Christmas is rushing in and arriving tomorrow, the Covid-19 Christmas of 2020, that strange mutant promising to be different from any Christmas we’ve ever known. Tomorrow’s odd offshoot will be marked by smaller family gatherings, or none at all, by folks humming familiar carols rather than singing them (their closed mouths hidden behind masks, their shoulders properly distanced). It will be a day in which whopping numbers of friends and relatives greet each other not in person but from afar, their smiles conveyed by  Zoom, or FaceTime, or other fancy apps. But for you, reader of my blog, no matter how or where you spend your Christmas, I wish you a merry day.

Looking at the week ahead, I plan to write about a long-ago trip a friend and I took to Portugal. After our adventures there, we rode a train to Madrid, the city which provided high times and a troublesome secret I’ve shielded for all these years. I’ll reveal that embarrassment in a following episode, confessing at long last my roguish behavior while in the Spanish capital.

Housekeeping note: If you haven’t provided your email address here, please consider doing it now. I put mine in a few weeks ago, and it worked perfectly. I was notified immediately of my last few blogs as soon as they were posted.