The world had changed. Most people say for the better, but others longed for the days when you could get cheap illegal labor to do housework and gardening as well as general labor readily and inexpensively. Products that we used to buy at dollar stores – cheap throw away stuff that worked as long as you didn’t use it often or for a lot of different uses were now being made from better quality materials, were made to be repaired and were a lot more costly. As a result, landfill sites were not being filled up as quickly and more and more goods were being produced with the longevity and the recyclability of the product being carefully considered. Cheap online glasses from low wage cost countries had been slapped with tariffs, as had pharmaceuticals that were sourced from offshore. Manufacturing companies had turned away from “Global Sourcing” and were now considering opening factories again that had been closed for years, or in many cases had built new, smaller more efficient factories with much more of the labor being done by robots. All this was a direct result of the 2020 pandemic that was called Covid_19. Air travel was a big factor in spreading this virus globally, and after an antidote and a vaccine to this virus had been developed most of the countries were forced to place a health screening inspection along with the pre boarding checkpoints that had been set up after 9/11. It wasn’t much of a medical exam as far as that goes. Your temperature was taken electronically as you passed through a scanner and if there was a reading that indicated fever you were sent to secondary for a medical check. People soon learned that if you wanted to fly you had better be healthy. Cruise lines hadn’t recovered from this well. Most governments came up with bailout plans for companies, so they didn’t all go bankrupt. But the major cruise lines had, to save taxes, domiciled themselves in foreign countries. The governments that had the ability to bail them out said that since they were foreign companies, they should go ask the country where they were domiciled for a bailout. The same thing happened to a lot of companies that had set up operations around the world with their headquarters in a foreign country. Not our problem said the government. We do realize that you employ a lot of American, or Canadian or British or citizens of other countries where they had factories, but your headquarters are not in our country. Too bad, so sad. Now I must admit that there were a few teething problems getting countries back up and running with their own manufacturing facilities. Those high-priced glasses that you were buying from optical stores in the local mall – well, the lenses were all made offshore and shipped here. There were still a few local companies that made specialty lenses, but even when they tried to ramp up production a pair of glasses now took about 6 to 8 weeks to get the lenses. Contact lenses were not as bad, because a lot of them were made in Ireland and many countries still had a free trade agreement with them. This virus, which originated in Wuhun, China and spread all over the world, killed a horrendous number of people wherever it hit. It mostly affected the old and the infirm and was really hard on people who had lowered immunity. One benefit was that it managed to wipe out a few of the entrenched politicians that had been feeding at the trough for several years. In the US the one benefit was that we finally got term limits for congress and the senate. Another benefit was that here in the US we also managed to get a form of health care that was available to all for a lower cost so that was a real bonus. Fighting the virus was so expensive and we lost a lot of people that should have lived because they didn’t have health care, which was a real incentive to force the government to provide health care to all. Another real shakeup was to religion. Those that believed in God were adamant that this virus was God’s way of showing his displeasure at the world, as there was not even one country that avoided this completely. This drew a number of people back to churches. However, there were also a large number of religious people that could no longer live within the church, because they felt that this was not the correct way for God to show his displeasure. I am catholic, and for years I had been attending Holly Mary Church over on Elm Street. I liked the main priest a lot. Father Matthew was, to me, a straight, no bull talker. His sermons were pertinent, to the point, and best of all were fairly short. Farther Matt, as he called himself, was quite popular with the congregation. And he practiced what he preached. He almost died himself from the virus because he continued to work the church food kitchen right up until he tested positive for the virus. And so many of his homeless and drug addicted people died, after his recovery he felt he could no longer return to the pulpit. One of the good things about the virus was that it killed off a lot of druggies. Some of the homeless didn’t deserve to die, because a lot of them were on the streets because of mental health problems, or job losses. The virus didn’t care what their reason for being on the streets was. It killed a lot of them off. Father Matt didn’t quite see it that way. He mourned each and every one of his people, and when this virus was under control he resigned from the church, left the priesthood and went out into the poor and homeless part of the city, where he rented an old storefront and started his own ministry. Father and I had been fairly good friends, so I headed over one Sunday to hear another of his sermon’s and to visit with him. I like glasses. Always have and always will. Father Matt was extremely shortsighted and the glasses he had worn for several years were a wire frame angular pair that had small eye sized lenses. When I say angular, they were narrower at the nose side than they were at the temples. His lenses must have been a very high index as they were slightly biconcave and showed plenty of cut in, even though they were only about 8mm thick at the outer edge. I expect I stared at his glasses a lot, but I could never bring myself to ask him any questions. We often had coffee at the rectory after church was over, and I had not seen him for a couple of months, so I had missed our chats. When I got to the storefront and walked inside, I could tell that there had been a lot of work put in to make the place look decent. In the 4 months he had been here he had garnered a lot of parishioners, as the place was filling up fast. Father Matt had gotten a new pair of glasses as well. He was standing at the door and was now wearing a black framed Ray Ban Wayfarer style of frames. On looking at them I could tell that while I doubted that his prescription had changed at his age of 45, they looked to be thicker. The lenses were a good 10mm at the sides of the frame. The fronts were no longer slightly biconcave, and there was about an 1/8” of an inch of lens with no prescription in it showing on the left side. The right side had about 3/16” of the same showing and that either indicated that his right eye had a stronger prescription or else his eyes had different PD’s. His eyes, behind the thick lenses, lit up as he saw me. “Andrew, welcome to my “New Life Ministry”. Will you join me for coffee after as usual?” Father Matt asked. I said I would, and I went in and took my seat. He hadn’t changed a bit. His sermon was still to the point, and topical. When the service was over, he took his place at the door, thanked the person for coming, and shook hands with everyone as they left. Not knowing where we were meeting for coffee I stood aside and waited for the last person to leave. He gave me his address. I entered it into my GPS. It wasn’t far, but I was surprised to see that the house looked to be a little run down. Not surprising, because it must have been a ton of work for him to get the church going first. Inside the house was clean, but well worn. The kitchen cupboards were either in need of replacing or at the very least repainting. The old likely asbestos tile floor was worn right through to the underlay in spots. He indicated 4 chairs at the kitchen table and suggested I should sit myself down wherever it suited me. We sat down and started on our coffee’s. I had never brought up his eyesight before and after we had exchanged pleasantries for a while I commented on how I had been shocked to see him wearing new glasses as in the 15 years I had known him this was the first change I had seen in his eyewear. “It was finally a necessity. The old ones were at least a dozen years old, and while the prescription was still good, I was afraid they would let me down. You have likely guessed that I am pretty blind without my glasses.” Father Matt said. “Those are the same prescription, are they?” I asked. “Yes, my eyes haven’t changed for years. I am around -25D for both eyes, I think that the last time my prescription changed was before I entered the seminary and I was still going out with Mary.” he said. “Aha, you sly old fox. You had a girlfriend before you took your vows.” I replied. “I did. And I also had a best friend whose name was Simon. The three of us were inseparable. We used to call ourselves the Holy Trinity as a joke, although Mary in the bible was the mother of God and Simon and Mathew were the apostles. Simon had a girlfriend who was named Lilia and the 4 of us went everywhere until, the day that Simon and Lila broke up.” Matt told me Matt had never opened up to me about his life before he devoted his life to the church, and I wondered what had led to this. We kept talking about other thing and he wondered if I had seen some of his old parishioners at Holy Mary. We had lost a few since he left, so I mentioned them, and we continued to talk about the youth group, and how it was doing. I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure someone had taken over and it was still going. I knew for years that the Catholic Church had a problem with pedophile priests, but in all the years I had known Father Mathew there had never been any problem or even any rumors of any inappropriate actions. And because of the prior rumors, the whole of the congregations everywhere had been watching all priests carefully. “So why did you become a priest if you had a girlfriend?” I asked. “Long story there my friend. But the short version is that Mary decided that she liked Simon better than she liked me. There was no sense fighting it, and I managed to hide my love, so we just went on as friends. They broke up for a short time, but before I could take any action, they got back together. They were engaged to be married, and Simon got the call to go with a mission group to a country in Africa. It was a country known for violence at times, but as hard as Mary tried to talk him out of going, he adamantly insisted he wanted to do this one last thing before they married. So off he went to Africa.” Matt told me. “I sense there is more to this tale.” I said. “Simon never made it to the Mission. The plane landed late, and there was no place to stay. So, they decided to head to their destination. The 4 in the jeep were waylaid by robbers and all 4 were killed.” “That left you free to go after Mary again. Why did you join the church? I asked. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t Mary I was in love with.” Specs4ever March 30, 2020.
https://vision-and-spex.com/a-story-for-the-times-t1666.html