Out to the west, the sky is clearing, a little, after two dreary days with heavy skies, leaden with a mixture of rain and snow, falling alternately. The windows are spotted with dots of water from the last little rain that fell, ending a few minutes ago. To cheer me, I have started a fire and am listening to a couple of songs from “Mary Poppins Returns,” out in theaters soon.
Today, the plan had been for me to go to New York, have lunch with friends, then a drink with Nick Stuart, and back to the country again. Waking even before the alarm, I knew immediately it would not be a good idea, but it took until I was in the shower to convince myself it really wasn’t a good idea.
The stomach virus that has plagued me since Cornwall returned again to once again to inflict its discomfort on me and only recently have I pulled myself from the comforts of bed.
As well as the stomach bug, I feel like I am shaking off a post-Thanksgiving kind of blues and I haven’t been able to reason with myself why that is. Is it because I am now back, both from the Vineyard and Europe and must sketch out my next moves? Is it the rebuke one of my readers gave me for being “miserable?” Is it the unremitting greyness of the last three days? A combination of all these things with the stomach right at the top of the list?
Probably, the latter.
A small storm of perfect proportion coupled with having apparently lost my favorite reading glasses yesterday!
And all these things, I must remind myself, are white wine problems.
Unlike Paul Manafort, I am not looking at spending the rest of my life in prison. AND, it has been reported, that our good friend Paul, visited with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London just before stepping into the role of Trump Campaign Manager. I am sure he didn’t!
And I am not an immigrant at the border of the United States and Mexico, where tear gas was used over the weekend. Nor I am in one of the camps this side of the border, housing detained [insert your own word here], where it appears that, while it is mandated, no one has been performing required background checks.
I am not a transgender woman who died in custody in one of those camps. Her autopsy demonstrated she had been beaten before her death.
Nor was I a passenger on the Lion Jet airliner that crashed minutes after takeoff.
What I am is a more than middle aged white man, resting very comfortably in the guest house of friends, staring out at the Catskill mountains, over which the sun is bravely trying to emerge. I am freshly back from a summer on the Vineyard where I loved selling books and a fall traveling, much of the time in Europe, seeing monuments everywhere, built as memorials to those who died in this war and that, each one more awful than the last as weapons got more vicious and am sobered by that in a way I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been to Verdun, Omaha Beach, Pont du Hoc, Mont St. Michel, Heidelberg Castle, Cologne with its Roman Museum and other places.
Perhaps, I shouldn’t be bothered by any of this and should only be thinking of how good my life is, savoring each glorious mouthful and, yet, here I am, bothered by the starvation following in the wake of the Yemeni war and a slew of other issues our world is facing and feeling there is something more I should be doing.
At every church I hit in Europe, I lit a candle and asked the universe for an answer and maybe this bout of blues is because I have no answer from my question to the universe and must struggle to find it for myself.
Well, damn…
Letter from the Vineyard 
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