To do list:
Hug partner and tell them that you love them. Check.
Make espresso. Check.
Turn off phone. Check.
Change book club reading to Paul Lynch's Prophet's Song. Check.
Resolve never to visit the state of Florida. Check.
Cancel subscriptions to New Yorker, New York Times, etc.
Donate to Ukraine relief.
Finally contribute something to The Guardian. Consider doing same for NPR.
Lock gates and remove bumper stickers.
Cancel all lessons and stay in pajamas all day.
The ninth one will take some time:
You should all do the fourth one:
The best thing in retrospect that happened to me yesterday was that the man who owns the new coffee shop down the street, Jennings Java,
gave the man who sells cashews, Columbus Cashew Company,
whose daughter was about to take a piano lesson from my studio, Nursery Lane Studios,
a cup of coffee to take over to me. It was a cappuccino in a small white cup. And it meant that our community was thriving, and would take care of each other. It also meant that I would manage to teach children who hadn't adjusted to their new feeding time after daylight savings without having to break a pencil. One of the parents that evening brought their delightful 6-month old child, Amory, to hear the lesson, and play with a rattle. Renee has a way of speaking the truth: she said that one of the good things about bringing a child into this world in 2024 was that the child would never know Donald Trump.
True fact: as soon as I had written those two proper nouns (never was there a less appropriate description) the site I'm writing this blog post on broke. The weight of those two words must have been too much for it. Like me, the site needed to be refreshed. "Reload?" it asked. Yes please. "Are you willing to lose your memory of current events?" Yes please. "Restore?" Oh God Yes.
There is a house in Vermont for sale at $460,000 in Rutland - you can google it on Zillow. I would put up a picture but I'm being pursued by copyright trolls and daren't risk it. The last time I put an unauthorized photograph on this blog a law firm in San Francisco, Higbee & Associates, asked me to pay them $1,400 for the right to use it. I protested that I was a non-commercial entity and they said that I charged for piano lessons. I further protested that teaching neighborhood children at cost hardly qualified as a commercial enterprise and the picture, which I do now have full rights to use but will never show anyone out of spite, was about a Russian bombing of Libya and had very little to do with music teaching. They told me that Agence-Presse, whom they represented, would take $1,200. I offered them a dollar per eyeball - 111 people had read the blog (probably including you) and so $111 seemed like a fair fee. We settled on $400 and I painted the fence myself to save the money. I can at least show you a picture of the fence:
Anyway, the house in Vermont is nice - it has turrets, and is on a secluded hill, and is almost certainly a money pit. You're welcome to make an offer. I'm staying here in Columbus with my sick old dog Olive listening to the rain gently falling over all the Harris Walz signs.
What happened has already happened. As Kamala kept telling us, now we get to turn the page. Only this time we're flipping forward a couple of chapters, past the fatuous inaugurations and pointless slights, past the rise of the steel-eyed incarnation of the Jacksonian mean streak that is the completely made-up personality of J.D. Vance (not the first unprepared politician to invent for himself a new name, who also had a little bit of war experience in an earlier war and a giant manifesto to inflict on an unsuspecting nation), past the loss of Ukraine, past the ceding of the Arctic sphere of influence to the Russian military industrial complex, past the Chinese dominance of the South China Sea, the seaway through which a third of all shipping passes, past the children with polio (good God) and well past the endless endless crowing from our nation's cockerel. We voted for it, we asked for it, we got it. Let's move on.
Renee's child Amory will grow up as my dear friends the Thielses did, unwitting children of a horrific time in their nation's history, emerging out of postwar Germany at the age of 20 in 1945. The Thielses settled in Frankfurt and became psychiatrists. They were part of the great rebuilding of the European social contract that Tony Judt writes about so movingly in Postwar. At the age of 80 they took to the streets to protest Bush's war in Afghanistan. Gertie would say, when the bad thoughts begin, lean your head against the wall and knock them gently out. Try it. It might work.
We can do more than that. We can bring a cup of coffee to a neighbor, buy a bag of cashews, give a child a music lesson. Weave the fabric. Build the community. Hold fast to what we believe in. The dawn is mocking me as I write this - nature has a way of getting the last word in human affairs. That was true for Wilfred Owen, true for Anna Akhmatova, true for Erich Remarque. It's probably true for the small bug that is presently crawling over my computer screen. The world has changed utterly, and the prince of lies has arrived to take his preordained place. But things won't fall apart. Well, bridges will. Health care will. NATO will. It will be our job to put it together again.
Here's that house in Vermont:
