Is democracy worth all this effort? Probably.

But it feels more sisyphean by the day. The Epstein files are ordered to be released; dribbles appear that expose victims and protect abusers. The constitution mandates one citizen, one vote and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act reasserts that right; exhaustive measures are taken to disenfranchise voters. Repeated court orders prohibit the temporary occupant of the People’s House from arbitrarily destroying house and grounds alike; he simply goes ahead paving over, digging up, constructing.

It’s as if all the anti-democratic issues and actions we are battling are rolled into one immense obstacle to be struggled uphill, only for it all to reverse course again and steamroll over us. Donald Trump’s obsessively coveted ballroom will be built, despite the clear certainty that it’s illegal; he is crafty enough to know the more complete it is the more difficult to tear down, and amoral enough not to care about history, legality or decency.

Still, the keepers of the flame refuse to give up.

What’s amazing is the resilience with which defenders of democracy keep pushing the ball of infamy back up the hill. Ro Khana, D-CA, for instance, was on PBS last night (I think; he pops up so often one loses track) talking about how he and his fellow representative Thomas Massie, R-Ky, plan to get the Epstein files actually released as soon as a new congress is installed and plow right ahead to get satisfaction for victims along with prosecution of abusers. It’s almost enough to make you a believer.

Following Khana on the daily news is like watching a vigorous game of Whack-a-Mole: Optimistic Khana pops up, Milquetoast Mike Johnson bashes him down, Khana pops right up somewhere else. Add to this the impression that Republican Massie has an actual spine, and my money is on the gutsy survivors and their friends in D.C.

It’s been harder to watch the machinations of Trump & Co in their efforts to undermine the vote. Take away the vote and you’ve pretty well defeated democracy. The forces of evil are showing us how well they understand this and how determined they are to get it done. Most recently it’s been the gathering of every available searcher to find instances of noncitizen votes  — never mind that even the Heritage Foundation could find only 100 in a quarter century. They’re aiming their Whack-a-mallets everywhere; witness the Tarrant County, TX commissioners lopping out 92 polling places because their reliably Republican community suddenly showed signs of purpling. (And while they’re at it, get rid of mail-in ballots.)

But the citizens of Tarrant County seem just as determined as their higher profile colleagues in the nation’s capitol. Thrown out of the room for protesting the obvious voter-discouragement tactic, they came back one by one to stand at the microphone and speak their minds, often ending with one emphatic word, “SHAME.”

Shame may not do it. I think that word is not in Donald Trump’s vocabulary. Legal arguments and court cases may not do it, but individuals and organizations (send money!) continue to do battle with the constitution as their groundwork. Advocacy may not do it, but don’t write off the Epstein survivors or the protesting citizens of Tarrant County, TX. Or the rest of us ready to take to the streets. While we’re at it we might also rip up concrete and replant rose gardens.

All together, we Sisypheans may just get democracy back on track.

Lake Obama Superior does have a nice ring to it.

I just received an email about Ontario renaming Lake Superior as Lake Obama, properly identified on new maps as Lake Obama is Superior. The Honourable Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario since 2018 (can we sense Donald Trump’s jealous ire over that long tenure?) might have effected this with a sharpie. Or not; either way, it’s a fine plan.

While we’re at it, how about a few more renames:

The E.B. White House — just to retain a tiny sense of dignity for the People’s House currently being trashed by its temporary occupant. The new 2026 Congress could authorize the E.B. in front of the place until 2028. Strunk & White, or White’s Elements of Style, at any rate could teach the current, style-challenged temporary White House occupant a literary thing or two, were he inclined to read. Though I’m not sure his reading got past Stuart Little, if indeed he reached that level. (P.S., White was even born in Mt. Vernon; thanks, internet.) Nickname: The Every Bit Our White House, not yours, DJT.

Next, perhaps the F.A.A. could re-rename the Palm Beach International Airport for the benefit of travelers now flying into Miami and taking shuttles to avoid flying into anywhere named Trump. I mean. If they did it once, surely they can do it again. How about Dolly Parton International Airport Annex, since the late, beloved icon was even beloved by Donald Trump (so he’s going to object? Not on your life.) I’m thinking Tennessee Rep Justin Pearson would be up for furnishing the legislative authority as we edge aside Gov. Ron DeSantis. Pearson is twice as smart as DeSantis, if barely half his age, and this would avoid any conflict of interest with Nashville’s own renaming of its airport in Dolly’s honor.

While we’re re-renaming, let’s have that poor benighted gulf re-sharpie’d as the Gulf of Messico. That early presidential stupidity started all this. The re-rename will make it easier to fix those maps that went along, as soon as sanity is restored to our democracy.

I was briefly, extraordinarily fond of Black Lives Matter Plaza off of D.C.’s 16th Street. Mayor Muriel Bowser seems to be getting along with her anti-DEI neighbor as well as currently possible, so maybe she’s not up for quarreling about it. I hold out the hope that the new president will have better things to do after the 2028 inauguration, but I will personally deliver a sharpie for re-renaming BLM Plaza

Already the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is getting to be known as the Strait of Warm Ooze; I heard it on PBS. The status of the long-revered reflecting pool remains cloaked in mystery, presumably until Trump’s pool guy comes up with a new idea. This should not delay installation of a plaque on the fence with the new name. And since he’s so addicted to plastering his own moniker everywhere  — why not? — make it officially the Donald J. Trump Strait of Warm Ooze. If he can do that in the Persian Gulf (though Iran seems not to be in obedient compliance) we can do it in our nation’s capitol.

I just look forward to the return of the Kennedy Center. We all miss the Kennedy Center. But I’m satisfied it will return, when sanity returns.

Lastly, let’s rename Congress. Oh, not permanently, just until after the midterms. For now, Spineless Center might work; it surely fits the majorities that have allowed the Sharpie King to desecrate our Capitol and demolish our democracy. Perhaps, when sanity is returned and — dare we hope — democracy restored, along with civility and justice and equality, all those quaint things we used to enjoy, we can take a new look at an old name.

United States of America has a nice ring to it.

Is there time to move to Iowa before the midterms?

To be truthful, I know approximately nothing about Iowa, other than the song from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “State Fair,” — Oh I know, all I owe I owe Ioway, which is at least a start. If you’re old enough to know “State Fair” — unlikely for the original in 1933, but perhaps one of the remakes and reruns in 1945, 1962 and thereafter  — you will immediately sing along. Please feel free; this is a music-centric essay.

By now we all know Rob Sand. Sand is currently running to be Governor for All — as in All Iowans. Never mind that he’s actually the Democratic nominee in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in two decades. Anyone who gets his audiences singing “America the Beautiful” has my vote. One thing the world needs now is music, the food of love and uniter of souls. Another thing is a little more uniting of souls.

Rob Sand has the right idea.

Last night I caught a clip of Sand at a campaign event asking the Republicans in the room to raise their hands, followed by the Independents. He then led rounds of applause for both groups, before kicking off a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Iowa farmer LaVon Griffieon was quoted referring to the event as a “breath of fresh air.”

Call me Pollyanna (I’ve been called that already, and worse,) but the sight of people of differing political persuasions singing together about amber waves of grain does a lot more for the heart, soul and general welfare than a rhythmically challenged president clapping his hands to “YMCA” or whatever other fire-’em-up tunes are blasted from his rallies.

For decades, especially during election years, we were treated to revivals of the Gershwin musical classic, “Of Thee I Sing,” an electoral spoof that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1932. It was back on Broadway in 1952, on TV in 1972, and sporadically in community theaters ever since. But it doesn’t seem to be playing anywhere this year; it may be harder to laugh and sing about politics today than it was in 1932.

But we can all do a verse or two of America the Beautiful.

I don’t know how many (or which) verses of the old hymn are sung at rallies for Rob Sand or any other candidates, but there are zingers in the final lines of all four verses. Including, (Verse 2) Confirm thy soul in self-control — something notably absent among today’s decision-makers — and (Verse 3) May God thy gold refine. When Katharine Lee Bates, a poet, professor and social reformer, wrote the poem/future hymn at the turn of the twentieth century, she had in mind refining our gold to proper ends. From what’s known about Ms. Bates, she would hardly have condoned slathering gold leaf on every available surface in the White House,

But as a hymn to the beauty of our country — Bates had recently traveled from Massachusetts to Colorado where she went to the mountaintop of Pike’s Peak — and to the brotherhood it should inspire, “America the Beautiful” is hard to beat. Will it ever replace the militarisitic Star Spangled Banner? I’m not holding my breath.

But here’s to a movement promoting group sing-alongs at political rallies, with “America the Beautiful” as the keynote and perhaps one of Dolly Parton’s everything’s-gonna-be-alright songs for the closer.

We may have lost Dolly Parton, but we have her legacy. It includes thousands of her own songs, music for lovers and strivers, music for everyman and everywoman. Plenty of familiar songs that might as well lend themselves to political rallies.

Parton, though, was famously and adamantly non-political, often quoted as saying she was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but perhaps “a hypo-crat.” But however much the far right might claim to love her it’s hard to imagine she’d ever have sided with the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric or the cuts to healthcare, education and welfare — or the book-banners. One small fragment of Parton’s legacy is her Imagination Library, founded in 1995 as a tribute to her father, who never learned to read and write.

There’s a Dolly Parton quotation posted on a bulletin board in my building that reads, “If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain.”

It’s raining craziness now. A president renaming lakes while ignoring the war he started? Voting restrictions proposed from everywhere just in time for democratic elections? It’s also raining divisiveness and discord. But with a lot of work in the meantime, the midterms are going to bring rainbows.

Sing on, candidate Sand.

My excellent husband Bud Johns, 1929–2019, was known to be wise and perceptive. This was owing to a curious mind not unlike the Encyclopedia Brittanica… but he also had Tonto.

Tonto joined the family when Bud was about four (he thought) although nobody was ever quite sure; from then on, in any event, they were amiable companions. It was the Depression, and with a Methodist preacher dad at the helm the family was constantly moving. Tonto moved with them.

I don’t think he went to college or joined the Marines, but Tonto somehow survived moves, marriages and the vicissitudes of life to wind up on a shelf in my living room where he now contemplates the universe.

There, he serves as a metaphor for today. And/or Ultimate Sage. Bud used to theorize you could tell that Tonto understood the world just by his exasperated expression. We also had a habit of saying, when weighty isssues were in dispute, “Look at Tonto. He supports offshore wind farms, don’t you, old buddy?” Or things of that sort.

Having observed nearly a century of the trials of humankind, Tonto has earned the right to reflect on our whims and foibles, if not to serve as a metaphor-in residence.

For starters, he wakes up every morning and something is slightly off. We know that feeling. Tonto has the advantage of not really waking up, since he doesn’t close his eyes. It’s hard not to take that as a subtle comparison to how desperately most of us would like to pull the covers over our heads and not wake up until 2028.

One thing that’s off for Tonto is the perpetually dislocated lower body. We never understood why one Tonto leg is shorter than the other, but a close examination suggests misalignment of his right hip, and if you’re 93, as Tonto and I currently are, you know a lot about hip issues. I avoid them by just walking a few miles a day, but Tonto, unfortunately, never had that option. The rest of his limbs? Hang loose, it’s all we can do.

But back to the ever-watchful gaze. Tonto’s primary message for today, I think, is the side-eye. Tonto looks perpetually askance at the world. His friend Bud, asked about this one day, said Tonto saw a lot more than the rest of us with our tiny attention spans because he was on constant alert, and furthermore he was a confirmed skeptic. And here’s to skepticism.

We live in a time that calls for the side-eye. Annex Canada? The Iran war is over? We won? Drill for oil in Greenland? Climate change is a hoax? Pick the next declaration coming from the mouth of our president and I recommend you give it the side-eye.

Perhaps it’s just as well Tonto never opens his mouth. Considering what he has witnessed — World War II, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Watergate, endless wars and a pompous narcissist wrecking our democracy — one can only imagine what he’d say. Probably, something like: Pull yourselves together. Ball up your own fists.

Or maybe not. Maybe the message from the shelf is only: “My head may be full of sawdust, but I can tell truth from lies, and fascism from democracy.”

Or maybe, since Tonto (and his friend Bud) were contemporaries of poet Dirk Dunning’s Uncle-in law (Keith Schooler Hickey, Pvt. 15th Infantry Regiment, of the 3rd Infantry Division, 20 July 1923, Montana to 23 October 1944, somewhere near Mortagne, France) he’s sitting there reflecting just as Dunning does in his eloquent poem “Four Score Later, We Return” which concludes with these lines:

time is not mercy.
It only returns us
to what we have not finished.

So let this be a lament,
and a vow,
for those who died then,
for those who live now,
for the never-finished work
of refusing the lie,
refusing the dark.

I am worried about my homeland, and not just its security.

The Homeland Security people would have you believe that new ICE recruits receive 56 days of training and an average of 28 days of on-the-job training. If you believe everything Markwayne Mullin says, I have a bridge to Antarctica I’d like to sell you. Despite his having a degree in plumbing and an honorary doctorate, Mr. Mullin does not make me feel secure.

I have encountered ICE people, mostly when accompanying law-abiding immigrants to mandated appearances. Although surely they have personal lives and families, I have yet to see an ICE agent smile, make eye contact or otherwise acknowledge the humanity of the humans present.

So now we want Mr. Mullin to equip them with electric shock gloves? Oh, good grief. Didn’t we all spend enough time teaching our children not to stick their fingers in the electric outlets — and now this.

There are videos of how these tools work; most of them showing both shockers and shockees laughing after a simple handswipe lands the victim on the floor. On the hands of ICE agents, I do not anticipate laughter.

Estimated cost to us taxpayers? Oh, maybe $10 or $20 million. But what’s that to an administration fixated on golden ballrooms and triumphal arches and incarcerating anyone with a tinge of brown in his or her skin. Not to mention forever wars, which go unmentioned for days on end — but all of these are where our taxpayer billions are going.

The company that makes ICE’s shock gloves is Compliant Technologies, which makes a big deal of being “veteran owned.” Compliant also asserts that the G.L.O.V.E. (its clever acronym for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) “gives officers a non-lethal option… bringing resisting subjects into compliance in seconds, without lasting harm to anyone involved.” This assumes the subject is not someone with medical issues, or a child, or a pregnant woman, or a 112-pound little old lady as will be the case when an ICE person grabs me by the arm if I choose to question his grabbing of a terrified immigrant friend.

If you would like to tell the Compliant people what you think about their wonderful new ICE tool, here’s their contact form. If you want to save time composing a message, feel free to copy or adapt what I sent them:

That a company associated with American veterans, a demographic I appreciate and respect, could be supplying shock gloves to ICE for their despicable, illegal activities, is nothing short of obscene. You are contributing to activities that violate our Constitution and every law of moral value. For shame.

I don’t think it’s worth anyone’s time to try to reach Markwayne Mullin. But please consider letting your representatives know how you feel about all this, perhaps by supporting people (maybe they’re not yet elected, and need your help!) who will shift control of Congress so that the obscenities being committed in our name, at home and abroad, might be brought under control and democracy restored.

Thank you. From the sane people of the world, and me.

“Okay, that’s it,” Christine Cotter said, “I’m done. I’m moving to Malta.”

In another U.S. home, on the day after Donald Trump was elected to a second term, Sarah Ziegler’s husband Charles Allison asked, “Can you get us out of here?” Sarah had already started looking at housing in Greece; that day they switched to fast-track.

Americans are pulling up roots. Weary with the battles and shaken by the upheavals of Trump 2.0, hundreds — perhaps thousands or more — are moving their allegiance to the European Union, cutting American ties and relocating to new homes in Portugal, France, Malta, Amsterdam, Brussels, Greece and elsewhere.

It is our loss.

The exodus of Americans, according to a variety of sources ranging from Brookings to broadcasters, has accelerated since the beginning of the second Trump administration. They are young scientists, public servants and medical professionals who were summarily fired from promising careers. They are bedrock-American families concerned about their children’s education. Or healthcare, or safety. They are older citizens feeling betrayed by the country they’ve supported for decades. Americans of every age from every corner of the USA — saddened by the loss of the democracy they helped build.

I talked to a handful of citizens heading to new homes in Portugal, Malta and Crete, several dual citizens choosing their overseas homes, and one American-born dual French citizen with no plans ever to return his allegiance to the country of his birth. U.S. citizens who have long contributed to the social, cultural and economic fabric of this country and now plan to invest their lives and considerable energies elsewhere.

Christine Cotter, the Ziegler/Allisons and others snapshotted here are Americans who have been informed and involved in this beleaguered democracy but see its current anti-democratic movement as too rapid and no longer worth the fight. It’s not hard to figure out why.

The folks at GTFO Tours — whose name you have to love — help Americans find new overseas homes. “Most of our clients,” says GTFO’s Jana Sanchez, “move because of concerns about the stability and/or future of democracy in the U.S. They often have specific concerns about the safety of family members; this can be because they are families with LGBTQ or immigrant members, who feel targeted by the current administration. Almost every client is concerned about the cost of healthcare in the U.S., the proliferation of gun violence, the quality of education, reproductive rights and societal division.”

Many of those concerns prompted Janice’s family to consider moving to Portugal a decade ago. She asked for anonymity for fear of being targeted. “We made the decision in 2017, shortly after the election,” Janice says, “partly thanks to the partisan arguing and partly because of the country in general — ‘This is not going the way we would hope.’

“We wanted to be close to the ocean, a temperate climate, safety, good food, good healthcare, good quality of life,” Janice explains. Portugal offered all of these. The family’s original plan was to get residency visas, have their son and daughter finish high school and get EU citizenship before they graduated. Processes took far longer than expected; the kids are now in college.

The family sold their house and downsized into a nearby condo. “We missed having space for the kids’ friends, who used to congregate in the big house,” she says. That was one regret; the other was the length of time that turned out to be required. But in 2026 they bought a house in Ericeira on Portugal’s western coast. Over the years, complicated by the Covid pandemic and upheavals in Portugal’s immigration office, they’ve had tourist visas, which allow stays of 89 days; their applications for residency visas were finally accepted in 2023.

Visas were never a problem for composer Josh Levine, whose eventual permanent settlement in France was shaped by decades of personal and professional factors rather than a single political trigger. “My affinity for Europe really began in childhood,” he explains. Though he grew up in Oregon, where both parents were professors at Oregon State, he spent childhood and youth years in Israel, Spain and England; later he studied classical guitar in Basel and lived for 14 years in Switzerland. But it was marriage to a French national decades ago that brought French citizenship — “It just came in the mail, when I was living in San Francisco.”

His own preference for France over the U.S. owes partly to professional frustration — despite several good teaching positions “my compositional career gained little momentum,” Levine says. He also cites “a strong vein of Francophilia” alongside political discouragement as drivers for Americans relocating to France. One couple he met during the first Trump term, he says, “bought a house in southern France and are building toward full relocation; they are disgusted with the way things are going in the U.S.”

That was also true for French-Americans Fiona Clement and her husband Norbert de Bruijn. Retired physicians Clement and de Bruijn came to the U.S. early in their careers, she from Britain and he from Holland. More than a decade ago they settled into a houseboat home to be near California family.

“When Trump came on the scene,” Clement says, “Norbert became more and more disgusted with the political situation and that encouraged him to find a home in Europe. We eventually found a nice house and garden in Avignon, where we currently stay for 6–8 months of the year.” They plan to return for portions of the years ahead. But the ease of European travel plus the attraction of “the massive Rhône river that flows by Avignon, attracting various ships coming north from the Mediterranean and south from the northern countries” are balm for the family soul, and rich reward for getting away from “the political situation” in their formerly chosen country.

German-American Astrid Cooper and her husband lived in Ohio from 1995 until 2022. They have chosen Germany.

“When I woke up to the news that Trump had won his first election,” Cooper says, “I was devastated. I remember crying for weeks. January 6, 2021, was the turning point for me. I will never forget how frightened and hopeless I felt that day. That was the moment I realized I no longer wanted to live in the United States… a country that, in my view, seems to be moving backward, under an administration that I feel is limiting rights, dismissing dissenting voices, and tolerating dishonesty and corruption.”

Mary Kay Vona, who with her Sephardic partner will become a neighbor of Janice’s family in Ericeira, sees the move more as a long-planned cultural choice/portfolio investment than a political escape. “It’s been a decades long dream,” she says, “rooted in a global career. The current U.S. climate accelerated the timeline but was not the primary driver — I’m not going to give the regime that power.”

A nationally recognized public speaker, teacher and leadership consultant, Vona is like Levine, Clement, and de Bruijn in being more of a global citizen than committed to one specific country. But their commitments to the U.S. were long and strong before being pulled up with their roots. Vona’s concerns, on leaving, include “the decline in international students, the weaponization of higher education and the lack of historical knowledge among students.” Though her citizenship will be elsewhere, “I believe the current regime will collapse,” she says, “and accountability must follow.”

Not all of these have given up on the U.S. Janice and her family will fly home to vote in November. Along with the Ziegler/Allisons and others interviewed for this article, they continue to work for midterm candidates. Christine Cotter, who will also fly home to vote if mail-in voting is denied, also hopes midterm victors “will provide fresh leadership with new ideas, encourage civil discourse and generally reverse the damage — without rewriting history.” A tall order.

The depth of discouragement is palpable. Most of those interviewed for this sample — and I communicated with many others before calling it quits with the above — believe the U.S. will eventually reverse course and democracy will survive. Many have been deeply involved in political activism; all are unwilling or unable to continue the fight, at least on U.S. soil.

But defeat is not an option.

My beloved friend Bob left the planet recently.

It was time. He was done with all this. We have a good law, the California End of Life Option Act, that offers the choice of Medical Aid in Dying if one is a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. So after many years of battling cancer — most of them wonderfully good and productive years — he didn’t so much surrender as choose to leave the battlefield. We should all have the grace, and the good fortune, to make such a choice.

Still.

A few days earlier he’d called to say goodbye. I declined; we settled on See you around. Then on that morning after I awoke to an email of two hearts in my inbox from him; another two, later, from his wife. (Though he and I had loved each other deeply for years, she understood. I’m pretty sure I was not even close to being his only extra-marital beloved.)

I had gone to bed that night before, after sending off my own hearts, with a heavy one of my own. The hearts in the inbox helped, but the heaviness was slow to lift; loss takes its own time to wear itself down. As Anna Quindlen concludes in her poem “Old Friends” — which also references earthquakes and tsunamis and terrorist attacks — “Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.” So I poured a cup of coffee, thought sorrowfully and fondly of his family, and wondered how any of us would get through the day.

And then these things happened:

A new photo of my one-month-old great-granddaughter popped up in a family text stream. Her father, my grandson, is shampooing her hair.

A neighbor of Bob’s — who knew him only casually but knew of our friendship and his illness — sent an email saying she and her husband were walking by his house this morning and thinking of how often they enjoyed the lovely music coming from his piano. She hoped things were okay and just wanted to send a note.

My daughter-in-law called to fill me in on family lives, and discuss some technological issues she has offered to help me with. If dealing with technology won’t take your mind off your sorrows (and/or replace them all with rage and frustration) nothing will.

A neighbor in my building sent a text saying how much he was enjoying the new flower arrangement outside my door. As it happened, the flowers in my building’s

lobby were to be replaced in the morning, so it was legal to snatch a few (the white ones, dahlias perhaps?) late last night. I poked them into a vase with some hydrangeas brought by dinner guests two weeks ago. Who needs new flowers, when aging ones bring community joy?

A political activist friend emailed an invitation to a fundraiser for some national candidates I greatly admire. She knew I couldn’t afford the big bucks initially advertised, but a few cut-rate tickets had quietly been made available. (Or so she said. Maybe she was feeling sorry for me?)  In any event, it meant getting to meet and greet a few heroes, and in lively, fancy company!

Some old Substacks and Medium posts generated thoughtful comments, some of them funny, all bringing just a tiny fragment of someone else’s soul.

At lunch I visited with a group of old friends; we talked causes and politics and trivia. After dinner, another old friend came for a visit and to use my shower, because she has no hot water. Life in senior living facilities does not always run smoothly. But her trouble was my gain.

In my reading pile are several unfinished New Yorker’s and Atlantics, Ann Patchett’s new Whistler and (audiobook version) The Odyssey. Miss Mabel K. Whiteside, who taught me Greek 101 an antiquity ago, would be proud.

Just another day on planet earth. Minus the physical presence but not the living spirit of one treasured soul, and still peopled with others — 

Each one reaching down a hand of friendship.

This is an anecdotal victory tale within the universal story: human v. website. Usually the humanoid surrenders, the algorithm wins, life goes on. But for those of us who usually surrender, and on top of that who generally refuse to deal with the Amazon website on principle  — a task that gets harder by the day —  here is an Uplift Story:

All I wanted was to send a baby shower gift.

Amazon had thanked me for my business, confirmed the transaction, assured me the gift would be delivered on Tuesday. Whew. The party is scheduled for Thursday.

This party is happening in Catania, Sicily; I am sending a gift from San Francisco. Thus, I am dealing with the evil Amazon, because one can send something via Amazon.IT and otherwise sending a gift package from the U.S. to Sicily is an impossibility. Sometimes we just do what we have to do.

Oops! I am greeted in the morning with a message that my credit card was declined by the bank. Excuse me? This credit card has been on auto-pay from the day I got it a decade or so ago. The credit card algorithm revealed that payment was declined “because the address entered did not match the address on record.” Oh. A return to Amazon revealed, after about 20 or 30 minutes of digging, that the shipping address for the gift had erroneously slipped into a billing address line.

I spend 10 or 15 minutes trying to get the website to let me fix it. Eventually, I give up. I find the place where I’m invited to Add A New Payment Option, and add a new card. (It’s also on auto-pay, so I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine if I can get the right address into the right line.)

Please confirm new card, it says. But it refuses to provide a box for re-typing the number of the new card. No amount of typing and searching and clicking will bring up the box into which I might re-enter the new numbers and confirm the new card. By now it is close to midnight, this having been an on-again/off-again battle. Not a good time to be arguing with a website, but I am committed.

I take my laptop down to the front desk of my building, where the concierge on duty happens to be a tech genius. He understands it all, but not even he can get it to provide the little box. We go for coffee. We return to see the little box has blinked on — only to blink off.

I go back to my apartment in full battle mode. I push my laptop far enough away to finish some other chores, but copy the necessary numbers onto the clipboard and poise the cursor on the exact spot. I go about my business — it’s now closing in on 1 AM but I am beyond determined at this point — keeping one eye on the evil, recalcitrant website.

And sure enough, at about 1:10 AM PST the box blinks back into action. I spot it right away and hit Ctrl V — pasting the numbers in before it can blink off. Take that, evil techno-gremlins.

Mission accomplished. Gift purchased. Delivery made in time for party.

Current score, Technology: 5,794 — Humanoid: 1. But I’ll take it.

Visitors go to San Francisco’s Alamo Square Park to photograph the Victorian Painted Ladies houses, to gaze at spectacular views of downtown or the surrounding neighborhoods, to picnic or sunbathe or strengthen various muscle groups.

I go to the park to look up. Well, for all those other reasons too — but looking up is what does it for my heart and soul.

Try it.

Just look up. Walking cities, check out the floors above street-level on urban blocks — I learned that in the one college architecture class I had. It’s a way of noticing the building’s history, or figuring out what’s really going on up there, inside.

Or look higher!

As a committed follower of the Cloud Appreciation Society (Member #45,662,) I have more cloud photos than you want to know about. I’m constantly on the lookout for a potential Cloud-of-the-Day photo that CAS might choose. Lovely way to start every day: with the daily Cloud in your inbox, along with an explanation of what, where and why it is, and often a few whimsical asides.

The London-based Cloud Appreciation Society people are among my favorite know-it-all’s on the planet.

So after this flyaway photo, I’ll quit for now. But I hereby rest my case. The sky’s not just the limit, it’s the invitation to wonder. To exhale.

Here’s to an uplifting day ahead. Week ahead. Just look up.

If you were ever four years old, you’ll remember this:

“I saw that. You did bad.”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

“Did not!!”

“Did too!!”

“Prove it!!”

We humans were born to argue. Not to fight — though admittedly a few of those preschool encounters did wind up in fisticuffs — but to argue our cases. To call out wrongs, to stand up for the right, and make the case for truth and goodwill.

Truth and goodwill are under attack, along with pluralistic democracy.

Led by a playground bully who has punched and bribed his way to the top, grown-up bully-followers are spreading wars and lies with abandon. We need to stay in the game because they cannot win the arguments.

I grew up in a family where civil argument and informed debate were encouraged, expected and ongoing. On one memorable evening, my sister Jane was in a heated argument with my father (who was usually right and had the facts to prove it) over some point in a book under discussion. He abruptly left the dinner table with Jane in hot pursuit, holding the book aloft and saying, “…but Daddy, it says right here in the book..” To which he flung back, over his shoulder, “Well, the book’s wrong.”

It became a family retort, useful when you were worn out with a debate or possibly in a losing position: “Well, the book’s wrong.” It’s funny when you’re throwing in the towel on some insignificant issue. But shutting down all argument when democracy is under attack and a war’s going on is dead serious. And can be seriously deadly.

We have a president (God forgive me for implying even the tiniest connection between Donald Trump and my erudite, impeccably honest and kind-hearted father) whose common stance is, “Well, the book — the fact, the constitution, the ally — is wrong. I, only I, am right.”

There are more than a few good debaters standing up to Trump now (my personal favorite is GA Sen. Jon Ossoff) and with luck a few rational arguments will be heard above the fray as the midterms approach.

But I think we need an argumentative dialog at every level, not just at the top where the bully-pulpit megaphone drowns out rational thought.

Not hostile or pugilistic encounters, just argument. Civil debate.

I’m about the only person I know who hasn’t seen The Odyssey. But in response to all the hoopla I have just begun an audio version of Emily Wilson’s translation (having long forgotten every word of my college Greek I and II.) Because I started this essay simultaneously with the audiobook, it’s hard not to consider the immortal epic poem as arguments about homeland, loyalties, hospitality, wanderlust . . .

Which is to say, humans have always told stories, and they have also found ways to advance their stories through arguments. Isn’t it worth arguing for this nation of immigrants, for individual freedoms, democracy? Not just on the national level but also in the neighborhood near & far?

I do know, firsthand, that this is no easy task. I have a dearly beloved son with whom I am quite close personally, though not geographically; we talk often, usually for an hour or more — he calls when he’s driving and needs to keep alert. We talk about everything under the sun — except politics or abortion. Our views on these are polar opposite and the potential for rupture too painful. I wish his grandfather were here to moderate a debate; he’d never leave the dinner table on this one.

This is precisely the loss I lament here. Not just that I wish I could find some piece of the puzzle where we might meet, but that I SO want to gain a better understanding of the people who put our current administration in power. And here is one: a smart, funny, honest citizen, a loving husband and father with a graduate degree and, as far as I know, a healthy respect for science and truth.

My son has a wide-ranging circle of friends who share his political beliefs, and I have every reaosn to believe they are equally good. I want to understand their worldview almost as desperately as I wish they would take a hard look at global warming. But today’s political climate makes just opening my mouth seem accusatory and any word from them belligerent.

On the other hand, three weeks ago I met a young man at a library event who was wearing a Turning Point USA lapel button. After we talked briefly about the author talk we’d just enjoyed I asked if he’d meet me for coffee to talk about Turning Point, and his political philosophy in general.

We met several days later. Here’s what I learned: Rob (a pseudonym; he did not want to be identified) works with a tech startup in the San Francisco Bay Area and volunteers with the TPUSA group at U.C.Berkeley. He said he’d been a senior at another local university when the Turning Point tour concluded there last November and has tried to help build the TPUSA group ever since. “It is strong, and growing,” he says with pride.

Rob believes that “there is some evidence of global warming,” but that climate change is far overemphasized and that regulatory agencies had “gotten out of hand and needed to be reined in.” He disagrees that any real harm has come to humankind since the dismantling of USAID, and feels that although “Trump does occasionally bend the truth” he has done great good for the country by “wrenching us off of the track we were on.” About that last assessment, Rob explained that “big government had become Big Brother and was killing free enterprise and individual initiative with things like “willy-nilly handouts.”

I did not argue, I simply listened (as I’d promised.) But I asked if I could offer one counter-thought (and rather sneakily made it a two-for.) I said my concern is that the world my grandchildren, who are about his age, and their contemporaries in countries affected by U.S. policies could be living on a planet that’s barely livable long before they reach my age.

“That may be,”Rob replied, “but I doubt it. I think what you’re hearing about climate change is vastly overstated, and you disregard the ingenuity of young people today.”

I did not rest my case, but sure hated not making it. I have Rob’s contact info, but doubt we’ll meet again because he seemed disinterested in that possibility. We are several generations apart; his is the rising one, mine the dying one. He felt heard, he said; I felt only wrenchingly sad.

Still, he took several brief reprints of unimpeachable (IMHO) data I’d brought and promised to read them with an open mind.

I’m doubtful that the Robs of the world are ready to hear any counter arguments to the beliefs they so tightly hold. But I also believe there are others in this great country who are open to questioning where we are today, and whether we’re on the right track or a dangerous detour. Open, at least, to respectful argument.

We need to find ways to engage, to listen with courtesy and civility — but to advance the cause of freedom and democracy and the plight of our threatened planet.

Those are arguments worth making.

“This is not what we fought for,” he said. The 91-year-old Army veteran was speaking for himself and his older brother, a World War II Navy veteran .

“They were first generation Americans taught to pitch in for the common good,” wrote their son and nephew Bruce Gomberg, a retired Maine physician. “And that’s what this administration is ripping away from us.”

These thoughts came in a recent response to an essay this writer had in the June issue of The Atlantic (I like to slip that in whenever I can, “my essay in The Atlantic.”) That article suggested that vaccines are for the common good, and fascism is not. If you check the extension of the link that The Atlantic assigned, it reads “patriotism-selflessness-collective-effort” — I couldn’t have tagged it better myself.

The common good. I am among those who harbor, deep in our psyches, a conviction that true democracy seeks to protect and advance the common good — but what do I know? If the common good is a high priority of our current president, congress or supreme court it’s not particularly evident.

“The common good morphed into the white Christian good,” Bruce wrote, “and, to repeat what my dad told me just months before he left us, ‘this is not what my brother and I fought for.’ ”

Suggesting the common good extends beyond national boundaries, Bruce added that this writer’s “portrayal of American life prior to vaccines is a reminder of how important research, teaching and good health are to the world, ” and current policies are “a reminder of how quickly our progress can vanish if we’re not careful.” (Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. Fast forward: well over 2,000 cases of measles have been reported thus far in 2026.) Are measles for the common good?

This dichotomy sent me to my pocket Constitution. It turns out the founders weren’t precisely talking about the common good — it was all about providing for common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. Throw in establishing justice and insuring domestic tranquility — and — surely that is sufficient to claim this nation was established to further the common good.

So how is it doing, the common good? And what does it even mean? It seems worth a cursory look. The “Greatest Generation” — that would be those who fought for it in World War II — believed it had been secured. But the events of recent years, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have called it all into question.

Maybe our current, and future, leaders could use a reminder.

In the interest of the common welfare, I conducted an anecdotal generational survey. We heard from the nonagenarians and the Boomers above. I asked a few representatives of more recent generations simply to define the common good. Just off the top of your head, I asked, what does it mean to you? It seems that not only are we not there yet, but there’s almost a wistfulness around how far we’ve strayed.

Said Lilli (Millennial:) “First thought: an outdated idea that I wish people still believed in (cynical much?!) Second thought: do we agree on common? Good?”

Also Millennial Alexa: “Good for most even if not always good for everyone?”

And then I heard from a couple of Gen-Xers (or Y’s or Z’s, who can keep it straight?) They may have given it a little unauthorized extra thought.

Wrote Connery: “Doing something that is not necessarily in my own best interest, but doing something less ideal for the better interest of others in one way or another. And how some level of selflessness on a personal level is needed from humans in order for a “common good” to stay alive (and ideally thrive, though we’re not seeing anything close to that right now.)

And Sam added: “Not having a huge imbalance in the world, considering what is good for everyone and striving for everyone getting a piece of the pie.”

About that last. Maybe it’s too much to ask that we all pull together for the common good. But surely we could try a little harder to lessen the world’s imbalance  — and to get the American pie divvied up into slightly more equal slices?

That won’t be common in my lifetime; but wouldn’t it be good.

Donald Trump’s comments at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner about how his despicable friends Pete Hegseth, Steve Miller and Tom Homan “showed extreme bravery” by standing on tables — presumably leading their troops into battle or something — while reporters were cowering under the tables when the earlier dinner was interrupted by gunshots may or may not have held a grain of truth.

Does Trump know truth from fiction? I doubt it.

And as for the WHCA dinners — reportedly they are sometimes fun and sometimes boring as all get out. I’ve never attended one — women weren’t even allowed until the mid-1960s, thirty+ years after the first such event. But I have a WHCA dinner story that makes for a great morality tale and surely should remain prominently in the history books.

Syndicated columnist and beloved human Charles McDowell, Jr, a prominent member of the National Press Club, found himself seated next to President Ronald Reagan at one such event. A great American humorist but without an unkind or dishonest cell in his body, McDowell was in something of a dilemma. What in the world could he say, given the fact that his opinion of Reagan and the whole Reaganomics catastrophe was somewhere between disdain and repulsion.

Charley McDowell married Ann Webb of Ashland, VA, my BFF from childhood, in the early 1950s and became my own immediate BFF about the minute they got engaged. This oft-repeated story of his chat with Mr. Reagan is only one of several thousand collected in his books and my head — albeit one of the best.

Having grown up in Lexington, VA, Charley fondly recalled seeing the 1938 film “Brother Rat,” starring a somewhat younger Reagan and Jane Wyman, whom Reagan married in 1940. (The days, 1940-49, before Pat.) “Brother Rat” was filmed partly in Lexington, home of both Virginia Military Institue and Washington and Lee University where the elder McDowell taught law. So Charley launched into descriptions of the film, how much everyone in Lexington enjoyed and discussed it forever — especially that scene in the drugstore where Charley’s mother always sat in the very same booth that actor Reagan had sat in . . .

“Son,” said Reagan to Charley, laying his hand kindly upon the latter’s, “that scene was shot in Hollywood. I’ve never been to Lexington, Virginia in my entire life.”

“But Mr. President,” Charley argued. “That booth is famous! My own Mama used to sit in that booth because you’d been there. How can that story possibly not be true!?!”

“Son,” said the president with a smile — and I can still see Charley laying his own right hand upon the left for emphasis — “it’s true because you want it to be. I do that all the time.”

Ah, so.

I generally try to avoid doing business with Amazon. No easy feat. My growing list of good reasons begins with simply not wanting to make Jeff Bezos any richer, even though it’s unlikely he notices my personal boycott.

But my Amazon antipathy has also been grounded in their cavalier attitude toward burning up the planet. Not that they didn’t proudly announce, in September of 2019, a “Climate Pledge” initiative designed to reduce emissions. Oh, well. Carbon emissions from their planes, trucks, vans etc continue to pollute at an increasing, astonishing rate, and a recent company statement suggested they would “need to be nimble and continue evolving,” policy-wise. I think that translates to “keep raking in the bucks for the top brass and worry about the planet tomorrow.”

In today’s global economy, how can we put our money where our mouths are, not to mention our hearts?

Drinks, for instance. Coca Cola seeks to appear climate conscious, but as pointed out in a recent New York Times storythe corporate giant keeps moving the goalposts for its goals. Thank heaven I shifted from sodas to lattes long ago. But ooops, Starbucks. According to that same Times story:“In 2020 the coffee chain said it aimed to halve its emissions and waste sent to landfills by 2030.” But with that date looming ever closer the company is now focusing more on its reusable, recyclable, compostable endeavors and “reassessing” its earlier ambitions.

Bearing my reusable bottle of plain old water (thanks, Hetch-Hetchy Dam) I stopped by the Athleta store on Fillmore Street  — about the only place I occasionally pay retail. (Goodwill on Fillmore is my go-to fashion outlet. And we presume Goodwill is at least minimally helping the planet by recycling a few tons a day of stuff that would otherwise be destined for the landfill.)

According to Sustainability Review, Athleta is at least “on the sustainability path with an ‘it’s a start’ environmental rating.” Meaning: it uses eco-friendly materials, employs sustainability options and aims for responsible water management.

While most of us now just get most of our stuff online (Amazon? Eeeek!) it’s possible to judge your brand or product for its awareness of climate change by simply asking the bot if XYZ Couture has a sustainability program. The DitchCarbon people (you’ve gotta love their unvarnished title,) for instance, disclose that Macy’s — yep, it’s still proudly there on Union Square— has a DitchCarbon score of 33, which sounds low until you read that it’s 57% better than the industry average.

I can get downright righteous about cutting fossil fuels, having sold my car three years ago and taken to using a combination of two feet and the occasional Muni bus for 90% of my daily needs. But the righteous of the world tend to overlook their Lyft use — one passenger, an awful lot of mileage. It was heartening to discover that Lyft has a few goals for moving toward electric vehicles and reducing CO2 emissions.

Can you and I delay the heating up of the planet by altering our lifestyles? Probably not. But there’s no harm in trying. Corporate awareness is a good way to start, and surprisingly easy. With the federal government rushing to remove all remaining environmental protections and boost fossil fuel industries, somebody has to take up for poor, ever-warming Mother Earth.

Might as well be you and me.

The Optimistic Eye is glancing sideways today at the upwards of a million Americans currently in senior living communities — and probably ten times that number who are considering such a move for themselves or an aging loved one.

It’s not an easy decision, or an easy move. But starting anew in a new and very different kind of housing needn’t be just the beginning of the end. It can, in fact, be an altogether satisfying new beginning. Here’s what I’ve learned over more than a decade of ‘senior living’ life:

I moved into an assisted living building when we knew the wheelchair was coming for my husband; our multi-level Victorian forced the issue. We were extraordinarily lucky to find — and be able to afford, thanks to San Francisco’s over-the-top housing market — a comfortable apartment where I was able to care for him for six years until he died.

That was seven years ago. Who thought I was going to live this long? But here I am, still healthy, busy, and grateful every single day to be in this place. There are plenty of ways to make life livable — rewarding, fulfilling, productive — in a senior living facility. Here are some I know:

• Keep your outside life. Stay active in your church or synagogue, with nonprofits you’ve supported. If you’ve moved to a new city or state to be near children, enlist their help in finding these outside interests. The senior living facility may offer activities 10 or 12 hours a day (many of them do.) Pick and choose, if so; but resist the temptation to reduce your world to the world within those walls.

• Broaden the conversation. If everyone’s talking about their grandchildren, ask about their grandparents instead. Get your new friends to talk history, geography, shared or common experiences. Maybe even politics and world news. (See below.)

• Stay informed. Get your news and information from reputable sources (NPR and PBS, for starters,) magazines and newspapers. It’s still possible to have civil conversations about the news; instead of expressing your opinion, though, try starting with “Tell me what you think about . . .” Then listen.

• Stay active. Most senior living communities have exercise classes, yoga, etc. Great. But if you possibly can, take walks in your neighborhood. Get to know (or keep your connections with) the local clerks and baristas, the librarians and politicians. Extra points for joining protest marches.

• Make new friends, but keep the old. (As the children’s song goes: One is silver and the other is gold.) If you’ve stayed in the same city, make the extra effort to meet your old friends “on the outside” for coffee or events and invite them to your new digs. Reach out to younger generations — ask their advice, work with them at soup kitchens or on causes; you might not click with the first young stranger, but the next could be your new best friend. Because I have no family within a few thousand miles of San Francisco I am rather notorious for my West Coast Daughter, son, grandson and a growing assortment of other WC kin; my West Coast Family members refer to my birth family members as siblings.

• Be kind. There’s a tendency in senior living communities (and everywhere else in the world) for people to form cliques, gossip, and/or make disparaging remarks about fellow humans or the state of the world. Just don’t. The more smiles and kindnesses you throw into the universe, the more it will reward you.

You and I make democracy work.

Beneath the sweeping laws and headline-grabbing movements, there at the very bottom is the individual voter. Who votes, unless by visiting a nearby mailbox, at the local polling place.

Some of the best times I ever had were working at the polls on election days. Because I was always a freelancer and could arrange my own schedule, I volunteered to work at the polls for at least a dozen years. My polling place was the elementary school a few blocks away.

Here’s what grassroots-level, neighborhood election work looked like:

A few poll-worker friends and I, usually after attending one or two advance meetings to go over laws and procedures, would show up at Winnona Park Elementary School in Decatur, GA, our local polling place, at 6:30 AM, with thermoses of coffee and a sack lunch. From 7 AM to 7 PM when the polls closed, we would greet the neighbors, answer questions, check rolls, record signatures, issue ballots and generally make sure everything was done properly and as efficiently as possible. We’d have quick breaks as needed but nothing like a lunch hour. After a careful count, we’d certify the results, deliver the ballots to City Hall and finally go home.

It was a 14- or 15-hour day, sometimes longer, for a few dollars an hour. Nobody works at the polls for the money. Still, I never went home without feeling as exhilarated as exhausted.

I loved being around the schoolkids who were watching democracy happen. I loved greeting the voters, making sure they had help if needed, carefully getting their ballot in the proper place. I loved feeling, for one day uninterrupted by much else, that I was a part of this great American experiment in self-government that’s worked for 250 years now.

That might be an olden days story, but election work has changed very little and this much I know:

• Very few people do election work for the money; it’s the spirit.

• The people running your elections are your friends and neighbors.

• Our elections are free and fair; with very, very rare instances of fraud or any form of mismanagement or misbehavior.

Election work is democracy’s foundational job. As with anything in a country of something over 340 million people, there will be occasional bad apples, but election workers at all levels tend to be the most dedicated of patriots — in the respected, old-fashioned sense of the term. I have two friends in San Francisco, a couple now past retirement age, who have taken time off from their executive-level jobs to work together at the polls in every election for more than 30 years. Sometimes even at a financial loss. They simply love participating in our democracy.

Poll workers are supervised by more competent and experienced local and state employees, but I’d be willing to bet that most of these, too, have a decent amount of pride in their jobs as democracy’s bedrock.

It’s how the U.S. has worked since its beginnings. Two hundred and fifty years of free and fair elections.

Trump wants to trash it all. And royally mess with the system — most recently by firing the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections. Because “our elections are rigged.” Excuse me?

The New York Times published an excellent article on July 15 about the multiple ways Donald Trump is working to rewrite the rules for the midterms and beyond — by trying to ‘nationalize’ elections (which are the responsibility of Congress and the states, not the administrative branch,) by pushing debunked conspiracy theories — and by undermining faith in the system.

The official word about the most recent destructive move was that Trump reserved the right to fire individuals who “may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

Hogwash. That is as ridiculous as Trump’s bluster about not letting non-citizens vote — as if flocks of “illegals” from Bulgaria or Indonesia or Central America were showing up at the polls and somehow casting ballots.

We have a president who wants to be king.

Kings go to war on whims, without asking anyone else. Kings build personal armies responsible to no one but themselves. Kings erect monuments to themselves, put their names and faces everywhere they possibly can. Kings destroy on whims — destroy buildings, people, institutions, traditions, precedents. And elections.

Our wannabe king wants to destroy democratic elections. And, while he’s at it, our democracy.

I think we will not let him do this.

A little more than two years ago my friend Lynne Calkins pronounced her own death sentence. One of the founders of End of Life Choices CA, a nonprofit that provides free support to Californians navigating end-of-life decisions, she was speaking with a man who had called seeking help. When she hung up the phone she said to herself, “He sounds just like I’m beginning to sound.”

He had Bulbar onset ALS.

Doctors had been sending Lynne, a retired Nurse Practitioner, to a variety of specialists in efforts to solve her growing problems with speech. The good news was that she had made the correct diagnosis, so it was now possible to confront her disease. The bad news was that the diagnosis was Bulbar onset ALS, a rare and ultimately fatal disease for which there is no treatment and no cure.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. About three quarters of all cases are limb-onset, affecting the arms and legs first. The rarer form takes its name from the “bulbar” region of the brain, which controls the muscles in the face and neck and processes like swallowing and speech.

In other words, no fun. Early on, Lynne found her slurred speech meant she was treated dismissively (or worse) by sales clerks and others who assumed she was either drunk or mentally disturbed. Eventually she lost the ability to make herself understood at all. Try absolutely muting yourself around everyone you love and enjoy, perhaps a beloved husband of more than six decades, and see how that works out.

There are a few upsides to Bulbar v limb-onset ALS — Lynne was still playing tennis several months ago — but for the most part it is a bewildering journey none of us would choose.

It’s been my joy to share that journey with Lynne, tracking major road bumps like loss of the ability to swallow, and detours, anticipated or unexpected: mood swings, exhaustion, frustration, isolation . . . recently she encountered jaw-breaking yawns until a wise hospice nurse suggested ways of dealing with that new weirdness.

A wry humor probably helps. Thanks to weight loss common to those with the disease — Lynne hovers around 85 pounds — and wrinkling of skin, she muses that towards life’s end “We Bulbar people may resemble each other more than our families.” And in another post a day or two ago I quoted her describing her G-tube meals as “One-third Mad Chemist as I mix my formulas in their bottles/bags; One-third Drug Addict, preparing my fix to “inject,” into my body; and One-third Nursing Mother as I lift my shirt…”

We have been logging notes of the funny moments, the frustrations and the weirdnesses in hopes of furthering understanding of this awful disease. (EOLCCA will eventually make available a compilation of it all.)

Bulbar onset ALS offers a projected life expectancy of two to three years, less among “older people.” I strongly suspect that on hearing that prognosis I would simply get in bed and pull the covers over my head. Not so, Lynne Calkins. She continues to work with EOLCCA, quite recently still training volunteers, working on programs and attending board meetings —  eventually through texting with an interpreter.

Full disclosure and a warning: I’m lucky to serve as a volunteer and fellow board member of the excellent nonprofit mentioned above and below. If you know anything of nonprofits, you know they’re always interested in donations and that’s involved in what’s ahead:

Yesterday, Lynne sent a letter to friends and family that included these lines:

“My Bulbar-onset ALS is relentlessly progressing, and I know my time is short, but for right now, I’m still enjoying life and having fun! Although I can no longer speak nor swallow, and I tire easily, I’m very, very happy to still be here, very much alive, enjoying my home and family and you.”

The letter was prompted by several milestones: First was the recent 66th anniversary of her marriage to Ken Calkins. “Woo Hoo! That’s an amazing length of time to be married to the SAME person and to keep those marriage vows, ‘For better, for worse…in sickness and in health…’ all those sixty-six years! He deservedly received a Medal of Valor for keeping those vows, especially now.” Second was her 85th birthday on July 13.

This space very rarely gets into finance. I don’t monetize my Substack (wisely; it could get embarrassing) though I do pay to subscribe some worthwhile writers. And if you’ve pledged money in following me, thanks, butI’ve no plans ever to activate that function. But I hereby invite you to consider a Milestone gift in honor of my friend Lynne. Here’s how, per yesterday’s letter:

“It is my fervent hope that my beloved nonprofit organization, End of Life Choices California (EOLCCA), founded in 2019, will go on for another 85 years, continuing to help more and more Californians with end-of-life planning. It will require continued funding to sustain the high level of information, education and bedside support we now offer.

“If you would like to help me celebrate my milestones with a gift of support to EOLCCA, please go to our website www.endoflifechoicesca.org, and donate any amount you’re comfortable with: 85 cents or $85.00 or $66.00 or if you want to be a Lynne’s MILESTONE SUPERSTAR, $151.00 (Birthday and Anniversary milestones combined). Or mail a check to 153 S. Sierra Ave. #30, Solana Beach, CA 92075.”

I share Lynne’s enthusiasm for EOLCCA and the services its volunteers provide, so I’m already a supporter. But because I want to be a Milestone Superstar I just made an extra donation in her honor.

OK, back to counting my blessings now. Lynne Calkins is one.

It is entirely legal to take someone’s ashes (“cremains,” in creepy cremation society lingo) from the U.S. to the U.K. All you need are a death certificate and a letter from the cremation people — details that had not occurred to me until I was leaving for the airport.

Oh, well.

(I am not sure what laws I recently broke, or what the statute of limitations for sending me off into London Tower may be, so let’s just keep this story between us friends. Including any TSA people or customs agents who may be on Medium.)

A piece of my husband’s San Francisco soul was always in Cornwall. Generations of ancestors walked those ancient pathways in the pre-dawn darkness, headed deep underground into the mines that, long abandoned now, still dot the landscape.

So it’s been in the back of my mind, ever since my good husband Bud died in 2019, to take some of his ashes back to The Fatherland. And thus it was that I found myself landing at London’s Heathrow Airport with two small vials of his earthly remains plus a quart-size baggie, triple-baggie’d just to be safe, with more. And no requisite documentation. It was not that I don’t still have multiple copies of the death certificate, or that I couldn’t have found the name of those cremation people we signed up with several decades ago if it had occurred to me. It had just not occurred, and this was an inconvenient time to run back to the apartment and get things.

An extremely polite customs man motioned me aside, as my carry-on emerged from the scanner. It was then that I first realized — since I wasn’t smuggling any controlled substances or sneaking California produce into the country — that Bud’s ashes were at risk of remaining at Heathrow Airport forever, rather than scattered on hallowed Cornish fields. Any doubts about this possibility were erased when the young man gently lifted the baggie from its comfortable space and laid it on the table. Wordlessly, he began to run a small scanner back and forth across it.

Never say I can’t think on my feet, even after they’ve just gone through the airport scanner. I thought: Hmmm. He wasn’t at all concerned with the vials. As it happened, I’d found little 4-oz clear plastic tubes somewhere in an assortment of never-used beauty containers, so they bore labels that said “Skin cleanser” and “Conditioner.” The customs agent, now having pulled out an even more serious-looking scanner, was carefully running it back and forth, occasionally looking up with a pleasant expression.

I said something offhand about ashes used in facial cleaning. He said something, still with a pleasant expression, about “having to be certain about inorganic material.” (Inorganic? One’s mortal ashes?) To be honest (now, at least,) I think both of us still had questions. But he just carefully placed the baggies back where they had been and closed my suitcase. I was on my way, all ashes with me.

The person who would enjoy this story most of anyone I know is my late husband. I choose to believe he is, in some inorganic state, enjoying it on some celestial cloud.

I met my daughter Sandy at Heathrow and we splurged on a driver to travel the utterly gorgeous countryside that Bud and I had enjoyed together so many times. Without that excellent assistant (Thanks, Sabir!) there is no way we would have found our AirB&B cottage above the harbor in St Ives, nestled among other cottages and shops in the labyrinth of steep, winding cobblestone alleys of this charming fishing village — where I had always stayed with Bud, who knew his way around. I did not; I still do not.

We spent a day or two readjusting our inner time clocks and enjoying St Ives, Cornwall. It was then time for the first half of the mission: spreading a few ashes in the sculpture garden of the English artist Dame Barbara Hepworth, who lived and worked in St Ives from the beginning of World War II until her death — in a fire in her studio in 1975.

The Hepworth Museum and sculpture garden are a quick walk from the Tate St Ives Museum, one of my favorite museums in the United Kingdom. They adjoin her former studio, now preserved and feeling as if she just left for a spot of afternoon tea.

Hepworth moved to St Ives in 1939 with her husband, the painter and sculptor Ben Nicholson (and their 5-year-old triplets, two sons and a daughter,) and lived there until her death in an accidental fire in the studio in 1975. Their story, and the stories of other artists who flourished in that time and place, are fascinating. As is the adjacent sculpture garden serene in its surrounding lush greenery, which was a haven for Bud and me.

But do the present-day managers of it all welcome scatterers of ashes? We thought it unwise to ask. So, after making sure no other visitors were nearby and giving thanks that the winds had subsided, we each quietly emptied a vial behind a Hepworth sculpture. It felt right.

The next day it was on to find the right spot for the final resting place of the rest of Bud’s ashes, grateful that it had not been Heathrow Airport after all.

We found another intrepid driver (ask for Barry) to tour us around the countryside, and specifically to get us to a remote area of the Tinners’ Way — a 16-mile stretch of pathway along the coast where generations of miners walked on their way to work. Bud and I covered much of it, a few miles at a time, on visits to Cornwall.

Again, as informed, agreeable and charming as we found Cornish-native Barry to be, we thought that trying to explain the ashes mission was a story too far. Having made it through customs, I also didn’t want to risk losing my precious cargo to HRH Charles III’s National Trust, which maintains the landscape. So we just said we wanted to do a walk of a mile or so, at some remote point.

There are plenty of remote points along the Tinners’ Way. We found one (above) that seemed right.

And there, in the tall grasses and the rocky soil of Cornwall, lie a few of the mortal remains of this last generation of Johns’. May they rest in peace.

Mission accomplished.

Maybe it’s just jet lag.

I’m barely a week past a journey that involved seven or eight timezones, and don’t let anybody tell you jet lag doesn’t get harder to handle with age. (Hello, Mr. 80-year-old President?) Or it could be the heat, since we’re learning that all this excessive heat muddies the brain. Oh, that’s right, climate change is a hoax. The glaciers aren’t melting . . .

Like Alice hitting ground after she fell through the rabbit hole, some of us today are feeling the same, our heads swinging from swollen to shriveled trying to follow the events of the day. We wish the Mock Turtle could tell us how to handle the “different branches of Arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision” that were causing him grief; we’re struggling with them too. It’s disorienting down here.

A driverless car passed me yesterday on Pine Street, pulled up to a building entrance, sat there for a few minutes while two men seemed to argue with each other and then the non-driver pulled away while they yelled at it.

Graham Platner, the now former Maine Senatorial candidate, bewildered many of us with his unapologetic regrets about having been “a bad boyfriend,” but when reports of just how bad his boyfriendship had been finally forced him out of the race he blamed only some nebulous “large forces” or “the political establishment” or “party apparatchiks” or everybody in the world other than his bad-behaviored self.

I routinely walk to my right, on encountering someone walking toward me on a narrow sidewalk; I reaffirmed this an hour ago. But a recently released study shows that we humanoids move counterclockwise. Who knows why?

Our aging president — he who promised to end all wars on Day One and not start any new ones — loves Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni one day and despises her the next. He insults and derides NATO, then categorizes its meeting as a love fest (love for him, of course.) He declares ceasefires one day and sends missiles the next. Dispatches his utterly unqualified son-in-law and a similarly unfit real estate buddy as “envoys” to clean up some of his messes (they clean up, but only for their own caches) and the next day professes not to care about their failures, the endless war he started or the fate of the world. Explaining diplomacy v deal-making might be a job for the Mock Turtle.

There are extravagant plans for San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, although nobody knows why sand has been piling up fast at the beach’s north end since the 1980s, while eroding at the south end. Would it be worth figuring out what Mother Nature is doing before plunging into big ideas of what we humans want to do? Oh, that’s right, climate change is a hoax.

My friend Lynne, two years and several months past diagnosis with the rare, indescribably awful and ultimately fatal disease Bulbar ALS, can still laugh. Last night she emailed a description of her tube-delivered meals: “One-third Mad Chemist as I mix my formulas in their bottles/bags; One-third Drug Addict, preparing my fix to “inject,” into my body; and One-third Nursing Mother as I lift my shirt…” Fit for a tea party with Alice!

Sometimes laughter is the only medicine.

This has become a dizzying world. We can’t trust our government for health information and we have to surf around to find real data on climate change. (Spoiler alert: the glaciers are melting.) We go to bed assured of the ceasefire in Trump’s war with Iran, and wake up to news of bombings because “they’ve been acting really badly.”

Alice eventually woke up as her sister brushed the leaves from her face. Rabbit holes eventually close. Science finds ways to address climate change and cures for diseases. Wars end, and the work of rebuilding begins.

Nature Bats Last.

For many in the good old U.S.A. this Independence Day doesn’t feel very celebratory.

We’re catching glimpses of our nation’s capitol that look more fenced-off than open-armed, more partisan than all-American, more discouraging than hip-hip-hooray. We’re feeling a little that way ourselves: fenced-off, fractured and discouraged.

Maybe the day — July 4th, our country’s semiquincentennial (the new Word of the Day) — is big enough for all of the above. My plan is to hang onto two good quotations that seem particularly appropriate:

From that great American sage, Mark Twain — “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

And from a President, several elections ago, who exhibited grace, dignity, civility and a few other qualities missing in our national leaders today: “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” — That would be Barack Obama

Here’s to changing corruption and autocracy back to that original, old-fashioned government of, by and for the people. Now THAT would be something to celebrate on July 4, 2027.

Happy Semiquincentennial to us all.

“We’re from the U.S.,” my daughter and I regularly say when meeting Brits in business or social contexts, “but we didn’t vote for him.”

Other than one brief family event last year, I am on my first European trip since Donald Trump was elected to a second term. In more than a half-century of traveling abroad, this is the first time I have ever had to apologize for my country. The first time I have had to say, over and over, “I’m so sorry we have let you down.” Or regularly wished that my nationality matched my luggage tag — which bears a giant maple leaf & reads: CANADIAN.

The good news is: almost everyone is immediately empathetic. They respond with comments like, “We still can’t believe it;” and “We do know the majority of Americans are fighting against an immoral and destructive president.” But it is still overwhelmingly sad to realize that the appalling actions of the past 18 months are not just wrecking America but America’s standing in the world.

One tiny reverse commiseration occurs when the conversation drifts toward Brexit — the decision that surprised and dismayed so many of us when conservatives pushed the vote that took the U.K. out of the European Union. “We were given misleading information,” said one U.K. friend. And more than one Brit has pointed out the parallels between Brexit advocates’ “Take Back Control” slogans and “Make America Great Again.”

By and large what we are encountering is not unexpected. The Epstein files seem just as all-consuming abroad as, sadly, the foot-dragging and cover-up are with most of us at home. “Do your politicians really think it’ll go away?” “Do they really intend to keep protecting the men involved instead of the victims?” And a few features in today’s Guardian (my print subscription to the New York Times is on vacation hold) further illustrate the view of America from the U.K.

Gas prices are up, along with groceries and other goods, and guess whose fault that is? It is not lost upon many Europeans that the Strait of Hormuz was open until Donald Trump’s war closed it.

The ongoing heat wave now killing people all over Europe is the most severe ever recorded. I am extraordinarily lucky to have dodged the worst of it, but humankind on this side of the Atlantic is suffering from the damages of climate change — while the Trump administration continues to deny the facts, the science and the reality of our rapidly heating planet and to speed it all up with insane policies. Guess whether all this endears us to other nationalities — or not.

And then there’s the sensational. The Guardian (see illustration above) leans more toward Britain’s tabloid press than its U.S. counterpart (think a combination of The NYTimes and People magazine,) but an issue my daughter brought with my morning latte — age has its privileges —  illustrates today’s version of the Ugly American. Splashed across the front page is the face of an American Air Force pilot caught up in a sex crime largely unnoticed in the U.S. — unless it was in our own more sensational publications. This is not the full report. For that, you can Google Jacob Wulfson, 32, the errant Captain, or Sarah Steele, 39, the wronged woman, identified as a British academic. The Guardian article runs to four full pages of text and photos in addition to the front page attention-grabber.

Briefly: After meeting on Tinder and sharing sexual fantasies on WhatsApp, Ms. Steele went to Capt. Wulfson’s flat. A message preceded her that laid down a few ground rules about hands on neck and condoms. But unauthorized drugs were apparently involved and she later woke up in a tub of cold water with strangulation marks and evidence of rape, no condom. (It’s pretty lurid — if you’re still reading this instead of going to the thousands of words available in The Guardian’s report.)

British and American authorities negotiated about who should handle the case; it went to the U.S. military. Wulfson was convicted of strangling an intimate partner, classified as “aggravated assault on family member or partner” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He was given a choice between having the judge decide his fate or a group of his peers. He chose the latter. After six months in detention he’ll be dismissed from the Air Force. If the trial had been held in a British court, it would have been heard before a jury of ordinary men and women and the penalty would’ve been up to five years in prison. Guess where the sympathies of the reporters, and probably most fellow Brits, lie.

A column in the same issue of The Guardian illustrates how our country’s upcoming 250th birthday is being seen. “No soaring oratory or epic vision,” reads the headline; “just Trump being Trump.” The business of the U.S. being superior to any nation ever and the far right “carrying forward the light of western civilization” (as per recent remarks by Stephen Miller) is just pushing thinly veiled white supremacy, columnist David Smith says.

Which brings us back to the Brexit/MAGA analogy. In a recent New York Times guest essay, Philip Stephens writes that “history’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off. ‘Taking back control’ left Britain alone. ‘Making America great again’ may yet come to mean the same to America.”

I’m just one traveling writer and certainly no political analyst. But if what I’m seeing and hearing from abroad is even minimally correct, outsiders are hoping Americans will stem the tide of destructive “untrammeled sovereignty” before it sends America back to the dark ages and consigns the entire planet to flames.