It is grey and overcast outside; warmish but not so much as yesterday, a bright and beautiful day in the Hudson Valley. Yesterday, with my friend, Pam, I went down to the Farmer’s Market, still held this time of year in the Parish Hall at Christ Church, purchasing a ganache for dessert, a freshly baked baguette and a few other things.
Since I have volunteered to lead the charge for Easter Brunch at church, I tarried while Sally Brodsky, the chief kitchen person at Christ Church, showed me how to operate the stove and ovens, which had befuddled me.
As I type this on Sunday morning, I am sitting in the living room with shards of sun slipping between the clouds. Pamela is showering and Tory is catching a few more winks of sleep. In a bit of time, I will be taking them down to the Hudson Train Station, sending them off to New York, where both have business this week.
They have been together for twenty-six years; Tory and I have known each other for thirty-one.
As everyone does these days, we talked politics as the fantastic scenario of this year plays out.
Trump rallies have grown violent, left wing protestors and Trump supporters clashed in Chicago. Conservative reporter Michelle Fields has claimed that Trump’s campaign manager assaulted her when she tried to pose a question to the candidate.
Marco Rubio is making Tuesday’s Florida primaries a make or break it for him, as Kasich is doing in Ohio. If they cannot carry their home states, what hope is there?
Just moments ago, former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, endorsed Kasich.
There seems to be an effort by many Republicans to rally around Ted Cruz in an effort to stop the Trump momentum, a thought only slightly less scary than having Trump as the Republican nominee.
Hillary Clinton made an appearance at Nancy Reagan’s funeral and absurdly praised the Reagans for their leadership in the AIDS crisis which unfolded during his administration. Anyone who lived through that era, and I did, will remember that they were famously silent on AIDS.
What was Hillary thinking?
While all eyes here are focused on the race for the presidential nomination for the Democratic and Republican parties, there are major elections happening today in Germany, a major test for Angela Merkel’s open door to refugees and migrants.
I don’t think of the Ivory Coast as a vacation spot but in that country, Grand-Bassam, is a popular destination for Ivorians and foreigners. Gunmen roamed its beaches and killed many; the number still undetermined and for reasons still unknown.
Suspicion, of course, goes immediately to IS for this kind of attack. At the same time, it has been revealed that IS is forcing females to use birth control so that pregnancy will not interfere with their use as sex slaves. You can’t rape a woman if she’s pregnant, so birth control is being use to prevent pregnancy and allow for continued rape.
The world’s oldest man is a 112 year old survivor of Auschwitz, a former confectioner, living in Haifa, Israel. It took awhile to confirm his status as so many records were scattered during the war. But he has been now affirmed, a living monument of a terrible time. The oldest living person is a 115 year old American woman, who was born in 1899. What they have seen…
Not so long ago, the head of IS’s chemical attack force was captured. It did not prevent them from launching a chemical attack in which 600 were wounded, a child died and thousands fled their homes.
I’m home now, after dropping Tory and Pam off at the train station for their trip into the city. We had lunch at Vico, on Warren Street, where we all had a great burgers and wonderful fries.
In the time since I’ve left home, now about three hours, the Ivory Coast has confirmed 14 dead and there has been a suicide bombing in Ankara that has killed at least 27 and wounded 75.
So the world beat goes on, while I am now seated on the deck, looking at the creek slowly passing by, a mallard having just taken flight to the north, bleating as it ascended into the sky.
When I came here, there were hundreds of mallards. Most are gone now. It is quieter but somehow less peaceful.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 04 21 2017 The past fights the future…
April 21, 2017Apple blossoms dressed the trees in the orchards as I drove along 9H earlier today, the first, best sign of spring I’ve seen though, once having noticed them, I was aware that small buds of green were appearing on other trees. The ones outside my windows don’t seem to be sporting them and I’m sure they will come eventually, which is how this spring has seemed – eventually we will get there – just not yet.
It has been a quiet sort of day. Earlier I spent some time at OMI, an art center near me that I have known about but had not visited and that was my loss. The two-hundred-acre campus is dotted with sculptures, the main building with art exhibits. Today quite beautiful children were painting, running around in young life’s exuberance, bringing smiles to all the adults. I offered up a thought for good lives for them; the future does feel cloudy right now.
It’s not just that this is a gray day. Generally, I am an upbeat sort of person [or at least I think of myself as that] and today I’ve not been. The state of the world has been weighing on me, both close to home and far from here.
Close to home, I am burdened because a friend sent me suicidal texts and I was incredibly concerned and finally asked the police to do a “welfare check.” They did. He then texted me he wanted nothing more to do with me. Truthfully, I did the right thing and, at this moment, it hasn’t turned out well. For me and, I expect, not for him as he is in deep trouble and won’t admit it.
Candles to be lit; prayers to be said and to continue, as best we can.
Paris is continuing as best it can after a policeman was shot yesterday and two badly wounded by a terrorist who was killed as he was fleeing. IS claims responsibility and France is having elections on Sunday. The far-right candidate, Marie Le Pen, is threatening to remove France from the EU so that it can control its own borders.
She has a chance of winning.
The far right is making its might felt all over the place.
And that is so worrying to me.
For a brief, shining moment in my life it seemed we might actually be headed toward a global society and it has not happened. It was around the time the Berlin Wall went down, a moment I will forever remember. Driving down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, headed west, my bestest friend, Tory Abel, called me on my car phone and said: do you know what’s going on? As I was listening to classical music, I didn’t. The wall was falling.
There are all kinds of suppositions about why that magic moment did not result in a better world.
Right now, I am reading a book about “the weekend” in British homes in the 1930’s and one of the revelatory bits was about a British Lord who became a Muslim because he saw Islam as the bulwark against women getting the vote and having shorter skirts and working.
He would probably have a lot in common with IS.
Change is hard. And changing centuries of tradition is hard and people will fight it. IS is fighting it.
When all of this works itself out, I won’t be here. It will take more than a lifetime.
And that is history in the making. It takes lifetimes to work itself out.
If you are not aware of it, Chechnya is conducting a campaign against gays. It is putting us in camps, not unlike the Nazis; there are tales of torture and death. Can this be happening in the 21st Century? Apparently so. The reports are horrific.
The President of Chechnya has declared he will eliminate the gay community by the beginning of Ramadan on May 26th.
Putin has declared there is no evidence this is happening and that is Putin’s view of the world: no horrible thing is happening. There is no sarin gas is Syria, there is no campaign against gays in Chechnya, there is no fill in the blank.
Tags:Chechnya, Chechnya campaign against gays, Far right, Los Angeles, Marie Le Pen, Nazis, OMI, Paris, Putin, Syria, technology, Tory Abel
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