With credit to John Lennon for writing that line borrowed from his song “Nobody Told Me,” nobody told us there’d be days like these.

I had a day yesterday like we’ll all have, sooner or later, more than once, most likely. A day heavy with the weight of worry, grief, fear, anger. It was tough to focus on anything positive.

Life goes on in weird ways, with some seemingly trivial things taking up a lot of my time; and it’s both comforting and frustrating.

One thing we did yesterday: we discovered a few N-95 masks leftover from a recent summer full of wildfire smoke. We delivered them (safely) to one of our local senior care facilities, which houses our community’s most fragile elders. The staff were grateful to have even a small number of additional pieces of protective equipment.

So let’s write the book of how to deal with days like these, hoping (of course) that our children and grandchildren will be able to read it as history rather than a handbook.