I walked on water yesterday.
Oops. That was a typo. I walked “in” water, though technically I did walk on water, water at the bottom of the pool at the Lifetime gym.
Tuesday was my first day not wearing a rehabilitation boot since I incurred a hairline foot fracture and severe ankle sprain six weeks ago playing pickleball. Gilda has been touting the benefits of walking in water. As I am still several weeks away from court competition, I finally agreed to join her in the pool.
She regularly walks for 90 minutes. I managed 60 minutes. Was it fun? Eh! Will I do it again? Sure. At least until I am pickleball ready.
Did the birds see me waving a white flag?
I have given up our annual fight, the birds almost daily starting construction of nests at the extreme ends of our retracted patio awning, me spending mornings yanking down their would-be habitats. Loyal readers of this blog may recall past confrontations.
This year the birds won. Chalk it up to laziness, or the weariness of my Sisyphusian task. So instead of building just two nests at the extremes, they have further humiliated me by feathering a nest in the middle of the awning superstructure. Gracious victors they are not.
Sadly, the birds have a predator more dangerous that I to worry about. Twice in the last week corpses of decomposed birds have been left on our property, one on the patio, the other on our backyard lawn. I suspect the killer is a cat new to our neighborhood that has recently prowled our yard. In our 40-plus years in our home we have never witnessed such carnage. I hope it stops.
Back to Reality: Musings aside, each day brings more hints we live during the possible last days of our democratic republic, not because a despot cowered the populace into submission, but rather because everyday citizens have accepted neuterization.
Several months ago a friend, Harold Brooks, posted this commentary from one of his friends. I find it tragically coherent:
“It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
“Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: ‘He says the things I’m thinking.’
“And that’s the part that should chill us.
“Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?
“Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.
“Now the mask is off. Now we know.
“And knowing is a far more dangerous place to be.”
