Virus

My first day of school was in 1951, in Jacksonville, Florida, near the Naval Air Base where my dad was stationed, serving in the military that paid for him to study medicine. I took a yellow school bus. I remember it vividly, and the uncertainty I felt about where it was taking me. My last day of high school was in 1963, in Nashville, Tennessee. I left in my embarrassing 1953 Plymouth and headed for our graduation party, where Billy Buist, drunk as a skunk, stood on a table and announced that he and his sweetheart Brenda were married.

During those years, I learned about how organs work, which made me think I wanted to be a doctor, like my father, I ducked and covered under my school desk to practice surviving a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, I ducked and covered under the hay in the eighth grade with Jane Sanders (uneventfully, sadly) and the next year determined, with what little consciousness remained after I tackled someone much bigger than I, that I was not meant to be a high school football player.

The one thing I never did, which never even occurred to me as a possibility, was worry about being shot in school.

During those school years of the 1950s and early sixties, in the United States there were nine school shootings involving students, not counting a few accidents. 

One third the number killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. About half the number killed last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglass. One fewer than were killed later that same year at Santa Fe High School.

I don’t understand why this is happening. Honestly, no one seems to. There are more guns now than ever, but there were always plenty of guns in the South, where I grew up. You didn’t need an assault weapon. You could do plenty of damage with a couple of semi-automatic shotguns loaded with buckshot.

Killing kids, or being killed by them, just wasn’t a thing in those days. We were plenty nasty. You didn’t want to cross the wrong people. But the worst you got for it was a bloody nose.

WW II wasn’t long behind us, and Korea was still a fresh wound. Maybe we had just had enough of killing for a while. Eisenhower was President for much of that time, then Kennedy. We were building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. We had beaten our swords into plowshares.

We had something of a hatred relapse when we killed JFK and his brother, and then Martin, and a further bout of global paranoia when we went to war in Vietnam, but for a long time we seemed to calm down and embrace bareknuckled capitalism as an outlet for our aggressions.

Then, slowly, like the return of a disease we thought we had beat, we started marching again to the drumbeats of war. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, mired in the sands of the Middle East, trying to defeat those who hated us (and get their oil, while we were at it), only succeeding in making them hate us more, just as we had in Vietnam. 

The wars after WW II and Korea didn’t pull us together, they drove us apart. We began to direct the hatred we felt for others at ourselves. Coincidentally, the Internet let us do that better than ever. Something like a civil war broke out in cyberspace. It’s raging hotter than ever.

Growing up in the South, I heard story after story of how the Civil War divided communities and families, sometimes even pitting brother against brother. It was hard enough to understand how that could happen then. I certainly didn’t expect ever to see it happen again.

But here we are, as angry and divided as I imagine the North and South were in 1860. The only thing to our credit this time is that we aren’t all shooting at each other, just some of us, notably the ones killing kids in schools and worshipers in churches and synagogues. But in our national discourse we have picked up the cloak of hatred and are wearing it proudly.

Our president isn’t building roads like Eisenhower. He doesn’t exhort us to go to the moon. He’s bribing foreign governments to investigate his political opponents, and that’s just fine with his supporters in the public and in the Senate. It’s even fine with his attorney general. There seems to be no common ground here, no neutral zone for peacemaking. You’re either with him or against him.

The national virus of hatred and violence, almost eradicated, I’d hoped, is resurgent, and spreading wildly. It will not be denied. More lives will be lost. Something close to the catharsis of war will be needed to let it feed until there are no hosts left for it. Until it is forced by our regret and sorrow into dormancy once again.

River île

We call our evening walk “River île.” The river is the Seine; the île is the île de la Cité, where Paris was born.

River île takes us down the stone stairs at Pont Marie to the broad walkway along the Seine where a jazz saxophonist plays pied piper. We stop and listen for a while and watch the people on the party boat and at the riverside tables, couples like us strolling hand in hand among the bicycles and scooters slipping around them. 

We wander along the river to Pont Neuf, the bridge of masks, and up another stone stairway and across the bridge to the tip of île de la Cité where a courtyard park of cafes and restaurants is tucked in so discretely that in our early visits we often stumbled upon it afresh, as if a new discovery. We watch the bocci ball players, who are charmingly competitive and slightly tipsy, and then walk back along the other side of the river to Notre Dame. 

Viewing the grand old lady now means peering through construction barriers to follow the progress of her restoration after the fire that almost brought her down. France will bind her wounds, we know that, and viewing that patient and deliberate work is a different kind of pleasure than listening to Gregorian chants in her cathedral, but one no less moving in its own way. 

Our last stop is Pont île St. Louis, where buskers play among an eddy in the flow of lovers and children lapping against the low curbs and clinging to the railings of the bridge and to each other, listening to the music and watching the sun set orange and gold over Hôtel de Ville.

We have other walks with names: Louvre, Luxembourg Gardens, Place de Vogue. Pont Des Arts is still our favorite romantic retreat on a sultry Paris night, where we snuggle together and watch the people and the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower while the glittering water courses beneath us like the hot blood pumping though our hearts.

Ah, Paris. Where we go for love. Where we go to forget, to clean the slate, to start over. 

To get out of a rut, some might say, and it is that, but it is also more. Something more like rebirth. For those months in Paris, we are new. Not merely renewed as some form of our old selves, scraped of accumulated barnacles, but transformed into something else. The world looks different, both closer and more fragrant and more distant and beautiful, a crowd in the Tuileries, blue marble earth.

In Paris, we are just us. There are no others. We write and walk and eat and touch and stay up late like misbehaving children to slip out after dark into the reflection of the lights on the river. We are never alone, but there is only us.

It’s a mystery to me why we can sustain that way of being for months at a time in Paris and not for more than a few days at home in California. The natural beauty is here. The climate is mild. The sea is nearby. But it’s not the same. I don’t know why.

The reason certainly has more to do with us, or me, perhaps, than with geography. It’s more than wanderlust. I don’t get restless to be somewhere else when I’m in Paris. I work, but I don’t feel driven, or judged. The work is the thing, not the evaluation of it. Like a fresh baguette, it is something to be enjoyed daily, for it will be hard and stale the next day, when more words will be written and more bread bought at the end of the day of writing and carried home, partially consumed along the way, warm and fragrantly irresistible.

It is as simple as biology, and as complex as bread and wine and writing and love. Perhaps I am a lost wine grape of France, one that only flourishes in that terroir with the patient and loving tending of the winemaker of my life.

The Wall of Our Time

I was born a week after the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert, a few weeks before it was used to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My second child was born as people behind the Iron Curtain struggled for freedom in the Prague Spring of 1968 that was crushed by Soviet tanks. My fourth came into the world as the Berlin Wall came down, the end of history, some called it.

People want to be free. China is going to have to face that eventually, and North Korea, and the ruthless oppressors cloaking women in the burkas of sharia law.

Even in the West, liberalism has taken a bit of a hit lately. Despite our recent flirtation with something close to fascism here in America, we are still free. Free to choose. Our wall is one we have erected ourselves. Sure, we have been exhorted and exploited by cynical politicians, but we have laid the bricks with our own hands.

Our psychological wall is built on fear and resentment, but its physical manifestation is not guard towers and barbed wire, it is social media. Where the news is as unreliable as it was in Pravda at the height of the Cold War. Where the guards are internet trolls and bots. Where the head of the politburo inside the Kremlin is Mark Zuckerberg, guarding his commercial interests no matter the cost to informed democracy as ruthlessly as any Stasi guard.

On this thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the question for those of us who still live in the land of the free is this: As the digital wall of false reality is built between us, will we stand by in shocked incredulity like the Berliners who in 1961 watched their wall divide them, or will we be the ones who tear it down?

Just Me

Oh, my goodness, the world is so messed up. It’s enough to make me want to go off somewhere and forget about it all.

I can do that now. The work I do is portable. I could live at the beach or in a mountain cabin. No one would care.

That may sound like the musings of someone who is a little depressed, or of an old guy viewing his mortality. They’re kind of the same thing, I think.

I wonder how I made it this long without getting discouraged. The world isn’t objectively worse off now. Were not in the middle of the Depression or WW II. There’s a lot of poverty, a lot of economic inequality, but by and large more people around the world are better off than ever. Climate change is coming at us like the asteroid at the dinosaurs, that could be worse.

When I was young, two things were different—about me, not the world. First, I was boundlessly optimistic, on behalf of myself and mankind. Second, I was busy. Working, raising a family, all that nose-to-the-grindstone stuff. I took Watergate and Reagan in stride. When the Berlin Wall came down, I said, “Of course it did. That kind of repression never lasts.”

But some kind of repression is always with us, it seems. I don’t need to give you a list. Everyone has their own. We are beleaguered by the Democrats or the Republicans, the right or the left, corruption or political tyrants. 

The world is the same, but I’m different now. I want to be hopeful, but I’m chastened by the realization that human nature, in all its glory and greed, is unlikely to change. And so the world, fundamentally, is unlikely to change.

We are born egocentric. It’s the way we survive. It’s too bad we have to grow up. It was a lot cheerier in that long-ago world of just me and endless possibilities.