An American Pope. My boyhood, Catholic school kid heart is happy. My mother would be beside herself as would be the nuns who taught me, mostly Sisters of Charity in their starched, white-winged habits. I doubt any of them ever imagined that a kid from the South Side of Chicago who graduated from Villanova would make that journey. But here he is and we can talk to his brothers and they’re telling us all about him. He likes the White Sox. A baseball Pope. It feels good.

I think I’ve really settled into this retirement thing. Granted, I’ve been at it for a while, and my wife’s illness and death threw a kink in the works, but life seems to have evened out. I write in the morning, run errands, and do yard work. Take yesterday. I wrote. Went and got a haircut. Had my oil changed. Stopped for lunch. Talked to a friend on the phone. Came home. Cleaned the pool. Watered a few plants. Took a walk. Talked to my oldest son on the phone. Ate a light dinner. In the end it felt like a successful day. A nice older man’s day.

I’m like a dog with a bone, I guess, I find something and I can’t let go. Which means, as I dig through my life and find something interesting, I want to write about it even if it might be a topic that makes someone uncomfortable. That’s how I came to write about my wife’s dementia and eventual death. And that’s how I now come to write about politics. It’s a thing in my life, and it interests me even though I’m not a political scientist with tons of studies, and degrees to match. Although, in this day and age, when you can get a degree from a search engine, the latter means nothing.

Here I am again trying to make sense of the political turmoil, which may not be turmoil at all for a lot of people. I suspect because some people think it’s totally out of their control anyhow, so why worry about it, or they’re happy with what’s going on, because they agree with Grover Norquist, who famously said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Which means they probably think Reagan had it right when he said the government was the problem.

Every once in a while, after watching an event unfold, I like to ask myself, what would I have done? I did it yesterday, for instance, while reading up on the events that led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar, here on an F-1 student visa as a doctoral student, into custody and strip her of her visa. Apparently, she was picked up because she was one of four authors of an editorial piece last year in the Tufts student paper protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine.

I wonder. Who were the men and women who arrested Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk? Were any of them married? If so, did they kiss their wives or husbands goodbye that morning and tell them they loved them?

There is so much going on these days in the world outside my fence that it’s hard not to notice, but one thing’s for sure, trying to get reliable news about anything, is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. The stories come at me in bits and pieces and new bits replace old pieces before I can figure out what the first bit meant and follow ups get lost in all the confusion if any follow ups come at all. It’s enough to make someone want to run and hide, except that may be the point, although that just might be me trying to give purpose to random events.

My world is getting turned upside down. In addition to learning I have to hate Canada and love Russia now I’m starting to hear that empathy might cause the fall of Western Civilization. That’s going to kill the sympathy card business and lord knows what florists will do. And talk about re-thinking history. It seems as though the success of the various civil rights and civil liberties movements for blacks, women, and gays was a direct result of empathy, of people walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and thinking, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable and why do they have to do that?”

I think the AI revolution has started and it’s more insidious than I thought. Yesterday, without warning, six large fingernail clippers showed up on the island in my kitchen. I have no idea how the hive mind communicated with them, but it did and there they were. Of course, there might be another less fun explanation. Whenever I’ve needed a clipper I get one from a place where I know I keep one–my dopp kit, my car, the bathroom, my guitar case, or a drugstore. Then at the end of the day, when I empty my pockets I put the clipper on the island. Although I did not know I possessed six of them, and I don’t know how I failed to see them gathering. That was a revelation and an interesting discovery.

I wanted to be an altar boy in the strongest possible way when I was in the fifth grade in 1956. I wanted to wear the black cassock and white surplice. I wanted to be part of the mass.  And I did it in 29 Palms, California. I was thrilled the first time the priest said the opening lines, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and I replied, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Which when translated means, “I will go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.”, and not only did the mass give joy to my youth, but so did the gospels. And even today when I see the acronym DEI, I think of those lines and how the mass and the gospels infused my response to the civil rights movements for blacks, women, and gays.

Inclusion. This is a hard one, because on a personal level it’s likely we spend most of our lives excluding people and things from our lives. And while it's logical to argue that diversity is good and exposure to different foods, and music, and art will enrich our lives, most of us find ourselves settling in with the familiar religion, music, people and food that we like. And that feels pretty normal. There are even laws to protect our ability to choose, and laws to protect us from people who want to get too close to us.

I like the word equity. I have some in my home, and I try to have it in my life. It’s about fairness, but like its brother, diversity, it has gotten a bad rap in some quarters recently. What I don’t understand is why? Equity is baked into almost everything we do in our lives, especially sports. We handicap golfers and bowlers to even the playing field. We divide fighters into weight classes so that fighters are evenly matched. Horses and race cars are managed. Our public schools are divided into classes based on size. It’s about equity.

I was re-watching the Good Shepherd the other day, a 2006 film by Robert De Niro. It’s a fictional work about the creation of American Intelligence services. There’s an early scene where De Niro’s character is recruiting Matt Damon’s character to join the new endeavor prior to the US entering World War II. They’re at a Skull and Bones retreat, which is a secret society at Yale. In a quiet room over cigars and brandy, De Niro explains, “I’ll be looking for a few good men to head up various departments, in other words no Jews, or Negroes, or very few Catholics…”

I like to think of myself as a man of words. It’s mostly an old fashioned idea. These days everyone communications with video or podcasts. And I doubt any of my little 300 word blog posts will ever go viral. But I like words and the imagination required to make them real. Although, if they were shorter, they might have a better chance because, perhaps being pithy counts more than I think. Anyway, I have a few thoughts on some words in current usage.

A summer or so ago I went with friends to sit in the Guadalupe river. We had beer, snacks, and a popup shelter. We were joined by about a million of our fellow citizens who were floating down the river on inner tubes, boom boxes booming. Needless to say, all those people doing all the things people do in rivers, made the typically clear Guadalupe about as muddy as the Mississippi, and I can only imagine what things were being added to the soup by the tubers.

When I first started this blog in 2014, when it was solely on Facebook, I got a comment one day that said, “So what?” It stopped me in my tracks and made me want to run and hide. But then I decided I was writing for myself and if people wanted to come and read it they were welcome, but I’d still write, regardless. In the beginning, it was mostly about nature and life in the Hill Country. Then, in a seismic shift, I started writing about my wife’s illness and later, her death.

It was another day of mulching and mowing and yard work for me while trying to distance myself from the goings on in Washington D.C. Having convinced myself there’s nothing much I can do, having already voted, I had decided to let the big dogs eat and try to not watch or even comment. But I’m sensitive to the currents of history and I’m an interested citizen, so I look their way on occasion. Layoffs are the big news I see, and that’s interesting to me because I’ve laid off people before, and it was hard to do, especially because I delivered the news personally.

I miss the Sunday paper. A massive ball of newsprint, featuring the comics (all in color), a big sports section recapping Saturday’s games, Parade magazine (a national publication), and an entertainment section talking about movies, music and books. The Houston Chronicle’s entertainment vehicle was Zest magazine. I loved walking out on Sunday morning, picking up the paper, then parceling out the sections to my wife and myself. 

There might be forces at play in the world today that are beyond our understanding. And I might be willing to subscribe to a conspiracy theory if I could find one. At the moment I feel like a mammal in the age of dinosaurs, tiny, underfoot, and out of sight. The titans of our age are galloping across the stage, trumpeting like bull elephants, and the only thing I am to them is a number in a data set.

Yesterday, on my blog about Jimmy Carter, I posted a picture of a flag at half staff. The flag in question stands in the National Cemetery at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Mayres Heights, the hill Confederates defended and Union soldiers attacked. It was one sided. The Union soldiers were climbing uphill over open ground. The Confederates with their cannons were well hidden in a sunken road. It was a slaughter.