"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you
don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."
--J.R.R. Tolkien
This is the story of a shutdown.
Thursday, March 12, 2020. At 9:00 AM, the LBW Ensemble performed at Andalusia Elementary School for over 1000 screaming kids. They made us this sign, which still hangs in our practice room. It would be our last show of the year.
Little did we know that the administration at Red Level School had already begun thinking about heading off the possibility of coronavirus contamination. It was already in my mind that we should probably cancel the show, so I called out to the school and Principal Randy McGlaun agreed that we needed to cancel our show on the 13th.
At this point in the story, there were still MANY unknowns. Looking back, there was no way I'd have guessed that all that transpired over the next seven months was even remotely possible.
It wasn't long before toilet paper started flying off the shelf as well as anything that had Clorox or lysol in it. My friend Dell Trotter posted this hilarious picture.
If you know Dell, you know this is perfectly typical of his humor: truth with a side of laughs. It's about how we all felt at this time: just sanitize EVERYTHING and let's be done with it!! But we were far from done with it.
We quickly realized what was truly the hot commodity....hand sanitizer. This bottle could probably have been sold on Amazon for billions and billions and billions and billions.....
Social distancing became the "thing." It'll probably be the Time Magazine "Word of the Year," although it's two words. We had to find ways to be apart from each other. Several of my friends and I would meet for lunch in a local park with take-out food because we could't sit down in a restaurant for what felt like would be FOREVER. On my own, I usually did a lot of social distancing on two wheels, often through the woods of the Conecuh National Forest or by kayaking either the Conecuh River or the Sepulga River.
Bear in mind, that all this time, all I really wanted to be doing was performing with the Ensemble. But alas....
My friends and I joked that, during this time of staying home from work, we'd all have the best lawns we'd ever had because what else were we gonna do??? Jack and I got quite a bit of stuff done around the house. Every day, it seemed like we figured out something else to check off the list.
By mid April we were already pretty damn sick of COVID19....we had no idea what lay ahead of us, but we found ways to laugh.
That's just funny.
2020....what a year you had been already. But wait...there's MORE!!!
On Sunday, April 19, a tornado passed directly over my house, but we were fortunate that it didn't touch down there. Many in Andalusia/Covington County were not so lucky. You can stop, 2020.
I don't even have good photos of the destruction that County Road 70 sustained. But it was BAD. Ashlyn and I tried to drive there to see if we could help, and nearly ran into a spider web of power lines in the process. We decided it was best if we head on back to the house. All in all, I lost 3 shingles. My next door neighbor, Donald Knox, lost about 15 trees. He'd later lose his precious wife, Judy. It seemed that the farther we went into 2020, the worse it got. I guess that depending on your perception, that's probably true. I know I sure felt like I was ready to see 2020 hit the road. But in all the struggle and mess and cleanup, there were also things like this.
The guy who carved this in what's left of a giant oak tree and I, along with about 10 other guys cut trees out of Antioch Road for over an hour that night just so fire trucks and ambulances could pass. Ashlyn would later tell me she was scared that night. I was too. They say tornadoes sound like freight trains. Wrong. They sound like the engines of F22 fighter jets. LOUD!!
April came and went. May brought Mothers Day, and there was no way on God's green earth that COVID19 was shutting down Mothers Day!! My sister, Jeremie, had us all over, and it was a great day!
We were finding out what living in a pandemic was like. We didn't like it. We adjusted to it, but we didn't like it. No one liked it. And no, we didn't wear masks.
One of the biggest challenges for me was watching Grant's senior year end in complete dissolution. No senior parties. No baccalaureate. No commencement, at least we thought. But the city of Andalusia, and parents of the senior class did a really remarkable thing, and I'll never forget it. They created banners which hung along East Three Notch Street. I still remember seeing Grant's for the first time.
29 years prior, I wore the same cardinal robe. My mother wore it in 1965. Grant was a third generation graduate, and there were even a couple of fifth gens as well. Andalusia has a long-standing tradition of traditionalism, and our commencement ceremony is on par with the Ivy League. If you've seen it, you know. I was slated to perform the prelude, Trumpet Voluntary. I had been looking forward to this for MONTHS. But...nope. Or so I thought.
The administration at AHS was brilliant. They figured out how to give the class of 2020 a commencement that adhered to all social distancing (groan) protocols. To my knowledge, Andalusia had never held commencement on the football field, but we didn't care! We wanted to see our seniors receive their diplomas. They even got Skip Enzor to record all the music ahead of time and had it blasted over the Jumbotron in the stadium.
I didn't want to intrude on my son's event, as I tend to despise the idea of living vicariously through my kids. But...I couldn't help myself. I snapped this photo during the rehearsal the night before.
And then this one, the day of....
I was, and still am, so proud of you Grant Brewer. I'll see you soon, son.
The next week, Nann took the kids to Texas on a trip, so I hit the road on the bike. I intended to drive to Key West, but made it to Orlando. It was then I realized that while I love my bike, 400 miles is all it's really comfortable for in one day.
It is now hilarious to me, but wasn't at the time, that I somehow, in heavy traffic in Tallahassee, inadvertently hit the kill switch with my right thumb, and the bike DIED! LOL. Cars were beeping their horns. I had no idea what was wrong. I never use the kill switch...always the key. I pushed it under an overpass and called Jackson Honda. The guy said "uhhhh...did you hit the kill switch without realizing it??" Why yes. Yes, I did. Did I also mention that it was storming????
It was on this trip that I learned of the George Floyd incident. I called my brother and we talked about it. I was in Perry, Florida. I told him that I thought the US was about to be in a MESS. I was right, it turned out. So...COVID....tornado...mass hysteria...churches closed....and now we're on the brink of civil war. Good times.
June arrived. LBW employees were largely still at home. Grant was now an alumni of AHS. My twins were now HS students. This is where it got challenging for real. Jack was moving to Pensacola to live with his mom, and was going to attend Pensacola HS. 2020....the gift that keeps on giving. For full disclosure, I am OK with his being there. I also miss him. All is well.
June means beach trips. Thankfully, we were able to make that happen!
There's a diner in Gulf Shores that is straight out of the 1950s. The food is great, and it you're lucky, you can sit in the booth that looks like an old Cadillac....and play on a cell phone whilst doing so. LOL.
We knew Grant's ship date for the Marine Corps was getting close, and I wanted to do something special as a send-off. I gathered together about 15 of the men who had been a part of his life, and we had a cookout for him at Frank's house. I also gave him this rifle.
"This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine." Now, it's his. I love you, son.
We spend the rest of June planning a vacation that I wasn't exactly sure would happen....a road trip to Colorado. A few things...
1. I40 across Arkansas sucks.
2. Oklahoma didn't give a rip about covid! LOL.
3. Kansas is FLAT FLAT FLAT.
4. Denver was all boarded up from riots.
5. It was 40 degrees in Grand Lake!
6. Nebraska is just as flat as Kansas.
7. It's a LONG WAY FROM COLORADO TO ANDALUSIA.
8. This was one amazing trip!
July arrived and for me, this meant two things. One was going back to work. I joked that I was almost certain I remembered how to do this. The other thing was that Grant was leaving for the Marine Corps. He'd been waiting for this for a year. The day before he left, we rode motorcycles to Huggin' Molly's in Abbeville. They have a hamburger that's so large that if you eat the whole thing, your whole table eats for free.
Grant would later tell me in a letter from boot camp that he thought he could eat that entire burger in about 10 minutes!
On July 12, 2020, we took Grant to Dothan, Alabama to his recruiter's office. This was the last time I saw Grant (as of this writing).
He went to MEPS at Gunter Air Station in Montgomery, and then on to The Citadel where he'd quarantine for two weeks before shipping to Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and begin his journey by standing on one of these footprints.
Did I forget murder hornets? I think I did. How in the world did I forget murder hornets??? Hornets? That murder?? Far out, man.
Also, this meme appeared in my news media, and it sums up 2020 pretty nicely, I think.
Yeehaw!!!
Stephen Pearce and I joked about how the black helicopters were going to soon be swirling around our houses, so I wanted to make sure he knew how to identify them when they show up, so I shared this handy little chart. 
Personally, I hope it's the Blackhawk or the Chinook that shows up at my house. You hear me, NSA??? A Blackhawk, I say!!! Jed Blackwell hasn't been any help at all in getting me a ride in one. Jerk. Kidding, man.
School actually opened up, to my surprise, and Ashlyn joined the marching band. I used to teach that band and then instructed the drumline several years after that. It's nice to just sit in the stands and be just dad. Yeah, like that's ever gonna be possible. LOLOLOL.
Adjusting to wearing a mask every day at work has been....well....
The eyes are the window to the disgust, right?? I mean the soul!! The soul!!!!!
Hurricane Marco decided to come ashore right over Cameron, Louisiana. My father died in Cameron on February 23, 1977. I haven't been to Cameron in a number of years, but I'd like to go visit again. After landfall, it passed directly over Lake Charles. My dad's best friend and his wife, Monroe and Tina Wicke lived in Lake Charles for years. I last saw them in the fall of 1996 when the Sound of the South travelled to Texas for a football game and we stopped in Lake Charles to eat at a Ryan's Buffet. In the wake of Marco, I was able to reconnect with their son, Greg, and his family. To quote Greg, "God truly works in mysterious ways." Hopefully, I can see them soon, and catch up.
2020 was far from finished....Hurricane Sally was up next. It has been a long time since a hurricane or tropical storm passed directly over Andalusia, but here she came. We got about 15 inches of rain but not much wind. Other places weren't so lucky. Gulf Shores and Pensacola and that whole area was a wreck. The 3-Mile Bridge over Pensacola Bay, which was nearly $600,0000,000 is now in at least three pieces and Skanska is taking HEAT over their being barges being literally all over the bay.
And then October arrived, and with it, Homecoming, at Andalusia High School. Aaaaaand....my 30th high school reunion. Wow. 30 years. Kinda surprised I'm even still alive. Some of my classmates aren't. May they rest in eternal peace. This was Ashlyn's first homecoming at AHS as a high school students. The theme was fairy tales. Ashlyn's freshman class float was based on Cinderella. Watching them build the float was like a medicine to the soul. A little bit of normalcy has finally returned.
Normalcy. What exactly does that mean? I mean, sure, it's weird to me that the two choices.....TWO....for president are a man who is in the early stages of dementia and a blowhard. And yes, we had a tornado and a hurricane pass over our place in the same year. And yes, my son graduated under weird circumstances and left for the Marine Corps. And yes, 6-feet-apart has become a mantra for some. And toilet paper disappeared off our shelves. And we burned our country in places. And things got cancelled. And looking back, I can't believe we shut the whole country down over a virus. Now, granted, I don't know much about pandemics, and I'm not arguing whether or not we should have shut the country down. The point to all of this is simply this: GOOD GOD WHAT A YEAR!!!
There is no doubt in my mind that our mental health has suffered through this. I recently told someone that I would be totally content with it if we shut down again. I then explained why. But that's insane!! We are meant to be social. We are supposed to interact with others, face to face. And to think that I could feel OK with being isolated again tells me that something is off, and I suspect something is off for most of us.
I think one of the biggest challenges we face is the constant attempt we make at having "normal." What even is that? Do we really mean "privilege?" And I don't mean "white privilege," so don't assume that. What I mean is do we just.....expect.....things to go our way simply because we want them to? Isn't that called entitlement? And isn't entitlement exactly the thing that so many of us (Hey! how ya doing? I'm Johnny) preach against??? And if so, isn't that hypocrisy? Woe unto you, scribes, and Americans. Or something like that.
I struggle with this so much, but isn't it enough that we woke up today?? I mean, yes, I am thankful that I can go get a cup of coffee without even having to make it myself...but won't it be OK if a day comes when I can't?? And I mean really OK! Not this "oh it's OK" crap...I'm talking "water off a duck's back" OK!!!
So we had to stay at home for a few months. So.
So one of my kids moved to another town. So. I miss him, yes, but so. I ain't dead yet.
I think that if 2020 has taught us anything, it is that we should NEVER say or think "oh, it won't happen here." Because it can, and it will, and it did....to each of us, in some way or another.
God bless you all.
Have a great day.
