free event, died.

Six libraries, bombed.

We have had three friends die this year. One COVID, one not, one maybe.

Even the not-COVID deaths are COVID deaths, though; if you are dying alone in a hospital, if the nurse holding your hand looks absolutely exhausted and is covered in plastic, if no one can come together and remember the library you were, how are you not one more COVID casualty.

I know this is the Small Story where, chronologically, I'm supposed to be Thankful ™ and I am. Potable water, Kid, no bedbugs, better guy than I deserve, not running from incoming shells, traitors about to get what's theirs, it's a wonderful goddamn life.

And yet.

The loss.

We have lost over a quarter of a million Americans, needlessly. Our children have lost a year of finite and precious developmental period their lives. There are people who will be gone by next year, even if they never catch COVID.

We lost tomorrow with them.

Add in the relatives we've lost of @OANN and @newsmax, people whose fear has been weaponized to the point that it's plausible they might be lost to what you used to unironically refer to as "Polite table talk."

Every day, more libraries go up in flames and we never get a chance to mourn what we have lost because we're desperately trying to wet down our own metaphorical roofs. We're beginning to talk about a vaccine, an exit strategy, who will get the shots first.

Hugging each other.

All of this is well and good but there's a reason some of the earliest markers of humanity are burial sites. One book I am reading theorized that earlier anthropologists got it backward about humanity. We didn't start burial rituals once we started planting.

We started planting to stay close to our dead.

Thanksgiving began from the simple expression of relief that in a world with very little margin of error, a small band of humans had made it another season and might, fingers crossed, make it through the darker days ahead.

If we weren't so fragile, we wouldn't be so thankful.

When we are free again, we will be so grateful and there will still have been immeasurable loss. We're complicated, we can hold two thoughts at once. I understand the impulse to put miles between yourself and grief but if we do that, it's not as if the libraries burnt.

It will be as if they never existed at all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Stay safe.