As you ascend from the tracks in Penn Station, to the lower level, the air is infused with the siren smell of popcorn and I must pass through this with the steely resolve of Odysseus listening to the Sirens sing. Mentally, I bind myself to the ship’s mast to sail through the popcorn straits.
It is, perhaps, my favorite taste treat. At certain times of stress only a bag of freshly popped popcorn will soothe my spirit. When I can’t get fresh popcorn, I reach for Cheetos, orange like our president.
In New York for a noon lunch with Jeff Cole of the Center for the Digital Future, then drinks with an old friend and dinner with even older friends, followed tomorrow by my quarterly lunch with my friend David, another potential meeting or two and then back to the Keene Farm, where I will work out what my next vagabonding steps will be…
It is the year 2019 and I am staggered by that reality. If, in 1969, had you suggested I would be around for this year, I would have laughed in your face. “Live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse!” was a common battle cryand and there were times when it seemed I might make that a reality.
Yet, here I am. I have not died; my fast living was short term and I won’t have a good-looking corpse. Sigh!
This is likely a not uncommon refrain among baby boomers. How did this happen to us, we, who were to be forever young?
Age comes to all of us who are lucky enough to age. There are those who have not been so lucky. I lift my hat to my good friend, Richard Easthouse, still and always missed, felled by AIDS just before the cocktail and to others lost to that disease, as well as car accidents, overdoses and cancer. Baby boomers were not immune, regardless of our strident sense of immortality.
Living in the U.S., we are often, it seems, pounded by bad news, which is why I suggest you read the article you will find here. It gives us 99 stories [and a bonus one] of good things happening which we probably missed in the strum und drung of contemporary American culture.
Speaking of which, could not someone helped President Trump refute the scathing Mitt Romney Op-Ed with something other than a tweet saying, “He has a big, stupid mouth!” That is the question. Rather it is just one of the questions wrestled with concerning the behavior of our current president.
However, as I pointed out to someone when all this began, Rome survived a string of bad emperors. [Though they didn’t have a nuclear trigger at hand.]
So, with all that is going on, partial government shutdown, Syria, Iraq, Congressional stalemate and everything else, I will re-read the article of things done well this past year and take hope in things going well and will continue to think about how I can contribute to things going well.
Do read the article! There are some amazing things going on and we need amazing things to buoy us up and carry on – hope, after all, is one of the great traits and gifts of the human race.
Letter from the Vineyard 
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