When You Wish Upon A Pinata…

Perhaps it was growing up poor, or just appreciative of every little thing, but we didn’t believe in wasting anything.

We repurposed as much as we could, giving our toys, and our creations, multiple lives and meanings.

A few years ago,, I searched for the best Pinata I could find, to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with our three granddaughters. I discovered a cornucopia of these beauties hanging from the ceiling of a bright, abundant Mexican market, in our Northern California town which is roughly one-third LatinX.

I filled it with candies and toys and we invited some of our granddaughters’ friends over to help us break the Pinata open. We had fun that day, and I rescued the battered Pinata and saved it for another time, another celebration.

Last year, our granddaughters planned an inspired, hopeful, “End of COVID” Party. All we needed was a replica of a COVID virus, prickly spikes and all.

Well, Voila! I re-dressed the Pinata in new garb, and this time, we smashed open the dastardly COVID virus to beat it out of our lives, retrieving the treats inside. We knew there were better days ahead, and that we could overcome any hardship, which is a wonderful meaning of this special holiday.

If only it were that easy to beat COVID, which, as of today, has taken 1.2 million lives in the U.S, and 6.9 million worldwide.

In our family, COVID stole the life of a beloved Matriarch, and laid me low 3 times. We are vaxxed, double vaxxed and triple vaxxed and are planning to get vaxxed again, knowing that without those life-saving vaccines, our bouts with the disease would have been much, much worse.

So, it’s kind of serendipitous, or ironic depending upon your perspective, that today, on Cinco de Mayo, the World Health Organization (WHO) is declaring that the COVID crisis is over.

Perhaps our COVID/Pinata Punching Bag had something to do with it’s demise. It would be nice to believe there was some kind of Karmic Connections, and that we were able to exorcise evil with such a simple act.

Just in case Karma does count here, it’s time to, once again, start repurposing our Punching-Bag Pinatas into the shapes of AR-15’s, Anti-Trans bigots, Racists, book censors, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Nazis, Proud Boys, White Supremacists, Leonard Leo, Kevin McCarthy, Christian Nationalists and a host of other hate-mongers and fanatics infecting our lives, like communicable diseases.

As we used to say when I was head of a terrific national HIV/AIDS action and education organization: “We’ve Got A Lot of Work To Do.”

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