We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us *

  Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Becalmed, we are. 

No wind in our sails. Scanning the horizon for help. Glare on a broad flat expanse that is so empty we can see the unflinching curve of the earth.

So we row, and we hope. We are still alive, while many are not, so we are the lucky ones.

It’s a strange feeling to have to stay away from people. We are lucky if we have that option.

Isolation is probably not evolutionarily adaptive. So we poke our heads out when it seems the danger must have passed, even though it has not.

I don’t know how long we, individually or collectively, can keep it up, or what will happen as we let down our guard, as we already are. We don’t want to believe this is real, so many of us refuse to. We are not a nation of natural mask wearers. 

The pressure to get back to normal is enormous. Both psychologically and economically. But this is a more formidable pathogen than we have faced in living memory. Maybe we’ll get a vaccine. Maybe it will save us. If not, we are going to lose a lot more friends and family before this is over, if indeed it ever is.

How will we handle that? That is the question on my mind lately. Will we pull together or apart?

The conventional wisdom is that a common enemy unites us, but that’s not what is happening this time. We are at war not only with the virus, but with ourselves. 

If we continue that way, we will certainly lose.

______

* Walt Kelly, in a Pogo strip

Time to Rebuild

I’m starting to feel embarrassed about what I have that others don’t. I’m part of the crowd that just keeps getting richer while so many others are getting poorer. 

I’m not doing anything special to deserve that. 

In my working prime I made money and invested it. I sent my kids to public and private schools and took advantage of good healthcare plans. Now I’m riding a wave of passive capital appreciation at historically low tax rates.

I make charitable contributions, but they don’t even make a dent in the problem.

The problem, of course, is systemic inequality. Inequality in income and opportunity. Inequality in buffers for unexpected job loss or bad health. So much inequality, covering every aspect of life. 

It’s not just a few people who don’t have enough to live on, who can’t afford to go to a doctor, who can’t see that their children get good educations. It’s most.

American society today is as stratified as it has been since WW II. After the Robber Barrons, after the Depression, we made progress. Now we’re slipping back into a new Gilded Age. Our stark class differences would seem familiar to Charles Dickens and Marie Antoinette. Indeed, scenes from the barricades have been playing out these these last few nights in fiery protests in so many cities.

I'm ashamed of how we have abandoned so many of our citizens. I want to aid them through an institution that I no longer trust: the United States government. Only government—federal, state and local—can put in place the health, education and economic infrastructure to support its citizens more equally.

Not this national government, though. Our federal government needs to be rebuilt with wise, trustworthy people who care about others. Then it needs to collect sufficient taxes from me and others who are well off and use that income to support those who are less well off.

It’s that simple, really. As simple as pulling a lever in a voting booth this fall.

Those Who Made My World

May 8 is VE Day, the day in 1945 when the war in Europe was won. I was born six weeks later. I was two weeks old when America incinerated Hiroshima and then Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Three weeks after that, Japan surrendered. So I was born in the middle of the end of the last world war.

I only knew about it from a few family stories and history books. We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and righted the global economy at Breton Woods. I grew up in the sweet suburbs of those victories and the prosperity they ushered in. 

I knew about the Korean War, because my parents told me about their friends who died there. I knew about the Red Scare. I ducked and covered under my desk in grade-school nuclear drills. I didn’t like the war in Viet Nam, but I had been raised on the need to fight communism, and I wasn’t yet wise enough to recognize a far-away country’s internal struggles as being no threat to us and none of our business.

I grew up with American right and might. When we turned our national attention to our racial injustices, it seemed natural and proper that after fighting so many foreign wars to insure our freedom we would take steps to better secure that right for all our citizens.

I don’t idolize the men and women who built my world, but I respect them. I respect their ability to dig in and get the job done when called upon. They had a big bacchanal in the 20s, and a big economic hangover in the 30s, but they sobered up and rolled up their sleeves when it was obvious they had to. Yes, they didn’t do it until then. They didn’t want to get into another world war. Who could blame them? But when it came to them, they did not hesitate or stint. They cranked out bombers and tanks and they bought war bonds. They saved the world that became my world.

Now we are faced with another great war, this time against a deadly virus, both real and metaphorical. The real one is killing us. The metaphorical one is destroying who we are.

In response to the Coronavirus Pearl Harbor, our president has not roused our nation to common purpose and sacrifice, he has said it’s up to the states to tackle this enemy. It’s like saying some of them should make tanks, some fighter planes, some bombers, and they should figure it out and compete with one another for the materials to do their work. If Roosevelt had taken that approach, we’d all be speaking German. Or Japanese. Or, as Philip K. Dick imagined in The Man in the High Castle, both.

Roosevelt exhorted us to pull together. Trump incites us to attack one another. Roosevelt gave us Social Security. Trump is doing his best to kill off the Affordable Care Act.

Can you imagine Roosevelt addressing the nation the way Trump does? Can you imagine Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, the reporters we listened to and trusted to tell us the truth, on Fox News?

The men and women running our national government today are not making a world we want our children to inhabit. Are we going to do anything about it? Or are we going to continue basting in our provincial certitudes and hatreds until the world made for us with such purpose, strength and determination after World War II is gone?

When Dad Left and Didn't Come Back

I still remember when Dad abandoned us.

He was a salesman, and a good one, the kind who could sell ice to Eskimos. He would put on his suit and tie and go off to big sales meetings and come home with a big smile and a pocket full of money. This one time, though, he didn’t come back.

We lived in a big rambling house out in the country. There were a lot of us, siblings and cousins. When he left, it was just like always at first. Some of us went wild. Some of us stayed in our rooms. Most of us did a little of both. 

He called about the time he would normally come home and Alice talked to him. She told him we were running low on food. He said he was sure he had left the pantry stocked. We didn’t hear from him again.

At first we fought over everything, but when it became clear that Dad wasn’t coming back and there wasn’t enough to go around, some of the cousins said they were leaving. They thought they would be better off making their way on their own. The rest of us started dividing up what was left and trying to think up ways to get more.

We weren’t too successful. We borrowed from neighbors, but we were out in the country, and our neighbors were far away and didn’t know us well, and I don’t think they trusted us. We took turns going into town to try to do odd jobs for food, but there wasn’t much to do. We ended up stealing canned goods from the backs of shelves, so they wouldn’t be missed.

That was a tough time. We survived, all but Joey, who got a terrible fever and was gone before we could do anything. We buried him in the back yard as best we could.

We didn’t have a mother. I don’t think a mother would have left us. I say that because who saved us was a nice woman from social services. She said our dad wasn’t going to be our dad anymore. She got us some food and clothes and school books.

When we got old enough, we all moved away. I was the last one to leave. I haven’t been back to the old house since then. It’s probably falling down by now, with no one to care for it. That’s what happens when you abandon your home.

The World on Fire

How do we think about this time? What do we say about it, to ourselves, to others?

Writers, especially, are prone to think about the details of what is happening to each of us. “Sit before that tree until you can describe how it is different from every other tree,” goes one piece of writing advice. Everyday ordinariness is our stock in trade.

There is nothing ordinary about a pandemic. It sweeps away normal life, or obscures it in fog. The virus now afoot ravages our imaginations in much the same way it does our bodies. We are as agitated and distracted as a wounded animal. Survival has become our principal focus.

And yet, even as distracted as we are, even as desperate to survive, unless we are actually sick, we are becalmed. Forced into unnatural isolation. Into contemplation, for the mind seeks, always. Even, or especially, when it is forced to be still.

In such times, it seeks to know why, to understand what it means for the future. We live in the future, even though it is only in our imaginations. We get ready for it by stocking up on flour and eggs and making plans for taking care of those dear to us.

Planning is not a choice. It is hard-wired into us as a highly adaptive evolutionary trait. Our stories are about grasshoppers and ants and little pigs who build their houses out of bricks.

In real time, planning is nothing more than living. We do it moment-by-moment, instinctively, until the moments add up and we see that our plan was good or bad and, if it was bad, we change it. We know there is a long term that we must prepare for, but we plan mainly in small, immediate ways. Another carton of eggs, another bag of flour. Mend the broken roof tiles. If there is some spare cash, set it aside in the children’s education fund. If not, do our best to teach them the things we know they will need to succeed: kindness, empathy. These more than the Pythagorean theorem (which we’re a little vague on anyway, so how important can it be?).

This why we write about everyday life. Because it is where life lives. It is where the species survives or dies. The details of how we live tell us who we are. So that others may know us and themselves, those are the stories we share, even when it seems the world is on fire.

The Man Who Didn't Cry Wolf

Once upon a time there was a man who thought only of himself.

“You should think of others,” someone must have told him once, perhaps when he was young, when it was still safe to tell him things he didn’t want to hear.

As he grew older, when he was told something disagreeable, he just refused to believe it. 

“That’s not true,” he would say. If he was told again that it was true, he got angry. No one wanted to be around him when he got angry, so his circle narrowed to those who always told him what he wanted to hear. Which was only good news.

Naturally, he believed them. And because the news was always good, and told to him, of course he began to see that he himself was the cause of the good news. Over time, it became an article of faith to him that bad news would mean he had failed, unimaginably, to cause it to be good news.

No one wanted to tell him he had failed, so no one told him bad news.

Bad news was not only withheld from him, he was protected from its consequences. He had a huge staff of servants eager to do his bidding, because he paid them very well. They made sure he never heard the bad news, and that it never hurt him.

The bad news did hurt others though, and they threatened to tell him about it. So his servants had to work especially hard not only to not let the bad news be conveyed to him, but to convince anyone who might tell him that it wasn’t bad news at all, it was good news, and they should be thankful that he was the source of it. 

If anyone wasn’t thankful, they were dealt with. Many of them were deported or otherwise banished from his presence. The ones who couldn’t be deported or banished, at least not yet, were discredited. They were called out as heretics, and the faithful, the true believers, turned on them and silenced them.

He began to believe he was not only infallible but also invincible. He ordered his servants and all others who came in contact with the public to humiliate and destroy anyone who opposed him.

One day, the wolf came. He had not cried wolf, like the boy in the story, because he did not believe wolves existed. No one had dared tell him they did. So when the wolf cornered him in his bedroom, he was completely unprepared. He was defenseless. 

It’s not known whether he put up a fight. There was nothing left of him by which to judge whether he had been valiant or cowardly. He had had no practice at being either, shielded from reality as he had been all his life. 

His remains, such as they were, were found in a corner, regurgitated by the wolf, which had apparently found him unappetizing. Of course, were he still alive, no one would dare tell him that.

Day 5

We have been on lockdown here in the San Francisco Bay Area for five days. That sounds like the beginning of a story about the Donner Party. Meg and I were in Truckee just last week, so the Donner Party is on my mind. We haven’t turned to cannibalism yet, but it is hard to get groceries delivered. Still no toilet paper. Now wishing I had saved those cloth diapers from when my kids were babies.

The rest of the state has joined us on lockdown. And New York and Illinois. Most of the country may not be far behind. The rough economic patch that began with the sub-prime loan meltdown became known as the Great Recession. This one may be called the “Great Grinding to a Halt.”

It is very strange to sit in your house all day. We’re not used to that. Who knows when we might turn on each other. “The Shining” comes to Palo Alto.

This is more than Day 5. We’ve all seen it coming and gradually cut back our activities. My last trip into the wild was to pick up something at a store on March 3. Since then it has been nods from six feet. So, by that reckoning, this is Day 17.

We go out for walks, but we walk across the street when we see other walkers coming toward us, or they do. We all smile and wave, but we keep up a steady pace. Ever since I read that the virus hangs in the air for a bit, I have tried to avoid walking behind people, to stay out of their vapor trail. I think of the jets I see going overhead and I imagine a virus contrail.

I don’t have any heartwarming stories of neighbors selflessly helping others. Mostly we are all keeping to ourselves, as we have been ordered to do, and as is sensible. A very few idiots seem to think the rules don’t apply to them, or their gardeners, but by and large, we all seem to be playing ball. We’re trying to flatten the curve so that when we do get sick, as most of us will, there will be ventilators for everyone who needs them.

The alternative of rationing medical care based on some judgment of who should live and who should die doesn’t seem attractive.

We talk by phone to our children, all grown up and far away, and wish we could be there to keep them from being lonely. I suppose we imagine playing games with them like when they were young. Probably their worst nightmare.

We’re all a little stoic, and a little scared.

And we have a long way to go. This is only Day 5 of likely a hundred or more, off and on. I would say that, with all that time on my hands, all my clutter will be organized by the time we come out of this. But probably not. Right now, my mind is more cluttered than my drawers.

Lost in the Jungle, No Compass

It’s too soon to know what to think about what’s happening. It’s all so fast. From vibrant city life to lockdown. From health to sickness. From sanguinity to fear. Also, no toilet paper.

And no jobs. No income. No safety net. It’s going to be brutal, that’s the only thing we can say for sure now.

Perhaps the worst part is that we have no idea how many it will kill or how long it will last. If we succeed in slowing the spread—“flattening the curve”—we will save lives by avoiding overwhelming our healthcare system, but we will also extend the period of sickness and economic paralysis. I’m not saying the cure will be worse than the disease, but it will be bad, and I’m not sure anyone knows just how bad.

Our society is as economically stratified now as I've ever known it. The virus hits all income levels, but the measures to contain it disproportionately afflict the poor. This is going to be very tough on anyone who has been living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s hard to imagine the consequences to them of this lasting eighteen months, as epidemiologists say may be possible, perhaps likely.

And at a time when we desperately need to decide whom we trust to lead us out of this uncharted wilderness, there is the question of how we can even have an election if we are still on lockdown.

The Enthusiasm Gap

A friend and I have periodic email exchanges about politics. He’s conservative but smart. We used to have these discussions over dinner, but the cost in broken plates was getting too high. 

Yesterday, he wrote to ask whether, given the struggle among Democrats to generate broad-based enthusiasm for a candidate, the “Anybody but Trump” sentiment will be sufficient to turn out voters to beat him.

It’s a good question. Here’s my reply.

Being against something usually evokes less enthusiasm than being for something. Unless the something we oppose is perceived as a big enough threat. German occupiers in WW II roused the resistance, as did the English colonization of India. Our instinct is to throw off the yoke of foreign occupiers. Some of us would put Trump in that category.

There is plenty of enthusiasm for Sanders, and not just among the young. He is currently the only ascendant candidate generating much passion. But most of us don’t want socialism and don't believe the country wants it. If we're right, Bernie will lose, probably badly.

So we cast about for someone we think can win. For someone who, other than Bernie, can generate the kind of enthusiasm that gets people out to vote, as Obama did. 

I don’t know if we will settle on such a person, or who it might be. If our nominee is uninspiring, whether Trump wins will turn on how badly non-supporters want to get rid of him.

That depends, in my opinion, on how well people focus on the danger he poses to our democracy, environment and opportunities for anyone not rich. Those are seen by many as either abstractions or problems for the future, and we’re not so great at focusing on problems that aren’t right in our faces: see, eg, climate change.

The anticipated benefits of a Trump presidency are not panning out for many of his supporters, despite the roaring economy. Coal has not made a comeback, nor rust-belt manufacturing. Healthcare is getting more and more expensive for, and less and less available to, people who are poor or of modest means, many of whom are also waiting for the revival of their industries that Trump promised.

What is unclear to me, still, is how strong Trump’s cultural appeal will be in this next election. A lot of people, for over-diagnosed reasons, are racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and want to keep the little woman barefoot and pregnant. Trump's rhetoric tells them that he is too. Will they continue to be led by those prejudices, or will they realize they’ve been following a con man? We’ll see.

Of course there are plenty who think they have a legitimate self-interest in having Trump in office. Certain well-off segments of society, fossil fuel businesses, Second Amendment die-hards, Christian fundamentalists. Personally, I think his policies will backfire for even those groups, or many of them. Climate change will hurt their businesses. The huge deficit will beggar our infrastructure and leave us handcuffed to respond to the next downturn. Cutting off immigration will turn us into Japan, given our slowing population growth rate. Huge class divides are not good for anyone’s business, long term. Consider what happened in France about the time our little country was getting started.

Then there’s the war risk. Trump is brutish in his approach to other nations. That worked for the Romans and the Vikings, but it’s not a good strategy in these days of nukes rattling around the world.

I used to think Trump was the problem. Now I worry it is us. Who are we? What do we stand for? I was surprised when he got elected. I blamed him. If he gets re-elected, there will be no one to blame but ourselves.

Cold Fusion

Today I read that the Chinese are about to harness the sun in a fusion reactor. I also read that artificial intelligence is better at reading mammograms than expert radiologists.

Ain’t science great. All that cool math. The stars are literally the limit.

My two youngest sons were just home for the holidays. They’re math types. One is teaching his artificial intelligence algorithm to design women’s clothes in flattering styles based on body shape; beyond the runway and into everywoman’s closet. The other is developing the theoretical math to support an idea for a better way to keep international banks out of trouble, to sidestep future financial crises.

When I talk to them, I come away brimming with pride and hope. Pride in them, and hope for humanity. They’re just two young men, but they have their sights set high, and they’re going to do some good in the world. Many many others like them are out there now, dreaming of a better future.

Meanwhile, though, while the Chinese are cooking up controllable fusion, they are also refining the facial recognition and surveillance technologies that let them keep an eye on all their citizens. They plan to give each a citizenship score. I’m sure they’ll only use it to make people happier.

And as fast as my son works out better banking protection, thousands of others as energetic and purposeful as he are developing crypto currencies and shadow banking systems that are wide open in terms of risk because no one can really anticipate what might go wrong. It’s like the first time someone poured baking soda into a bottle of vinegar. Wow, that was unexpected…but pretty cool! Let’s do it again.

And while my other son is developing the programs to give women the power to design what they want to wear, the commercial engine of our culture—kicked into warp speed by the internet—is shaming them for being normal. Not too thin, not too fat, just normal.

And never mind about the hackers all over the world who are staying up nights to figure out how to steal our identities and shut down our power grids.

Tech is there for us. It’s a tool. Like the clubs that the chimps in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey” picked up off the ground and began raging around with.

It’s pretty obvious that our tools are by now a long way from those simple clubs. I wonder, though, how evolved we, as humans, are from those chimps. I see today the same rage in us. Not all of us. Some of us are working to making the world better and safer and healthier. But the ones who just want to pick up a club and bash someone are still among us. And they may be a larger segment of humanity than we’re comfortable admitting.

So what happens when our tools become so powerful, as they perhaps already have, that a few of those rageaholics can do unimaginable damage with them?

We tell who we are with our stories.

I think of “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, about simple people living in a wilderness on the edge of what had been a great civilization, the forbidden Place of the Gods. The adventurous protagonist ventures along the broken and deserted highways—the “God-Roads”—into the empty shell of New York City, destroyed by some force not known to him, or knowable by him.

I think of William Golding's “Lord of the Flies,” of the shockingly quick descent of normal adolescents into primitive rage. “Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.”

And when I do, I’m afraid we can't trust ourselves with our toys.

The Man on the White Horse

Britain is headed for the exits. It’s harder to imagine where our country is going.

America is still the global power Britain imagines itself to be, even though lately we seem to have wearied of being world leaders.

It’s no wonder. Leadership is hard. Mostly people and nations don’t follow, so you have to be thoughtful and clever, as well as compassionate and understanding. I don’t know what you think, but we seem to me to be a little short on those qualities lately.

Some of us are tired and beat-up by globalization and upset about the way our communities are changing, so we’re acting out a fantasy not unlike the one being indulged in Britain now. We can go it alone. We don’t need outsiders telling us what to do.

The thing about friends is that if you don’t keep up your relationships, one day you look around and there’s no one to help you load the U-Haul when it’s time to move, no one to bow her head and stand beside you when a loved-one dies. Being alone is fine, until it isn’t.

I suppose if you have enough money, you can buy what you need. You don’t have to depend on others. But that’s not most of us. Most of us need help from time to time.

With the changes in the economy washing over the land, some of us have become so desperate that we’ve lost faith in the ability of our friends, family and communities to support us. We’re looking for a savior. Someone who promises to give us what we need.

If you’ve worked to get where you are, you’ve probably never put much stock in the idea that someone is going to ride in on a white horse and just hand you what you want, certainly not some rich guy from New York who made his fortune on your gambling habit.

So why do you think that’s going to happen now?

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.