Letter from the Vineyard

As I begin writing this letter, I am in New York City, at Birch, a coffee house just east of 5th Avenue on 27th, waiting for a friend and a colleague. There are some things he wants to chat over with me and then I will go to dinner with my great good friend, Nick Stuart and his friend, Jodd. Post dinner, I will head back to the cottage for a bunch of meetings and things to do tomorrow.
Walking from Penn Station to Birch, I realized how my relationship with New York City has changed over the last eighteen years. I’ve gone from “bright lights, big city” to being delighted not to be here that often; I have grown accustomed to the quiet of the country. Penn Station is an assault on the system after the tiny, bucolic station in Hudson and walking through the streets of the city, I feel more a sense of pressure, for want of another word, since I came here in 1999 to begin to live, then splitting my time between Los Angeles and New York.
For the last two and a half years, I have been mostly at the cottage and have slipped into the role and attitude of someone who lives in the country. On weekends, when the county fills with out of towners, I cringe when horns are blasted if someone doesn’t move quickly enough.
I relish waking in the morning to look out over the creek and to look out at my land and see no one.
One needs that kind of quiet and solitude these days to absorb the world news:

o A California judge won’t force Obamacare payments from the Federal government.
o Hillary and the Democrats paid for the dossier on Trump.
o The NAACP is warning people of color not to fly American Airlines.
o Whatever is going on with tax reform remains incomprehensible to me.
o The brother of the Las Vegas shooter was picked up on child porn charges.
o The president and a Gold Star widow can’t quit feuding.
o China’s Xi Jinping probably is with us indefinitely and we’ll see if that’s a good thing or a bad thing AND he’s now as important as Mao and Deng!!!!
o The ease of travel with a US passport has plummeted since Trump has become president.
o The US and North Korea are continuing saber rattling. North Korea is talking hydrogen bomb and the US military action.
o Amazon is going to start delivering packages into our homes. [Ah, not mine. Yet.]
o President George H.W. Bush has been accused by an actress of groping her in 2014. And has apologized.
o A Houston resident, originally from Mexico, died of flesh eating bacteria after working on homes damaged in Harvey. He was the third Houston case; the others were non-fatal.
o The Trump campaign, via a data analytics firm, contacted Wikileaks to access emails from Clinton’s server to make them into a searchable database for the campaign.

Is it any wonder that yesterday when I walked along the wooded lane that is Patroon Street, I thought about none of these things?
I thought of other things, the changing of the leaves, friends, personal things, upcoming trips, hopeful things.
My amazement at the world is unbridled. Today, I commented to a friend: I think we are living in the second Gilded Age and my comfort comes from remembering that did not last and was reined in, eventually.
Each day, I get up and read the papers and find my eyes go wide while I say: lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my…
The Toronto Star blazoned out that Trump broke his own record this week – of lies. They counted 57 whoppers.
Call me disgusted by them all.