I quote the famous last stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” as it has such relevancy today.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
This vile pandemic has claimed lives, the means of making a living, disrupting every aspect of our entire society. The tragedies that ensue have been a tsunami of pain and heartbreak. More than a half million lives lost in the US alone, and the impact on small business, and all the people they employ incalculable. Restaurants, the arts and all the other service industries have been particularly hard hit, rendering actors, technicians, waiters, kitchen staff, hairdressers, unemployed. One such victim is our beloved Double Roads Tavern in Jupiter where we were regulars for years to enjoy their Sunday night jazz sessions. I’ve written about the restaurant in these pages and my Twitter feed on Sundays frequently highlighted a brief clip of performances. They give a sense of the restaurant’s community experience and the high quality jazz they sponsored on Sunday nights. Vince Flora and his wife Kelly opened the restaurant in 2014. Vince frequently played on the DR stage with his rhythm and blues band, Big Vince and the Phat Cats .
The Palm Beach Post tells the story at this link.
I would be remiss in not covering the closing in this blog as it has been an important part of our lives, and so many others. My wife, Ann, said it best in a heartfelt letter to Kelly:
Dear Kelly,
It was such a pleasure getting to know you a little and seeing that gorgeous smile during the several years we were regulars at your Sunday Night Jazz Fests. You always saved our favorite table, right in front of Rick and the band. I loved seeing Cherie too, who always gave us a hug. We never knew who we were going to see, from little Ava Faith to an eye-popping, sophisticated Ava only a few years later belting out the standards like a pro. We met Yvette Norwood Tiger there and still follow her very successful career, booking her Palm Beach International Jazz Festival from its beginning.
We met Mike and Linda at your Club, a very fortuitous friendship as they insisted we consider joining them on the weeklong Jazz Cruise in early 2020. We did and it was the highlight of a most dismal year. Thanks to them, we saw Emmet Cohen again on board the ship, a young brilliant and charismatic jazz pianist we had seen once in a NY Jazz club and totally flipped over. He has held Monday night jam sessions in his NY apartment on YouTube which we never miss. That lifted our spirits during this Pandemic. And it’s all thanks to you guys and Double Roads!
Once COVID hit, Bob and I went into quarantine on March 12th and never left the house for most of the year. That hurt us too, as it meant the end of our standing Sunday night Jazz dates.
Now I can only imagine what you and Vince are going through, closing what was a labor-of-love restaurant/dive/bar/music hangout. Whatever you two decide to do, wherever you go, I’m sure your hundreds and hundreds of faithful customers will follow. I wish you good luck and good health. You contributed so much to our well being that we will never forget you.
Fondly,
Ann & Bob
P.S. we LOVED your hamburgers!
I think of that tragedy as being emblematic of the larger issue, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and the infinite number of similar wide ranging effects of the pandemic with an overwhelming sense of sadness and anger: as a nation we failed. Period. While it would have been impossible to avoid the impact completely, it could have been ameliorated by not denying it and listening to science, and following their recommendations scrupulously. How many lives were needlessly lost as a consequence? Even one is too many if the result of negligence. We must hold our leaders accountable.
The saddest part is we are still fighting a cultural war using the pandemic as the battle ground, the anti-vaxxers taking up Trumpism. How can we reach herd immunity when “leaders,” such as our Governor DeSantis, comes out against some form of “vaccination passport?” One anti-vaxxer wrote a letter to the editor of the Palm Beach Post, asking that vaccinated people “respect” her “right” not to be vaccinated and not to segregate her from public venues. It was a reasonable letter, but the logic deeply flawed. I tried to write an equally reasonable letter to the editor, but it turned into an essay so they published it as a “guest columnist.” Here is the link but as they sometimes do not allow non subscribers to view, I include a photograph of the column.
Will we be forced to live with this virus for the foreseeable future due to “perceived” personal liberties? In a rational society, that would seem unthinkable, but we’ve lived with outdated gun laws for decades due to the same problem. There are now so many of these mass killings that I’ve given up writing about more sensible gun control laws, particularly to eliminate military style weaponry (which was not the intent of the Second Amendment). Is this America’s future, an uncontrolled pandemic, wearing masks, having high hospitalization rates, those injured by gun assaults lying next to those with COVID? Mass burials? Are we already spiritually dead as Eliot implies in his poem?
Perhaps this is how a once great society, a representative democracy formerly the envy of the world, finally implodes. “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
