The Morning After: A Walk of Shame

I'm embarrassed.

While the world chuckles, the guy who has made a mockery of our country boasts that he will simply renegotiate every deal ever made on the planet. And, by the way, it will be swift, and it will be terrific.

You just can't make this stuff up. I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See, a novel set in France and Germany as Hitler rose to power. A brilliant German boy, orphaned by the coal mines, lands a chance to pull himself out of the muck when he is chosen, for his talents, to be groomed at an elite academy for Hitler Youth. In a letter to his younger sister, wise beyond her years and appalled by this bargain with the devil, he tells her what he has heard, hoping she will come around: the fuhrer has collected scientists to help him control the weather; the fuhrer will develop a rocket that can reach Japan; the fuhrer will build a city on the moon.

I suppose you can make this stuff up, although, in the fictional version, nobody claimed that Japan would actually build the rockets that would be launched its way, or that the city on the moon would be surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Amazing. Terrific.

No, of course I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler. That would be gauche, and, anyway, he's not nearly as articulate. He thinks reporters are disgusting, but he would never kill them. He'll only kill the "bad people" -- a rather broad group which happens to include every man, woman, and child born into a particular religion. Everything else he'll just renegotiate, just sit down at some global conference table and figure it out. Now why hasn't anybody else thought of that?

As humans, we hear what we want to hear sometimes, and when the going gets tough, we might even be tempted to put our faith in someone who promises to make all the bad stuff go away. Especially since a lot of us have been raised to not make promises we cannot keep. We forget that some folks just don't follow the rules. History should teach us, but sometimes temptation just gets in the way.

But this? Really? I just don't get it, how the runaway Trump train is now chugging toward an almost certain nomination. How scapegoating and hate and finger-pointing bullying and misogyny and self-aggrandizement and volumes of empty hot air have rendered this idiot qualified to sit at the helm of my country.

Overseas, they're chuckling. I'm terrified. Mostly, I'm embarrassed.

Springing Forward

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I have handed over a small wad of cash so I can fill out something called a bracket. My head spins as I randomly put my faith in one college basketball team over another, mildly excited when I recognize a team I can support on principle -- i.e. somebody I care about went there, or, with apologies to close friends who are Duke alums, UNC. Can't help it; I just love robins egg blue.

This is a big week for harbingers of spring. March Madness brackets are in. The Chicago River goes from puke green to kelly green for St. Patrick's Day. It's the Ides of March, a date so often marked by tragedy -- Julius Caesar, stabbed, 44 B.C.; Ed Sullivan Show, cancelled, 1971.  Super Tuesday, part two. Daylight Savings Time makes it a little harder to get out of bed, harder still to leap into your sweats the minute you get home and hunker down for the evening under a blanket on the couch while you binge watch TV and shovel in comfort food. Not impossible, but still harder, with the sun still so high in the sky.

It's been about five months since I've seen our neighborhood homeless woman, the woman who, at a quick glance, seems just like the rest of us but who, upon closer study, seems not like us at all. The "us" being a pretty varied and motley band of neighbors who may have nothing in common except for the fact that we are not homeless.

She stood at a safe distance from my parked car the other day, so still I barely even noticed her as I juggled my coffee and my laptop and my keys. I felt her eyes on me, looked up. "Hi!" I smiled, greeted her as I would greet an old friend, well except for the part about not moving closer. She let me off the hook, told me she had a really bad cold, as if she really thought I had any intention of closing the gap. I was relieved. By my estimate she was wearing about six layers of outfits, and the layer on the outside looked coated with dust.

"How's Eli," she asked me. The last time I saw her, Eli was sporting a lampshade so he wouldn't lick his phantom testicles, and she had expressed some despair at the idea of Eli's charms stopping with Eli, never getting passed down. My male friends had, for the most part, crossed their legs in empathy, astonishingly tuned in to Eli's discomfort. The homeless woman had taken a broader, more long term view. Lost potential, a bleaker future, limited possibilities. Something she knew a lot about, this woman who was once a girl with a life full of potential and unlimited possibilities and a bright future.

She had spent the last five months living in a shelter, technically less homeless, I suppose. And now, with Daylight Savings Time and March Madness and green rivers upon us, she is back in the neighborhood. Her body doubles as her closet and her suitcase, the sky is her ceiling. And the other folks in the neighborhood will talk to her, at a safe distance.

She told me a little bit about the shelter, how viruses spread like wildfire there.  She didn't call it the shelter; she called it her community. Her community. As opposed to my community, the one she visits for seven months out of the year. Yet she seems content. Content and very much at home.

When she and Eli again cross paths, he will wag his tail and lick her face.  His greeting will be joyous and genuine, unlike my immobilized "hi." In Eli's world, there are no brackets. No playing favorites because someone's wearing robins egg blue, or smells nice. Anything is possible. He will close the gap.

House of Trump Cards

Ben Carson. The race card on steroids. The yin to Donald's yang. Ben's a whole deck of cards all rolled into one dark complected fellow who has never uttered an Ebonics phrase. The Evangelical card. The Ivy League card. The Jewish mother card (oy, he's a doctah!). 

The hatchet has been buried, and Dr. Ben has swallowed whatever pride he has left and endorsed Donald. The martyred Trump, whose First Amendment rights were somehow trampled when he cancelled his own rally, back in full buffoonish form within a day of the "civilized debate" experiment. Poor Donald, victimized by mean dudes everywhere, not to mention CNN for its unfair coverage. Enough with playing nice. He's back, mocking little Marco and lying Ted and, yes,  democracy and political discourse at its core -- the "town hall meeting." Too small, he explained. Where would the other 25,000 love festers go? The campaign slogan of the new millenium: Size matters. 

The "cerebral" and "thoughtful" guy described by Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon and total whack-a-doo in his own right, is nowhere to be found. But Dr. Ben did his best to sound earnest when he stepped up to the podium and gave his cringe-worthy explanation of why he and Donald would now be bedfellows. All righty then. 

"We do have fun, don't we," Trump asked a boisterous Ohio crowd, to their delight. Fun? Is he for real? Unfortunately, he is. Worse than real, or worse, at least, than what passes for reality these days. Real reality TV cannot actually be real because it's about people pretending to do things the way they would do them if they were not being filmed.  Silly, but good fun. After a few seasons, it gets old. (I don't think I've heard much about the Kardashians lately.) Unfortunately, by the time the Trump Show gets old, he could be sitting in the Oval Office. 

I can see it now:

"Hey Doc, get North Korea on the phone!"

"Okay, Chief." VPOTUS Dr. Ben Carson, M.D., neurosurgeon, puts down his bible, whips out his cell (in its blingy TRUMP case) and selects "2" on speed dial. He hands the phone over.

"Little Kim!" roars our new President. Dr. Ben re-immerses himself in his Bible, tries hard to ignore the incomprehensible screaming on the other end.

POTUS kicks his feet up on the desk, almost knocks over the large flickering TRUMP pencil holder. "How are those cute little miniaturized nuclear warheads, Little Kim?" 

He's not worried about getting one of those miniaturized nuclear warheads shoved up his ass. He's got Secret Service agents, and, if things go too far, his VP is a surgeon. But what about the rest of us? I'm worried. I'm really worried. 

The alternatives are not great. And no matter how many super important people and even regular folks start campaigning against Trump, Canada and Mexico still look like the only viable options. But Canada's cold, and, at my age, scurrying over that massive wall ain't gonna be easy. 

House of Trump Cards. Season One. 

Electile Dysfunction

Little Marco, lying Ted. Tumescent Donald. Dear John.

These guys do a better send up of themselves than SNL could ever hope to do. The nightmare continues: images of the White House dwarfed by an oversized TRUMP marquis,  images of outsized Trump components that I try desperately to unsee. Without needing to boast, Canada is more alluring and intoxicating than Donald's energetic man parts could ever be. Even if he promised not to talk.

As I prepared for my trip to New York City this weekend, somebody asked me to sniff around, see if it's as Hillary-loving there as people think. What I discovered is this: I don't know. Word has it lots of folks still feel the "Bern" here, but nobody in my small cadre of revelers really talked about it. In fact, super Saturday passed before I even remembered it was Super Saturday, and I woke this morning with a pleasant hangover that had nothing to do with a buffoonish political debate.

Growing up in New York, I always assumed the rest of the country was just like us. It was a rude awakening, when my Greyhound busload of like-minded and like-raised teenagers pulled up to a luncheonette somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies and the locals sitting on a bench outside looked as if they had just spotted a UFO. New Jersey, they whispered. Not New York. New Jersey. They couldn't go that extra step, couldn't wrap their minds around the real alien truth.

Wandering through Central Park on a crisp and sunny March afternoon, I fell in love again, as I always do, with New York. The colorful mosaic of people on the move, all at their own pace, always some small group paused along the sidelines for a chat or a photograph or just to take it all in. Performance art. In the heart of New York, a place that can seem alien and daunting and even distasteful to the uninitiated, I don't remember hearing a harsh word or witnessing anything rude, for an entire weekend.

Could this be just a tiny oasis in a country gone mad? Or was I simply too engrossed in personal contentment, thrilled to be among family and friends celebrating a much needed happy occasion in a year that has already begged for a do-over in so many ways. In the span of less than three months, I've been devastated by personal loss and, though it matters far less in the grand scheme of things,  disheartened by the spectacle of American politics. My suspicion of politicians in general has turned into disgust, and I cannot help but wonder how this happened. Certainly, nobody in my little world gets it. My world, obviously as small as the world of the folks sitting on a bench somewhere between the Mississippi and the Rockies, as alien to me, maybe, as I was to them when I stepped off the Greyhound spaceship. I'd like to think we have all gotten better since the summer of 1975, when we didn't have social media bringing us together, that there's a clearer definition of good and evil that has nothing to do with race or religion or geography. But all I know is there are a whole lot of people out there, somewhere, who are buying into something that is at best comical, and at worst frightening, at least to me and the people I hang with, and I just don't get it.

Good things, like bad things, should happen in threes, and by my count, we still have some wiggle room on the good side. Maybe little Marco or lying Ted or tumescent Donald or poor, dear John will do something surprising, or rational, or good. I suppose there's always Canada, eh?

Crossroads

It was bad enough that I woke up soaked in sweat and realized I couldn't keep blaming it on the jalapeno pizza.  Another damn hot flash. Like a tap on the shoulder, momentarily startling, sometimes even makes you jump, though it's hardly a surprise. Everything changes.

I had cooled off by the time I found myself at that intersection, the same intersection I had passed through almost every weekday morning for years.  The crossing guards, more often than not bundled up against the cold, clutching the giant stop signs that defied the waiting drivers to turn, much less lean on the horn, until every miniature pedestrian had two feet safely back up on the curb.

Tap, tap. I'm not sure why it took my breath away, why I felt so startled. The same crossing guards, the same miniature pedestrians. Different faces, but the same size. The same long line of cars, heading north, waiting to turn east. I was heading west this time, a different perspective, I suppose. I was no longer a part of this scenery, just a spectator, a fly on the wall. So utterly familiar, so utterly unexpected.

I looked for my old neighbor, the one who always walked her dog around that time, stopping for a while to chat with the guards while they waited out the long red lights. She wasn't there. I hope the dog is okay. It was disconcerting, not seeing her there. It was still more disconcerting, seeing life going on the way it always had, when so much has changed for me. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Somehow, that evening, I ended up killing some time at bar in a popular local restaurant.  The "old" local, the place of the morning crossing guards with their stop signs and my old neighbor walking her dog and the miniature pedestrians oblivious to the impatient drivers waiting to turn, their horns eerily silent. The place I left two and a half years ago, a move less about distance than about symbolism, about starting fresh, and maybe even about being a little anonymous if I felt like it. My "new" local. I'm hardly as anonymous there as I had planned, but I still enjoy the newness.

Though I was never particularly anonymous in the "old" local -- how can you be, really, in a suburban fishbowl -- I was never particularly social either. Which is why it did not surprise me that I knew a good percentage of the folks wandering in, but it did surprise me that I went out of my way to catch the attention of several. To be out there, to say hello, to even solicit a few hugs. Tap, tap. An alien has inhabited my body, riding the wave of the hot flashes.

Another intersection. I again felt I was no longer a part of this scenery, just a spectator, a fly on the wall. So utterly familiar, so utterly unexpected. I caught myself, reminding myself that just because they are all still there, it does not mean that everything has not changed for them as well. That they, too, don't suffer pangs when they pass through the old intersections, no longer toting their own miniature people around, no longer revolving around the schedule of crossing guards. That they, like me, don't juggle love and loss and extreme joy and devastating sadness on a daily basis, in a life that is always evolving, always changing.

An occasional pause at an intersection is good, especially when everything else can be so shaky.

A Decent Proposal

My daughter said yes.

It had never occurred to me that she would say no, but still, when I finally got the call -- hardly a surprise, since my future son-in-law-to-be had already given me the heads up -- I breathed a sigh of relief. Odd.

She's beautiful, the doctor said when she finally arrived, a solid three nursing shifts after I had waddled in. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn't be, but still, I breathed a sigh of relief. It's a girl? I asked. I had known that for months, had even told the doctor her name. Odd.

I can't sleep. My own Facebook post announcing the engagement has been pushed to the bottom of the news feed, overridden by countless others. I scroll through the well-wishes, all accompanied by photographs of special moments with friends, from childhood through college. I take my own trip down memory lane, a montage of her and me playing out in my brain. She's beautiful. It's a girl? Sigh. My girl. My girl said yes. His girl, now. Odd.

There's so much I want to tell them. About how important this is, about how wonderful it should be, about how I truly believe that it can work, even though I was not particularly good at it. I worry about a lot of things, but, oddly, I don't really worry about them, as in "the them." Though their minds may be elsewhere when they actually speak those vows, they will mean every word. Marriage, like everything in life worth having, is hard, but they will make it look effortless. It's how they are. It's how "the they" is.

Word has it they were both too excited to eat last night. That's how I know not to worry. My own marriage may have given me indigestion at times, but I was never too excited to eat.

As it turns out, like me, she couldn't sleep. She texted me to tell me that. She sent me a close-up of her newly bedazzled finger. I told her how excited I am for them. "The them." I didn't mention how excited I was to hear from her, how reassuring it is to know there will always be "an us" too.

Yes indeed.

The Right to Bare Ass

"Can you explain something to me?"

It's disarming when a stranger asks you this, especially when you're naked. I stopped drying off, pulled my towel up and wrapped it tightly under my armpits. There was nobody else in the locker room, so she was clearly talking to me.

"If there's a guy who swims in the pool in his underwear, should I approach him myself or should I report him to the front desk?" God's honest truth, I had been deep in thought, pondering the great mysteries of life and death, like how I could have been so fond of Justice Scalia, and why a President is a lame duck when he still has almost eleven months left in his term, or why, within the span of a month, a teenager, my friend's twenty-seven year old son, and a brilliant seventy-nine year old jurist all died, inexplicably, somewhere in the state of Texas. (Yes, I watch too many crime shows, and the news of the teenager arose out of a hunch and a Google search.)

I had even been reminiscing about law school, although I'm not sure how much reminiscing one can do about an experience she mostly slept through in the first place. First year. Constitutional Law. Professor Henry Monaghan always seemed angry (and a little hungover). His rants were soothing and predictable background noise to my daydreams: diatribes about his arch rival, Lawrence Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard who probably didn't know they were rivals -- probably didn't even know Henry; dismissive stage whispers about how pathetic and third rate we were, students at Boston University, across the river from people who mattered (no he wasn't bitter at all); tantrums about  something called "substantive due process" which seemed just a silly oxymoron to me but apparently drove Henry to drink.

It came back to me today as I read excerpts from some of Justice Scalia's opinions, smiling at his mastery of language and his capacity for eloquent ridicule. I rarely come across such quality entertainment in my social security disability appeals, except for occasional snippets of scathing sarcasm from a favorite Seventh Circuit judge. Scalia's writing was so good, his principles so consistent, his respect for the Constitution so unwavering, it was difficult to hate him, even though I generally disagreed with his result. I get why Ruth Bader Ginsburg chose him as a playmate. Smart with a sense of humor -- goes a lot farther than movie star good looks, even if he's not Jewish.

As much as the thought of his pivotal seat on the bench being handed off to some pinko liberal would make him spin in his grave, I think Justice Scalia would be appalled at the politics of his death. I don't think he'd necessarily be surprised that Republicans are so worked up that they've forgotten to even pretend to cry. I don't think he'd even be surprised about calls for Senate filibusters or whatever else they need to do to keep open the possibility that one of the buffoons seeking the Republican nomination will actually become President and place an avowed gun-slinging homophobe on the Supreme Court. But these calls for the President to ignore Constitutional language that he (or she?) "shall" nominate and, with the consent of the Senate, "shall" appoint a new Justice, ignore it because he is a "lame duck?" Has he been a lame duck for this entire second term? Just the second half of the second term? The last quarter? I wish I had paid more attention in Con Law.

I'm not smart or principled or consistent, so, in these uncertain times, at least I am certain I won't get nominated, no matter which duck does the nominating. And though I get the point of strict construction, I'm a little loose about it, since I know the Constitution was drafted by folks who believed the definition of "person" changed with skin color and who grew up in a time when nobody envisioned crazy people shooting up classrooms and movie theaters and learning how to make bombs on the Internet. The times, they are always a changin', and I am a firm believer in wiggle room.

I told the lady in the locker room she should let the front desk handle the guy swimming in his underwear, if it meant that much to her.  It was a no-brainer. I have a strict policy against approaching strange men in their underwear.