Michael Field's Blog

This is the 2021 installment of the Field Family annual holiday letter.   Years ago, we stopped mailing out physical cards in favor of emails which had the collateral effect of replacing short, heartwarming, personal messages with this long, impersonal, canned message.   We swapped our hand cramps and hundreds of dollars in postage for an electronic missive that your spam filter will likely put in your junk mail folder. Such is progress. Most of us regarded 2020 as a lost year as we spent the bulk of the year in lockdown of one form or another. Well, let me introduce you to 2020’s cousin – 2021. And pundits are reminding us that the coming New Year is pronounced 2020 too! If you came here looking for a litany of travel and life events, this is not shaping up to be that kind of holiday letter. Lenora and Michael are both about as good as could be expected. One highlight of the year was Michael turning 70.   Evan surprised him by flying in unannounced and Michael was treated to an Ou

Our daughter, Elizabeth received her Ph.D in the Spring of 2020 and moved to Salt Lake City to teach and conduct research as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Utah. In other circumstances, we would have helped her move but, due to COVID, we knew nothing about her living situation or the environs of her new location.   Thus, traveling to see her and see where she was making her new life was a very high priority. Plus, we had a new granddog, Piper, to meet. Early spring, we were double vaccinated but were still being reasonably cautious as was Elizabeth. She was willing to have us stay with her but the last thing we wanted to do was bring the virus with us.   We planned the trip for when finals were over so Elizabeth would be available to do things with us such as hiking and exploring. Having enjoyed the Moab area two years before on our trip to Santa Fe, we wanted to continue exploring the National Parks and natural wonders of that part of the country.   As it turned out, our

  As the pandemic nears the end of its 2 nd year and seems to be barreling into its 3 rd year, it is easy to point to the negative ways it has impacted our lives. In this reflection, written to complement the 2021 holiday letter, I want to focus on silver linings. The clouds have been ominous at times and certainly have been persistent like Seattle’s weather, but there have been bright spots. Some were only bright when viewed in contrast to worst case scenarios, while some were truly illuminating. Most of had to use Zoom or the equivalent platforms for work and/or social groups. While in many, many cases, an email or two could have replaced a meeting for the purposes of information transfer, people have clung to the meeting, physical or virtual, as it retains the human presence. Virtual meetings, for their part, provide the appearance of people being present.   Those of you who have attended Zoom meetings in dress shirts or blouses while wearing pajama bottoms know the term ‘fully

  January 2021 was spent trying to get appointments for Lenora and I for the recently released COVID-19 vaccines. We were both over 65 and qualified relatively early but the process of actually getting the vaccine into our arms was frustrating. It would be hard to define a more Byzantine system. The federal government bought the vaccine doses from the manufacturers and then gave them to the states. Each state was thus at liberty to define their own policies. North Carolina has a rational governor who, following the advice of a well-grounded science advisor, set rational high-level policies – so far, so good. But then, North Carolina delegated the distribution of the vaccine to the 100+ counties while retaining legal ownership. The counties were then at liberty to define their individual distribution policies and protocols. It also meant that 100+ information systems had to be created to make and track appointments resulting in mass confusion as there was no one right answer to the

    New York City has always had a mythical presence in my life. Growing up, it was where my grandmother lived. As an adult, it was the center of commerce that my wife and I commuted into for work. Now, it is home to our son and his girlfriend and, as retirees, it gleams as a tourist attraction. I have experienced the city across several decades; indeed, I have seen it through many different sets of eyes. Looking out from my childhood home in Maine, Boston was the nearest major city, but the towering buildings of NYC loomed over it in my psyche. One of my earliest toys was a set of Lego-like building blocks which, when assembled, made a model of the Empire State Building. The bounty of Thanksgiving and the magic of Christmas were combined in one powerful symbol, the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Christmas morning meant a small, but special, present in my stocking, not from Santa and the North Pole, rather it bore the logo A & F as it was a gift from my grandmother in

  As this is my first time back in the ERUUF sanctuary since last March, I thought it was a good time to share some reflections on what I have learned from my experiences these last 15 or so months.   I titled it “Humanist Reflections” not because I have anything deeply religious or profound to share; rather I did it simply because my number one takeaway is that “Humans need humans!”   Last March, when we were heading into the pandemic, none of us knew what to expect. Most of us thought that we would put our lives on hold for a few weeks then return to ‘Normal’!   Looking back, that thinking seems so naïve, yet it reflects that, for the majority of us, life is basically good and the thing we wanted most was to get back to our lives. Now we know that what we called ‘Normal’ was in fact broken in many fundamental ways and now, rather than return, we need to rebuild better.   So, what have I learned? Well, I learned the importance of human contact to maintain my sanity.   Pre-CO