HARLINGEN — It’s a New Year, and yesterday and the day before that and all the others fall away.
We remember the madness of Uvalde and Buffalo, we think of life transforming from the COVID pandemic into a new era of guidelines and restrictions and health concerns and the heightened vigilance of students and teachers.
We’ve all been through Hell with all this, but we’re not thinking of recent insanities but of the glowing promises spreading before us.
Arlette Mares, 11, takes turns with her friends shooting baskets at the LeMoyne Gardens Unit of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Harlingen. She looks forward to spending more time with family, friends, and perhaps visiting Houston.
Rabbi Frank Joseph at Temple Beth Israel looks forward to more classes with youngsters, more field trips, more congregants leaving the isolation of remote services and returning to Synagogue in person. He looks forward to reading from the Torah and say prayers and singing songs in the company of his fellow Jews.
Prof. Enriqueta Ramos, retired, would like to see her home built after it was burned to the ground last summer.
“When I make a resolution, I intend to keep it,” says Ramos, 90, with as much command of her faculties as she was decades ago working with famed civil rights activist Cesar Chavez.
“I think the resolution I’m making this year is to have more patience not only with myself but with what’s going on in the city and the school district and all of that,” she says. “The house, that’s one of the things that I’m praying for patience, they haven’t even started. They said they would start around the middle of January.”
New Year’s resolutions are famous for people wanting to get in shape. The gyms fill quickly early into the New Year with people hitting the bikes and the treadmills.
Curiously, though, that influx doesn’t begin until at least mid-January, says Drew Goodrich, general manager at TruFit Athletic Club at 1001 N. Ed Carey.
“What I can say is last year it was probably – February was much bigger in growth than January,” he says, “just because people are still a little reluctant, they’re waiting, and they’re trying to finish out a contract from another gym. We don’t do contracts. We’re month to month.”
TruFit is offering specials for the New Year, with one directed toward emergency responders, military, law enforcement, and health care responders.
On a fresh December afternoon the gym is alive with the growling of pulleys and the “thunk-thunk” of weights and the verbal exertions of the healthy and those who strive to be. The familiar smell of sweat hovers in the air and faces clench.
Gustavo Macias, 33, with a physique that reveals the effect of heavy workouts for many years, says he plans to simply stay consistent with his gym work and diet.
“I want to get more focus on my goals and be more strict,” he says between sets on the leg extension machine.
“Me and my cousin have a goal to open up our own supplement store,” he says.
Jacklynne La Belle, 20, hopes to get back to a more consistent regimen.
“I want to start going to the gym at least five times a week,” she says. “I want to journaling every morning. I also want to graduate by next fall and become a veterinarian.
Birds and butterflies have captivated the attention of 15-year-old Ryan Rodriguez for most of his life. He’s a familiar face around Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and the National Butterfly Center in Mission, lugging around with his camera capturing fabulous pictures.
“I’m going to Panama in October,” he said. “What I really want to see in Harpy eagles. We’re going down to the Darien.’
While he’s acquired a talent for identifying birds and butterflies, he’d like to build even more on what he knows.
“I’d like to learn more about behavior instead of just watching them,” he said. “I’d like to spend some time with an individual bird or butterfly and know it’s habits. And just get more involved in the community.”
That word “community” seems to have taken a very different meaning after the shredding and unraveling and the reassembling and the reconfiguration of all our lives. It would appear that emerging from the uncertainty of COVID and the reeling of shootings across the country, Americans have developed a much stronger sense of family, friends – and community.
