The family took the subway downtown to a dance performance as a favor to the one dance fan in our midst and she thanked us for it afterward. “Thank you for indulging me, I really loved this,” she said. People ought to do that more often. Me, for one. My wife and daughter leave the apartment for hours, leaving me to work in silence. It seems awkward to say, “Thank you for going away,” so I don’t.
I’ve had an easy life, like canoeing down a river, one mile leads to the next, Tuesday follows Monday, obey the rules, portage around dams, don’t approach alligators unless their eyes are closed, and don’t argue with men with large eyebrows carrying shotguns.
Church was fairly full Sunday, the second in Lent, and I stood in back before the organ prelude, enjoying a cup of coffee and a couple introduced themselves, Tom and Jean, visiting from Washington, D.C. Interesting people. He is newly retired from the Defense Department, responsible for maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, and they were visiting New York simply because they like the city. I didn’t introduce myself: I like the city because I’m anonymous here.
As we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.
I got to spend last week in California, seeing people, doing things, from Irvine up to Sacramento, and people kept trying to get me to go with them to vineyards, though I no longer imbibe. I used to and then about 25 years ago I stopped. I am capable of idiocy on my own without adding intoxication to it. And I had a two-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to see me drunk. She and I love silliness, which is a whole other matter.
For the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you’d expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me. I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who’s never owned a gun, hasn’t fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.
When Chip Carter spoke about his father, Jimmy, at a memorial service in Atlanta and told how, when his dad noticed the boy got a poor mark in Latin, Jimmy studied Latin so that he could teach his son, I recognized a standard of fatherhood a good deal higher than my own and I felt bad for a moment until I recalled that it wasn’t my father’s level of fatherhood either. He was a father of six kids and I recall that when I got a C in math, it was my problem and he didn’t get involved.
I know something about elitism, having grown up in the exclusive Sanctified Brethren — we refused to commune with 99.85 percent of Christendom, we looked… Login to continue reading Login…
My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I… Login to continue reading Login…
Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter.