Dawdling by Walden Pond

Put something down on paper, I told myself, though I have no paper in front of me—only this old laptop. Just start to write, I tell myself: there’s a delete function. It’s like priming a well—throw some water down there and see if any will come back up.

 

Speaking of back, there’s Abrego García. He was one of over two hundred immigrants who got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. A judge had ordered that the plane taking him and the others be grounded. If they were in the air, they were supposed to turn around. There was no ambiguity in the order.

 

There was no ambiguity in the response, either. The Trump administration ignored the court order. It was one of the first signs that this administration was completely lawless and felt great about it.

 

It’s hard to know why Abrego García, and not any of the other “detainees” captured the public eye. Every story had its heartbreak, often appealing to one person but not to another. I worried about Abrego García, but I also worried about Andry Hernández, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela. He got sent to El Salvador as well, and only got out last month to return home to Venezuela.

 

These are the two guys I know about—what about the other two hundred people who got kidnapped? What about the thousands of people who are facing a decision today—do I risk going to Home Depot, to stand around and look for work as a day laborer? Do I go to mow the lawn or pick the fruit? Or do I stay home and cower? But for how long? And who feeds my family if I do?

 

My Monday morning, which I think is horrible, is a day at the beach compared to this. I leave my apartment and walk thirty feet down the sidewalk—a house is being renovated on my block. Which means that Richard, who is Cuban and lived in the states briefly, is at risk. So are the other guys who work there. Always, in the past, the gate to the building they’re working on would be open. Now, it’s shut—though you can hear them working there—and locked.

 

It's relentless, and it’s designed that way. It is, in fact, what I always feared: a vast, unyielding network that is designed to remove a certain number of people every day. Once in the system, you are completely unprotected—it won’t matter if you’re a US citizen or not, if you’re here legally, if your tattoos are just tattoos, not gang symbols.

 

So Abrego García got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. We all followed his case, and a United States senator, Chris Van Hollen went down to Central America to see him. They met at the hotel von Hollen was staying at, not at the prison camp Abrego García had been sent to. 

 

I watched Abrego García speak to the senator, and thought, “great—but what about the others?” Then the senator left, and Abrego rotted a couple more months in prison.

 

Sorry, he wasn’t rotting. He was being tortured (actively) and held in subhuman conditions (passively). And when he was released, in early June, the story should have been over. But he was arrested again, this time on charges that he was helping to smuggle people into Texas. Unbelievably, the judge ordered Abrego García to be detained in prison for his own protection. The idea was that he was safer from the government in prison than on the streets.

 

Even that didn’t work. Abrego García was taken into custody by ICE again this morning, and faces possible deportation to Uganda.

 

Uganda?

 

I don’t know much about Uganda, other than that it’s in Africa, it had a murderous dictator (Idi Amin) for a decade or so, and it’s nowhere I want to go. This is probably about all Abrego García knows as well, since he is from Venezuela, and probably doesn't speak great English.

 

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the United States government had to “facilitate” the release of Abrego García from El Salvador. The Trump administration disregarded the order for months; the court did nothing. 

 

The message couldn’t be clearer. I have blue eyes and fair skin, as well as an American passport. I am no more safe than Abrego García. I write critically of Trump and all his minions, and occasionally Blogger (the site hosting this blog) will “flag” my posts. Nobody is reading this blog, but it is being surveilled. My name could appear on a list of subversives, I could be detained at the airport, I could be sent to El Salvador and sleeping in the same bunk as Abrego García.

 

I’m not safe from my own government.

 

It’s a change, because I used to rely on the government. I wanted them to tell me about the hurricanes, at least, or the flash floods that might take out the summer camp that I sent my kid to. I want them to keep the mercury in the thermometers and out of the rivers. I’d like them to teach my kids, and yes, slavery is wrong. Teach them that, too.

 

So Abrego García is having a lousy morning, and I am having a great morning (because I am not in prison, in Uganda or anywhere else) but am not feeling it. I could go to the beach, today, and probably should.

 

Or I could consult ChatGPT or Replika—two site using artificial intelligence to provide (among other things) counseling to teenagers. Kids aren’t talking to anybody, not even themselves, and they probably don’t have the money to hire a therapist. So they are taking their mental health to…

 

to… 

 

…a computer program that is highly “intelligent” but not human. The New York Times says that the services offered by artificial intelligence are occasionally better than real therapists.

 

I’m saying no to the artificial therapists, and my Puritan ancestors are telling me “no” to the beach, as well. Instead, I’m going to be binding a copy of Walden, which is crazy because I have no interest in Walden and less interest in Henry David Thoreau.

 

We read him “then,” I told myself. “Then’ is the 1960’s, when the biggest issue (and it was big) was a war in Southeast Asia that we shouldn’t have gotten into and couldn’t get out of. We read Thoreau because he had spent a night in jail, for not paying his taxes to support the Mexican-American War. 

 

Thoreau got a visit, too—not from a U.S. senator but from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reportedly dragged himself into town and shouted, “Thoreau, what are you doing in jail?”

 

Thoreau shouted back, “Emerson, what are you doing OUT of jail?”

 

Thoreau went on to write On Civil Disobedience, and it got around. Gandhi read it. Martin Luther King read. And we all read it, back in the 1960’s—all of us who were marching and protesting.

 

How quaint it seems.

 

However vile Richard Nixon was, he was one of us. He was a human—a piano-playing alcoholic who beat his wife and sobbed drunkenly in front of the oil portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Right—the drunk I became and am now makes me empathize with Nixon. But why do I feel that living with Trump—who is a teetotaler—is worse than living with a drunk? Every situation is always worse than you imagined, everything happens too quickly, any control is illusory and usually a trick played by fate to tell you, once again, that you’re fucked.

 

That said, what do you do?

 

Well, Michelle Obama knew the answer, which is when they go low, we go high.

 

Lovely, we’ll stride proudly with our head held high!

 

…as we approach the guillotine.

 

Gavin Newsum—the governor of California and Trump’s current most-outspoken critic—has the opposite approach. Beat ‘em at their game, he says, and proposes gerrymandering California to counteract Texas. That might work, if the rest of the country buys the argument that, “well, they(meaning Texas) started it!” I used to try this on my mother, and it was a dud.

 

So it’s a Monday morning and people are doing their Monday morning things like making a living and binding notebooks. Not that those two activities have anything to do with each other.

 

And Judge Zinis is having her Monday morning as well. She’s the judge dealing with the Abrego García case, and she has ruled for months now that the federal government must “effectuate and facilitate” Abrego García’s release from his illegal detention. The Supreme Court threw out the word “effectuate,” which meant “do” but agreed 9-0 that “facilitate” had just the right passivity—sitting by and letting the El Salvadorians put him on a plane, if they were so disposed.

 

The United States did nothing; the El Salvadorians did nothing. The Supreme Court did nothing. 

 

Judge Zinis must have been pissed—and why shouldn’t she be? She has been ordering the government to come up with any real evidence they might have against Abrego García, and all they come up with are plane rides (no ticket needed) to foreign jails.

 

Worse, ICE set up a hearing with Abrego García and then arrested him when he showed up. It was a trap.

 

Well, she must have been disgusted, and I was disgusted too, which is why binding a copy of Waldenseemed like the least nonsensical thing to do. Short of buying Judge Zinis lunch (they probably have Uber Eats or Door Dash up there) there wasn’t much I could do. 

 

Want to know my worst secret?

 

I bind books so that I don’t buy bottles.

 

And since the only bottles I buy now (infrequently) have shampoo in them, I can now bind books. Even better, I can thread a needle.

 

You smile indulgently, perhaps, thinking that it’s just aged hands and faltering eyesight that keeps me from threading needles easily. But it has nothing to do with that. At the end of my drinking, my hands shook so badly that a friend felt my hand shaking as we stood joined together in a circle to say the serenity prayer, eight years ago. For years, I tried to thank God, mentally, every time I threaded a needle, which became second nature, of course. 

 

I made jokes about it: “It’s just as we feared,” I once told Raf when he came upon me sewing something. 

 

“I’ve gone from the bottle to the needle!”

 

He wasn’t amused.

 

So Judge Zinis made another ruling that said that the government cannot deport Abrego García—and this seems to have stuck.

 

At least for now.

 

9:23 on Tuesday morning.

 

So then I went off to bind Walden, which I thought was going to be a simple affair, since the book is only 50 pages or so.

 

Not that I remember all that well, since the last copy I saw of Walden was half a century or so ago. It was a dirty, slim, earmarked (if not indeed ragged) paperback with cheap paper and miniscule print. It had been thrown on a dirty sofa next to an overflowing ashtray.

 

Well, books change over the years.

 

They grow up, maybe, since my copy of Walden, which I downloaded from the Internet Archives is derived from a copy published in that leisurely age, 1899. It has all sorts of gewgaws the paperback never had, like faded but impressive woodblock engravings (or reproductions, at least), and type font that is usually associated with the dire side effects of a vitally needed drug. (You know, “may cause itching,  ___45-other-things, seizures, paralysis and death.”) Yesterday’s book was on cream-colored paper that was substantially thicker than the toilet-paper-like paper of the old paperback. And the paper will probably stay cream and not turn brown, since it’s acid and lignin free. 

 

The Victorians were generous—more port? Another cigar?—in their books, too. The book comes with a generous portrait of the author, a wieldy forward and introduction (probably a preface in there, as well), a list of the assorted works of Henry David Thoreau, and for all I know an extensive biographical sketch.

 

The book was over five hundred pages, and would have collapsed any old sofa that it had been hurled onto.

 

So it had grown up, Walden had, since the days of my youth. Actually, it had aged substantially better than I had, and I got real pleasure seeing the sections slowly build themselves up. 

 

A book is bound from the back to the front covers. It’s logical, of course—would you build a house by constructing the roof, putting the attic underneath it, then the second floor, and all the way to the basement?

 

Thus the binder, if he is of a mind, rereads the book from the back. It’s like telling a story with friends—you remember what happened, but not why, or all the details surrounding why it happened, and why it had to happen. As the evening goes on, you remember more and more of the back story (as we call it, now).

 

And as the afternoon wore on, I left paragraphs starting with, “And so my two-year journey into the busy solitude of the pond drew to a close,” and worked my way towards, “the noise and bustle of the city had become impossible for me.”

 

End-papers, cover, and bam--that’s it.

 

Another secret—binding a book is a LOT more fun than actually writing it. Writing goes on forever, and then you have to watch your friends shift nervously, every time someone mentions the fact that you’ve written a book. Because they haven’t read it, and why should they? But they’re feeling lousy about it, as they should.

 

(This makes perfect sense, to me at least. But don’t worry—I’ll probably edit it out.)

 

Binding a book is nice because the rules are clear from the beginning, and you follow them or you don’t. If you do, and if you’ve made 500 awful books or so—then you’ll be fine. You can throw the rules out, and more likely than not, you’ll end up with a mess, and not the glorious creation your fevered brain attempted to create.

 

Even though I tell myself, before I begin writing, “you know all the words, you just have to put them into the right order,” it doesn’t really help. Writing a book is like a blank canvas, but binding that book is more akin to a coloring book. The mind can rest as the hands toil.

 

And so Abrego García had his day in court, and not a government-funded vacation in a Ugandan jail.

 

The world has another copy of Walden.

 

I’m still sober.

 

Judge Zinis is plowing through her day, and I am plowing through mine.

 

Is it enough?

 

No—but it has to be. 

 

 

  

 

          

Planting History

What I really should do, but will probably not, is to tell you about the important meeting that Trump had with Vladimir Putin. You will remember—or maybe you won’t—that Trump had promised to make a deal and settle the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his presidency. He then met with the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, and berated him in the oval office with cameras rolling for not wearing a suit and not being grateful. It was agonizing to watch.

 

Now, Trump is doing what he can to divert attention from his dalliances with a couple of known sexual abusers—Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So the idea of meeting Putin in Alaska (without the un“suit”able presence of Zelensky) got floated and instantly was taken up. This is not an administration fettered by overthinking.

 

It was horrifying, if all the details are correct. Trump got out the red carpet (quite literally, since there were marines on their knees rolling the damn thing out), and then stood waiting like a dog for his master to get off the plane. At which point he clapped, and then veered like a drunk down the red carpet. 

 

Things got worse. There were three of them and three of “us,” though how much “us” is in Donald Trump is debatable. Trump got off to a fine start by delivering a monologue that lasted 20 minutes and was largely disconnected from any reality that should have been dealt with. Putin sat quiet and let him talk. Then the flattery, along with the history lesson that Ukraine had been part of Mother Russia for centuries. Anyone could see that, especially a man with the insight and the erudition of Donald Trump. That alone would be sufficient to justify his very firm no, to the historical impossibility of ending the current war with anything but the “return” of the Donbas region. It’s a huge amount of land, and it includes, of course, Russia’s access to the Crimea. 

 

My knowledge of Russian history is less than Putin’s, but even I know about the Russian mania for the Crimea.

 

The whole affair was a bust, because there was no cease fire—which had been the goal. Actually, Trump had told everyone that it was gonna happen, because Putin really, really liked Trump and wanted to make a deal with him. Still, it didn’t happen, though the world got to hear Putin speak of being “neighbors” TO THE United States, and his wish to increase that good will which should exist between neighbors.

 

During the peace summit, Russia bombed Kiev severely and repeatedly.

 

Trump looked old and weak. Putin looked old and in control (that KGB training comes in handy). The European leaders looked aghast, when they put down their phones after talking with Trump. He was calling them, essentially echoing Putin’s talking points, one by one, when he called them for support in getting Zelensky to propose to his country that they give up the area about the size of the east coast of the United States, stretching from the northern tip of Maine to the southernmost Florida Key.

 

So they put down whatever they were doing that day and flew to Washington, to support Zelensky and try to quash any plans to give up the Donbas region. The strategy appears to be to flatter Trump, and then slip in whatever truth they want to impart. I get it—I do the same thing to my cat. I put the pill in a nice, dripping spoonful of tuna fish, and we’re all happy.

 

That was hardly the most important news, since really the whole thing was about appeasing a severely-stricken malignant narcissist who has also developed a rampaging dementia. He also has the codes for the nuclear football.

 

Just to exhaust the Fire Department, Trump set another fire, this time in Washington, D.C. by sending in 800 national guardsmen last week to “combat crime.” The number of guardsmen is now up to 2000, according to one report; the mainstream media is covering the spontaneous protests (which are apparently large) with reverential silence.

 

 

There is, in short, serious shit going down, but did Trump go down? Not at all, he went up—UP!—to the roof of the White House, apparently twice on two different days. Having settled (or not) the difficulties in Ukraine, Trump got out his developer hat (or hardhat) and did what any real guy would do. He surveyed the site of the new ballroom that has to be put on the site of Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden. The whole thing is part of redecorating the White House to make it look like Mar-a-Lago, and in this he has been entirely successful. We all remember the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, though it’s always lovely to refresh the memory. 

 

 

All of this is really important, and a serious person would be telling you about it, but I am not a particularly serious person. I certainly wasn’t last Tuesday, when I had wasted my day finding a poem that I intended to bind into the indictment of Donald John Trump that Jack Smith had presented to the country in the first week of the year, before he skipped town.

 

But I was thinking about books, since the image of Trump on the White House roof (the cartoons the next day had crowds gazing up at the President and shouting “JUMP”) was too unsettling. Books don’t get up on the roof, generally, and they stick to their libraries until it gets timed to be rebound.

 

They lead quiet but not inconsequential lives. Actually, the most consequential thing about them is that against all odds some of them survive.

 

This post has no chance, I think, if someone or something wants to get rid of it. The website hosting this blog could have AI scouring their servers; my words and whatever thoughts they convey could be scrubbed from the internet in the time it takes to shut down my computer, stick all my stuff in a backpack, and head for the door to go home. I could disappear very easily, and so could Jack Smith’s indictment.

 

But something altogether extraordinary might happen if I printed a bunch of these posts into a book and gave it to Johnny, my brother. Johnny might put the book into the Norwegian chest that came over on the (as usual) second boat, us having missed the first. And there the book might sit, enjoying the dark and the muffled sounds of life outside the chest. The living room and especially the dining room are really nice places to be.

 

And some ancestor might come along, some day, with a morning free to look at a manuscript in that old chest. The pages would be yellowed, perhaps, though if it were lignin / acid-free it would help. But long after the Internet had forgotten about Trump on the roof of the White House, well, my book would not. All I (and my book) depend on is Johnny, who is a superb older brother and generally reliable. The ancestor might learn that the “tourist visit” thousands of Trump supporters made on January 6, 2001, to the United States Capitol was a less than peaceful affair. Though it taught us a lot.

 

Books only have to deal with fire, floods, desiccation, ill-use to the point of abuse, termites and time. They don’t have to deal with evil or malice.

 

They’re the quiet dudes in the room. You have to open them up to get them to talk.

 

Or rebind them, since that’s what I was thinking about, as I walked to the Poet’s Passage. One of the great things about books is that for centuries they were damned expensive to make: outside of the time and labor to produce them, vellum and parchment weren’t cheap. I throw away paper when I glue an end-paper down—such a practice would have horrified a monk in a medieval scriptorium. He would have gathered up the scrap and used it to thicken a book cover. In fact, stuff crops up from time to time in book bindings, and it recently did several months ago. Here’s a hint from the BBC:

 

…the 700-year-old fragment of Suite Vulgate du Merlin – an Old French manuscript so rare there are less than 40 surviving copies in the world – has been discovered by an archivist in Cambridge University Library, folded and stitched into the binding of the 16th-Century register.

 

I’ll let the BBC continue the story.

 

Today, multispectral imaging (MSI), CT scanning and 3D modelling has enabled scholars to not only read the faded and hidden texts of the fragment, but to understand exactly how it was folded and sewn into the register. The Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory team at Cambridge University Library has even been able to analyse the different threads used by the Elizabethan bookbinders and the different decoration pigments used by the medieval illuminator,  whose job it was to "illuminate" manuscripts with decorative illustrations and rich colours.

 

Well, well, I thought—it’s an interesting world. We no longer need to take the cover off and undo the binding of a book to see what’s inside. I knew about that, since we are doing essentially the same thing with the Dead Sea scrolls that are far too fragile to unroll.

 

What I didn’t know—and was pleased to discover—was that a bookbinder could plant history, as it were. Kids put messages for unseen eyes in the improbable future to discover in empty bottles tossed into the sea. Why not bookbinders?

 

So I gassed on about the Irish-monks-saving-Western-Civilization to the people at the Poet’s Passage. Then I told them about the Merlin manuscript, discovered after 700 years of gentle sleep in the inside of a book cover. Then I read them the poem of Arthur Waley about censorship. The poem that I had wasted a day trying to find. You remember, the poem that ends:

 

It is not difficult to censor foreign news,

What is hard today is to censor one's own thoughts --

To sit by and see the blind man

On the sightless horse, riding in to the bottomless abyss.

Then it was time to slip the poem into the folded cardstock sheet of the cover, and to put glue on the marbled paper to the cover. I sealed it up in front of everybody, since who wouldn't be curious to see, and indeed want to see…

…history being planted.

 

 

 

 

      

Not Walking Alone

By this time, I had wasted my day.

 

That was nothing new and nothing important, in a sense. If I wasn’t actively, whole-heartedly, pushing-with-all-my-might-and-giving-it-200% fighting against Trump and fascism, I was doing nothing.

 

The problem was that everybody else was doing their Tuesday, and their Tuesday didn’t include restoring democracy to the United States. Their Tuesday was about going to work to pay the mortgage—or whatever else was more urgent (if not more important) than democracy.

 

The problem, I decided, was that I had a past. I had always known about ladies with a past, but what was I doing with one? And why was it hitting me so hard now?

 

It was hitting hard, I decided, because for over 300 years, a part of my family has been in the United States. Not a big part, I grant you. In fact, there aren’t even branches of my family that are historically interesting—it’s only a couple of twigs. But there they are, and they were weighing me down. According to my grandmother, her family had been burning witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They had been fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. They had fought in the Civil War and the World War II—they had been right there during all the right moments in American history, and they had been on the right side.

 

Nobody in the family had much money, but we were there. True—it took us a while. We tend to get on the second boat that’s going places—never the Mayflower, but whatever it was that followed it. And we got it wrong initially at the Salem Witch Trials—Henry Herrick had been the magistrate, and had rounded up and (presumably) tried the women and found them guilty. He did, however, apologize for the affair. It had been a snare of the devil, and he had fallen.

 

Three hundred years takes the stench of burning or rotting flesh away—the witch trials seem quaint. But are they? If a child is starving on the bus going back home, I’m responsible for feeding him or her. But why, if the child is in Gaza, am I not equally responsible? And why should the deaths of a score of women and children matter less because they happened three centuries ago?

 

It was all going down on my own watch, and I hated it. Even worse, I now knew about Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard and my own grandmother and parents. I am no more responsible for saving democracy than a guy who has walked up from San Salvador a couple years ago, right?

 

Wrong, and I don’t know why.

 

I don’t like noblesse oblige, probably because I suffer from it. But we’ve been around for 300 years and counting, and we’re in a better position than the guy from Salvador. Or at least we should be. We’re supposed to know better and be better.

 

It was better when I was a teenager, and could cheerfully send my family to hell. I would have snickered at the witch-burning / hanging Henry Herrick: it was a long time ago, and what difference does it make, today? 

 

There were three or four of us in the family that I returned to over and over. There was Henry Herrick, who actually was involved in the whole process of finding the witches, getting them into the court, trying them, and executing them. Oh, and saying sorry afterwards.

 

There was Nicholas Coleman Pickard, my great-great grandfather. He had been a country doctor, sent his son off to fight the South in the Civil War, gone to collect his son’s body, and then “disappeared” for the last thirty years of his life. “He abandoned his family,” my grandmother would state, and then go on to attribute it to “gold fever.” In fact, he kept practicing medicine until three years before his death, at his daughter’s home in Kansas. What had caused this man to disappear from one part of his family only to appear again later, decades later and somewhere else?

 

There was my grandmother, who had written the story down (what she knew, what she remembered) and left out (wisely, Marc?) any mention of herself, though she did note her marriage, her three children, and a few details of her life. Details had slipped out: she was married and pregnant with twins in 1918, in a small, airless, Chicago apartment. The heat was infernal, that summer, and she was tired and lonely (her husband was a travelling salesman, selling paper from Wisconsin to businessmen in Chicago). Worse, the “Spanish flu” was ravaging her world just as COVID-19 had ravaged ours. She had endured, raised her children, and then was left a widow in her sixties. It was the depression, there wasn’t any money, she had gone to work (for the first time) operating the switchboard at the YWCA.

 

She had seen a lot, more perhaps than I. Her father had saddled horses and ridden his carriage down the country roads to see his patients. She sat, at the end of her life, with me, her young grandson. We watched the moon landing in 1969, and she marveled that such a thing was possible.

 

She had seen other marvels as well. She drove past and saw the quarter of a million black people gathered to hear Martin Luther King in 1963. She saw Europe and the United States fight Nazism and win. 

 

We had all been there, and we had been part of it, to one degree or another. I say “we” for a reason: I don’t walk alone. I have three centuries of family to account for and to answer to. One Herrick—either George or Henry—had even fought in King Philip’s War. I have the luxury of knowing only that there had been a war, that Henry / George had fought in it, and absolutely nothing else.

 

(AI knows, and can tell you: 

 

King Philip's War (1675–1678) was a devastating conflict between Native American tribes and English colonists in New England, named after the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, also known as King Philip. Driven by increasing English encroachment on Native lands and mistreatment, the war led to widespread destruction on both sides, with Native American raids on colonial settlements and significant casualties. It ultimately resulted in Anglo-American domination of the region, the deaths of many Native Americans, and their enslavement or forced migration, making it the bloodiest conflict per capita in American history. )

 

 

Wonderful—the slaughter of Native Americans gets dignified with high-falutin’ name. A century and a half later, my great-great grandfather takes off by train to collect his dead son’s body in Richmond, Virginia. Another hundred years: my grandmother and I are sitting in the living room on the family home on Bagley Parkway. The same home that will protect us, with its bomb shelter neatly in place. (True—we had never bother to equip the bomb shelter with food or water or even mattresses. But it was there, and we were safe.)

 

The network breaks for commercials. We go outside, my grandmother and I. My father has pulled me aside, before he and my mother left for six weeks in Norway, and told me that I am looking after my aged grandmother. My mother has pulled her mother aside, and told my grandmother that she is looking after me. I know this now, though we were both too delicate to mention that we were looking after each other, my grandmother and me.

 

We look up at the sky, at the moon. We totally believe that there’s a spaceship up there, with American astronauts, and there’s an American flag up there too, flapping in the non-existent wind.

 

We look up and we marvel.

 

We had been lucky, for the most part. We were on the winning side (if not the right side) of King Philip’s War. We had burned the witches, not been the witches. And we had been on the right side, I certainly knew, of the Civil War.

 

Things had been going along swimmingly, all those centuries of Herricks and Pickard and Newhouses.

 

I took off for the Poet’s Passage, to talk about Jack Smith and American Democracy.

 

I walked a couple of blocks to the Passage.

 

I did not walk alone.