Things Change, Luck Helps
The terrace in February
So it’s February in Prague (and everywhere else, or so they tell me), and though I still go out to ‘the terrace’ with my coffee most mornings, it’s slim pickings these days. My bench has a crust of ice on it. The umbrella trees, as I call them (identical flat-topped shade trees), are looking Edward Gorey-ish. The wading pools – conveniently filled with head-sized boulders for kids to bust themselves on - are empty. Nobody with any sense would be out there if they didn’t have to be, which leaves me . . . and people with dogs.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how universally embarrassed dogs look when they poop – yes, it’s down to this. You’d think evolution would have taken care of that. Not so. They’re mortified. Some try to brazen it out (“What’re you looking at?”), some seem desperate to get this humiliation over with, but most, I’ve noticed, stare off to the right and up as if seeing something important in the sky or simply imagining themselves somewhere else . . .
Cats don’t have this problem.
It’s February. The world feels locked. The mind wanders.
It’s important for me to preface this next bit by telling you that even at my ‘reduced admission’ stage of life, I’m a veritable marvel of balance. I don’t fall. Ever. Slip? Sure. Flounder? Fine. Fall? Never.
I mention this because last Tuesday I finished my coffee as always, walked to the slightly slanted berm that divides the aforementioned rock-filled wading pools, began to stride confidently across – cup in hand – and hit a patch of black ice. I went down so fast I didn’t even know I’d fallen until I was getting up. I went down so uninhibitedly, with such consummate elan, that for a second my feet, sticking out of my long coat, were higher than my head. No wimpy negotiating with fate, no namby-pamby flailing, just zip . . . WHAM! All this in absolute silence because I didn’t have time to yell, and because yelling after I’d already stood up would have seemed foolish.
Honestly, I wish I’d seen it instead of been it.
The unbelievable, the extraordinary p.s. to all this is that absolutely nothing happened. Aside from the amusement I provided to every dog in the park, nobody even had time to react before I was up and on my way. Basically it was some kind of secular miracle. Not only did I not break anything falling into a pool of boulders, not only did I walk away without so much as a bruise, but I still held my coffee cup, unbroken, in my right hand.
My takeaway? Things change. Luck helps.
There’s a phrase from Melville’s Moby Dick that I’ve been coming back to these days: “Reality outran apprehension . . .” It feels apt. Then again, given what we’re learning about the class of Dementors currently in charge of our affairs, “comprehension” might be more accurate. Reality has outrun comprehension, and somehow we have to catch up.
It’s not going to be easy. I can’t be the only one having trouble processing news that only a nanosecond ago would have been flat-out unbelievable. There’s a natural unwillingness to credit something of this magnitude, to allow it into the realm of the possible. Child rape? And now possibly child murder? Documents placing the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court on a sex offender’s plane? Desperate communications from Mexican authorities asking for help because American operatives have shot a trial judge in a Juarez sex-trafficking case involving – who else - Jeffrey Epstein? An ex-US Ambassador to Mexico – Earl Anthony Wayne – allegedly impregnating an 11 year-old girl?
Remember that Bannon line about “flooding the zone with shit?” Given recent events, turds should sue for slander.
Nobody wants to think about this - let alone believe it. But given the documentary evidence emerging from the Epstein files despite the DOJ’s redactions, given the testimony of dozens of victims who had everything to lose by coming forward, it’s getting harder to remain skeptical. At some point, doubt shades into delusion.
Whether and how we root out this rot remains to be seen. How we’ll handle revelations that beggar (and impoverish) the imagination, is anybody’s guess. We may soon be called upon to make room for the inconceivable. But if I take comfort from anything at all these days, it’s that reality doesn’t negotiate. It abides like a rock - stubborn, immovable – untouched by the world of lies. Sooner or later, one way or another, we’ll acknowledge it.
That acknowledgement has already begun, and not just in Minnesota. Outrage and resistance are going global, and the truth is that there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Last Sunday afternoon I crossed my terrace and headed for the tram station, where a crowd of people – young and old, some with kids and some with signs – already waited. Approaching the city center, every stop grew more crowded, the avenues filled up with people, traffic stopped.
I’ve never really liked crowds, but there’s something undeniably powerful about 90,000 plus souls (a huge number in a city of 1.2 million), gathering in opposition to government corruption. The cause – the Trumpian Foreign Minister’s attempted blackmail of the Czech President – seemed almost quaint by recent American standards, but what moved me, what gave me a measure of hope, was seeing photos of victims of the war in Ukraine alongside photos of Alex Pretti and Renee Good and Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman beaten to death in Teheran for not wearing a hijab according to government standards.
My bench has a crust of ice on it. The wading pools are empty. But in three months the umbrella trees will cast perfect circles of shade on the cobbles, the fountains will be gushing, and little kids will be splashing among the rocks that I fell into like a sack of meal.
Change is coming. The pendulum swings.
How you kept your cup of coffee is a sign of something! It does feel like the pendulum is moving.
You can't know how profoundly I pray that your prognostication fulfills itself, Mark!
P.S. I've taken a number of those sudden falls in my eight decades, and you are right: it all happens so quickly as to seem surreal. Keep these reflections coming.