When the Sun Goes Down

A memory:

We had a picnic dinner at the beach near Port Richmond on the bay once not so long ago. The steady breeze went down with the sun, and my grandchildren played at the water's edge. Some of them even swam. The water temperature was 55 degrees as the sun set, and the air was 62 degrees. I snapped a photo to remember for the future.

That future seems accessible very soon. The guidelines for a return to such activities are a bit ambiguous but we think it is, or soon will be, legal to take such outings again.

As is true of the waterfront all around the Bay Area, there are disintegrating concrete structures at that spot left over from World War II. In some places these include bunkers built to repel any aerial attack from the Japanese; near Port Richmond the buildings looked more like old manufacturing or loading structures.

This was a major center for Naval war and munitions ships during the war. Around 27 miles up this coast, then inland toward the Delta sits Port Chicago, site of one of the worst military disasters on the mainland in the war.

Some 320 people were killed and 390 injured in a massive munitions explosion that shook windows as far away as Oakland, some 40 miles away. Most of the victims were African Americans who had patriotically enlisted only to discover that they were precluded by entrenched racism from serving in combat zones and instead segregated into work teams such as that at Port Chicago.

A month after the explosion, hundreds of sailors and civilians staged a strike protesting unsafe working conditions  and 50 were court-martialed, convicted of mutiny and imprisoned. Only in recent years have they been finally recognized as the heroes whose actions led the Navy to finally desegregate its forces.

I thought about all of this and remembered our work on digging out the history of Port Chicago at the Center for Investigative Reporting many years ago as I walked along the waterfront with my daughter on that recent night.

***

Government authorities are gingerly experimenting with lifting some restrictions out here in California, where it increasingly feels like summer when we venture outside. No one wants to see the massive crowds not maintaining social distance as happened in Southern California and Florida, but it is going to be hard to convince everybody to stay inside much longer.

Californians are an open air lot. Many of us came here from elsewhere to escape the nastier weather in the East, North and Midwest.

All we can hope is that these relaxation moves do not unleash a new wave of illness and death from Covid-19, which has been relatively contained out here to date.

***

Most of the articles I read now are speculations about what will be like after this ordeal ends. A common assumption is that many things may change, both at work and in our everyday lives.

I doubt that.

In the past, when terrible pandemics struck -- polio, AIDS, various flus -- society seemed as if it would be fundamentally altered, but in fact it never was.

Once a cure or vaccine or both were established, life quickly went back to "normal." Before long, only the occasional person seemed to recall what had happened; the terror evaporated and the routines of daily life resumed.

One of the skills we've evolved is the power to forget. It's commonplace to hear women say that after giving birth they lose recollection of how painful the experience was, so they are able to go through it all again.

I'm living proof that is also true of jobs. The only gear I knew how to drive in for my many jobs was fifth gear, going all out for as long as it lasted. I didn't do things in a half-assed way. Rather, I was always on the hunt for the next big story.

When the moment came, and we were within shooting distance of the target, I could smell it like you can smell gunpowder during the practice shot.

Once we got what we were after, it was time to move on.

This may not be the most flattering description of journalistic practice but remember I was an investigative reporter, not your friendly weatherman.

For me, retired from that career, this thing is more of a dream-like experience, almost like living inside a novel. The story line is still weaving around in unpredictable ways that allow us to prolong our state of suspension between hope and despair, belief and disbelief.

We have scientists like no society in history has ever had. An example is Manu Prakesh, the brilliant Stanford bioengineering professor who is developing a new Corona-V mask out of scuba masks. (See an interview with Prakesh on KQED Newsroom, available online.)

I've met with Prakesh in the past and his has one of the most exceptional minds I have ever encountered. What's unique about him is how he devises new solutions to problems that are cheap enough for even the poorest of people to afford. Check him out.

With scientists like Prakesh, we will be getting through this crisis. I know it.

-30-

What Can We Do?

Millions of white-collar Americans are discovering that it is possible to accomplish everything required from home in a fraction of the time it took at the office.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that fraction is 5/8.

So many inefficiencies have been eliminated! Commuting alone represented a major investment in time and effort. It also caused stress, as in rushing to catch a train, eluding rush hour, or realizing halfway to work that once again, the damned cellphone charger is missing.

By comparison, the new commute is relatively uneventful.

There also used to be so many meetings. What, a distraction!

Come to think of it, lots of the interactions with co-workers were more social in nature than professional.

Now that our time is our own, no one cares whether we get dressed or not. Even if you are required to appear on a video chat, you can easily fake it. No one cares which restaurant you go to for lunch,  either, because you won't be going to lunch.

Today is Friday. TGIF. No one hears that.

There's lots of time to yourself, that is for sure. As the old saying goes, "two's company, three's a crowd."

Nobody ever said what one was.

The headlines suggest this state of being may last for the next two years, although commentators are putting a lot of effort into seeking the silver linings in all of this. Did you hear there might be a cure, or a vaccine soon? Like by next year, maybe.

***

Luckily, there is lots to do with your spare time. Yesterday, for example, I wrote about family histories. You might try doing that.

Researching family history is complex.  Starting with your mother and a father; each of whom presumably had parents, you already have six characters to develop and you've barely gotten started.

The reason my family knows about our theoretical connection to Shakespeare is because of a period sort of like this one -- over 30 years ago, when my oldest child was homeschooling. The difference is that that one was voluntary. She watched a PBS documentary that weighed the evidence that Edward deVere was possibly the actual author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

At the same time she saw the documentary, my daughter was researching family history as part of her homeschooling routine. She read a document compiled by one of my distant Canadian relatives that contained the information that deVere was in fact our original family name, later anglicized to Weir, and that we were French.

She put two and two together and theorized that we were descended from the actual Shakespeare. She was around 11 at the time and also interested in Britsh royalty, which led her to other adventures, including an article she wrote with a friend that was published by a national magazine.

You could say she used her time outside of the formal education system rather well.

***

In the best of times, many of us have to struggle to explain exactly how we fit into the world.

And these are hardly the best of times.

For most people, work helps in the process of how we come to view ourselves. We have titles, we get performance evaluations, and from time to time we receive special recognition.

Over time, these occurrences assume some sort of pattern. We have been judged by the world to be this or that and there is a narrative that can be constructed to explain it all.

We don't necessarily have much control control over that narrative. Others write the story for us.

One time, many years ago, I got a glowing performance evaluation by a supervisor who misspelled the word "peer" as in "he is well-respected by his piers." He then told me my job was being eliminated, which meant, of course, I would have plenty of time to walk on piers as opposed to working with my peers.

I've not saved a single performance evaluation from my long career. As far as my life story is concerned, they never actually happened.

There's a scene in the great Australian director Peter Weir's film "Witness" where the boy character, Samuel Lapp, is showing his adult visitor, John Book (Harrison Ford) around his farm in Amish country. Samuel opens the door to an empty grain elevator.

"This place really echoes," he says.

Spending a lot of time alone can mean listening to our own echoes. The question is "What do we hear?"

-30-

Who We Are

This odd, extended period of self-isolation presents the potential for reflection that normally would be rejected in favor of one of the temptations of the moment -- a video game, a bit of sweet tea and biscuit, some escapist pursuit (TV, magazine, novel), or a physical pleasure most decidedly *not* associated with an afternoon nap.

Yesterday, while dozing off in the sun, draped over a backyard couch and surrounded by the high-pitched sounds of six of my grandchildren and the competing chirps of a few songbirds, I was revisited by  the insistent voices of the ghosts of my past.

Every family's history ought to be viewed through the numerical lens of time, in my view. So let's start with the numbers.

Today is the last day of April, 2020, and the world is edging up to its all-time population peak of 8 billion people. When I was born, four generations ago, that figure hovered around 2.5 billion. When my parents were born, it was not yet 2 billion and back four generations before that, when my paternal ancestors arrived from Europe, it was more like 1 billion.

Accordingly, my modest piece of the human story is perhaps one-eighth of what it would have been 175 years ago during the Great Famine in Ireland, or around one-third of what it would have been upon my arrival in Detroit, not long after World War II.

Most families tell stories about who we are and where we come from. Who our ancestors were and what they told us, generation after generation, trickling down through the ages.

Frankly, that amounts to precious little in most cases. A few golden coins might have been a better heritage but it turns out you can't take it with you.

In my case, what I've inherited on my Scottish side is a family with that included national heroes who were swimmers and a contingent on the move that spread across North America from Halifax to Detroit to Vancouver.

Over the years, I've met relatives in all of those places, plus I had the extraordinary experience of meeting a cousin several times removed who was a Scottish actress. She showed up as she was touring the US. in the lead role of "My Fair Lady."

Other traces that remain include the clan's tartan, a fabric that is dominated by the color blue, as well as Scottish meat pies, which I order from time to time from a company in North Carolina.

My father's side includes mysterious undertones. What we know to be true (thanks to documentation) is the Weirs came to Canada from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s, when the potato blight chased both the gentry and the peasants from the land.

Ireland lost perhaps a quarter of its population in a very short time to starvation and emigration. The lucky ones had the resources to leave, and my predecessors clearly were among those.

They carried with them, as Irish people tend to do, a trove of family stories, many of which remain cloaked in rumor and vagueness -- and of dubious veracity. But the family claimed convincingly that it was of French origin and that the English version of the name had been anglicized from de Vere.

Here's where the family story is reduced to a whisper, as if we had been hiding it for cennturies. We believe we are descended from Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As my relatives related it to me, the family suspected he was in fact the author of the great works associated with a contemporary, minor actor named Shakespeare at a time when royals were precluded by class to take part in the base lot of actors, storytellers, and showmen.

Scholars do believe Shakespeare had a vocabulary of around 66,000 words -- three to six times the average vocabulary of English speakers today!

How can this possibly have been the case? And, if true, where did custody of all those words go? Was there a great falling from grace for the de Veres; did they retreat into the landed gentry that cultivated potatoes in the green hills of Ireland?

Perhaps so.

My sisters and I comfort ourselves from such disquieting myths by noting we are rather good at word games like Scrabble, after all.

So, maybe in the shadows, there is a line of history that reaches back to the 1500s and a tortured wordsmith hiding behind a pseudonym; a man driven to tell stories that were in many ways not his to tell. Rather like a journalist.

***

As you, I and billions of others shelter together, physically or virtually, it can be a time unique in our lives to contemplate matters like these. As I have suggested over and over, our imaginations may become fertile under these circumstances and our pasts may visit us in strange ways, using mechanisms that we would  no doubt ignore in the normal sequence of things.

But, for all of us, the natural order has been disturbed. One way to put it is the great potato blight has returned, taking a new form, floating in on the warm afternoon air, urging us to once again get up and move on.

This all makes me shiver, in the pre-dawn night. I have to light the fire, boil water, and pour it over  coffee grounds from to warm my hands as they hold the cup. It's not so cold that I can see my breath, but I can see my thoughts.

And now that I've let the word secrets out of the family bag, a new question beckons -- where the hell does my obsession with numbers come from?

-30-

Solitary Confinement

These days, we're pretty much all stuck in solitary confinement and it may not end anytime soon.

I've only spent a couple nights in jail, a long time ago, and not for anything serious, but it's easy to imagine a worse fate. You know, a case of mistaken identity, a deluded eyewitness, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Our common crime this time around is being human. An enemy force has rounded us up and thrown us in jail. The door is unlocked, but if we try and escape, the enemy is waiting out there for us. Better to stay inside the cell.

***

This is the age of the Great Unhappening. High school senior? No homecoming queen, no prom, no graduation ceremony. No getting drunk out on the town.

College senior? No prominent graduatation speaker, unless of course you are a cadet at West Point.

Were planning to get married? Try having an event while maintaining social distance.

Were going to die soon? No funeral, no memorial service, nobody comforting your survivors. At this rate, you might as well put it off if possible.

It's all just too weird. Of every catastrophe I've witnessed or imagined, nothing prepared me for this one. Scary nightmares are downright comforting by contrast.

Hurricane? I was in East Biloxi for the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. It was awful, very sad, and a cautionary tale for storm preparedness.

Earthquake? Try Loma Prieta in 1989, the most devastating in Northern California that I've experienced. The lesson for me was more preparedness, especially in the form of canned foods and bottled water.

Nuclear War? Well there's not much you can do about that one. In one way, Covid-19 is like the aftermath of nuclear war. The contamination is all around. It moves silently, soundlessly, without smell or any kind of physical sensation as it settles onto your body. Then it eats up your insides.

Some of our prison cells are nicer than others, of course. I certainly can't complain -- perched in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate, Mt. Tam and the coastal range. This is one of the prettiest environments in the world.

All the buzz now is when will our sentence be up. When will we be delivered back to what's normal? But what if the answer to that question is "Never?"

What if this is as good as it gets?

At least we are alive. and those of us with enough resources can get virtually anything delivered, so we have plenty of food, drinks, prescription medicines, healthy snacks, entertainment, the company of the cohort (family, friends, roommates, fellow inductees) we were staying with when the order came down.

Shelter in place.

Public health experts warn of the next wave, as Covid-19 apparently is nearing or passing the peak of its power the first time through the human community. They say it is inevitable that it will return, probably this fall and winter.

If the politicians who want to rush this "return to normal" deal get their way, and no huge adverse consequences result, we can expect a summer of hyperactive socializing. Single people of mating age in particular will be desperate to find mates to settle in with before the next wave rushes ashore.

This could be a summer of unprecedented partying. "Meet and greet" could be supplemented by "complete" so you have someone to share your cell with when the next sentence comes down.

That a new type of insanity is inevitable seems incontrovertible. Tell me one sane thing about any of this?

If R.E.M. were to hold one of those huge outdoor concerts now, the crowd would have to wear facemarks and gloves when they sing "Losing my Religion."

Consider this
Consider this
The hint of the century...
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I've said too much...
But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

-30-





.

Dreamtime Fades

The aborigines in Australia have been following "dreaming tracks" or "songlines" for 40,000 years, criss-crossing their homeland by foot. This tradition passes their history and culture from one generation to the next, despite the predations of missionaries who would "civilize" them. This resonates with life here in America.

I'm revisiting old books and films that helped shape my outlook decades ago. "Walkabout" is one of those films (based on a novel); it presents 16-year-old Jenny Agutter as a white girl lost in the outback with her little brother and David Gulpilil a 17-year-old Aborigine boy who guides them to safety.

It's a gentle and fierce romantic tragedy that touches me today as it did when I first saw it in 1971.

***

One way to experience this current period, when so many of us are staying quiet rather than actively casting about, as we are accustomed to do, is to allow the line between imagination and reality to blur. A warning label: Western medicine labels this state a borderline personality disorder.

So it is both a safe and dangerous place to go.

As is much of our great art, which probes this very blurring in novels, paintings, songs, and films.

When I rise I covet being lost in the rhythm of the departing night before it gets stolen away. Soon enough, dreamtime will inevitably merge into daytime.

Ironically, I spent an extended career in the world of setting reality straight, investigating how things appeared to be and communicating how they actually were. That was concrete work, based in a consensual construct, an agreement to interpret evidence according to set norms and standards.

Honesty is an entirely different matter. Staying within the strict boundaries of reality as opposed to the feathery borderlines of songlines is not always an option.

In an interview two years ago, Jenny Agutter talked about her experience as that 16-year-old girl in Walkabout. She shared her emotional journey from the age of fourteen, when she was chosen for the part, and the age of sixteen, when she actually played the role.

She talked about what was gained and what was lost for her in the process, how her innocence slipped away to let adulthood take its place. But she also did not claim that you can never go back.

***

It was an Australian kind of day. It was hot, utterly dry. A deep silence settled over the area. Sitting in the backyard, feeling the sun, I fell into a drowsy state. Betsy, the dog, tried to rouse me by placing a piece of wood, then a stone, on my lap. She wanted me to throw them for her to retrieve.

I often will do this but yesterday no; I didn't feel like returning to anything that concrete. My daughter came to my rescue by taking the dog inside and talking to me about writing. She also is a journalist plus she published her first novel, set in Chile, last year.

"Dad, you're retired now. You can write whatever you want to write."

It was my turn to cook dinner for our group of seven refugees. I boiled two packages of pasta, and cooked two pounds of meat sauce in onions, garlic and fresh parsley. There was olive oil involved. I had thought it would take me 45 minutes but in fact it took over two hours.

At around the 45-minute mark, my granddaughters emerged and pronounced, mostly to themselves, "We're ready for dinner but it's not ready for us."

***

As the sun went down, I returned to Australia by revisiting a 1956 film adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel, "A Town Like Alice," which recounts the ordeal of a group of  British women and children  as they were marched back and forth across the Malay peninsula by their Japanese captors during World Way II. An Australian man proves to be their savior and the lead actress falls in love with him.

This film is in black and white, and except for some poor depictions of the supposed frivolity of the children under such circumstances, with comically inappropriate music, it conveys that same dreamscape as Walkabout, i.e., life and death under a searing sun. The novel actually goes much further than the film, with the woman moving to a remote outpost near Alice Springs after the war to reunite with the man and start a new life.

But that is about love, perhaps a topic better left for another day. The sun is rising; I really must go.

-30-

Across the Divide

I asked my six-year-old granddaughter what she wants to be when she grows up.

There was no hesitation: "An artist."

"Why do you want to be an artist?"

"Because I like to draw."

"Do you like people to see your drawings?"

"Only some of them. Others I don't want anyone to see."

***

My father used to love to draw. He'd let me see his drawings but he told me that they were not very good. Maybe they were or maybe they weren't, but he kept drawing nonetheless.

He'd keep his drawings in an old dresser that I think was called a "filboy." From the limited research I've done, this may have been an example of the Waterfall Art Deco style of furniture from *circa* 1930.

When I was young, we lived on the outskirts of Detroit, and he was a milk salesman who went store to store selling his company's brand of milk.

Sometimes he took me along. He knew every shopkeeper's name, asked about their families, and handed out tchotchkes from his company folder. He'd also often tell them a story, simple tales about the store down the way, that kind of thing.

Years later, when I was raising money for various non-profit organizations, I found myself using some of the same techniques, almost unconsciously. My emphasis was always on the story-telling, which usually revolved around the impacts of our work.

Years after that, I read that story-telling had become the norm in marketing. During a down period in my journalism career, I applied for a few marketing jobs. "You don't have enough marketing experience," I was told.

Selling, of course, is selling -- a process where the product almost is incidental. Part of the sales job is creating a founder's myth, a story about how your company or its founder got started.

Take the light bulb. Thomas Edison is often given credit for tis invention but he was only one of many people who contributed to the development of this important item. According to *LiveScience*:

"The story of the light bulb begins long before Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879. In 1800, Italian inventor Alessandro Volta developed the first practical method of generating electricity, the voltaic pile. Made of alternating discs of zinc and copper — interspersed with layers of cardboards soaked in salt water — the pile conducted electricity when a copper wire was connected at either end. While actually a predecessor of the modern battery, Volta's glowing copper wire is also considered to be one of the earliest manifestations of incandescent lighting."

Edison was no fool. He started a company to exploit his founder's myth for commercial purposes. His company set truth aside in that pursuit.

When it comes to marketing campaign, they come and go, as do the companies. But the story, true or false, survives. 

***

This is a period of scams and fraud. Someone stole my credit card number and ran up over $1,000 in charges this month, which. came to my attention yesterday as I went to pay the bill.

"What is this?" I muttered, "And this and this and that?"

The fraudulent purchases were all for delivery. When I called the bank, they acknowledged the fraud and said they would remove the charges from my account.

I know many people who read my essays are elderly. Please be aware that these are times that criminals prey upon the unsuspecting. Be alert.

Most people are honest most of the time. We might shave the yellow-to-red light thing a little close sometimes as we glide through an intersection, but we feel guilty about that. Here's where effective law enforcement can prove helpful.

If you get stopped for that kind of infraction, a warning will usually suffice. The rule is that you should not enter an intersection when the light is yellow and you must exit it before it turns red.

A couple months back, I was taking a Lyft ride from San Francisco down the peninsula when I noticed that the driver would never turn right after stopping at a red light, even though that is legal in California. The driver was a recent arrival in the U.S. and I asked him if he understood the rule.

He said that he did but that most of his pickups were in the city, where drivers have perfected rolling through red lights when executing right turns, never quite coming to the required complete stop. City cops tend to overlook this practice; in fact they do it themselves all the time.

The driver told me he'd been ticketed recently on the peninsula for doing just that. Maybe cops down here were stricter?

In any event, he'd decided it was far better to come to a complete stop and wait for the green light than to risk another ticket, which would wipe out an entire shift's earnings. I understood, but being in a hurry, I was irritated by his caution.

In his case, a warning from the cop may have been more effective than the ticket. As it happened, after he was stopped, he had to work an entire second shift to make up the difference. So one of the peninsula's cities got some ticket revenue while those using Lyft got a very tired driver working much longer than he should have been doing.

And I got a slower trip home than I wanted.

***

As I watch people navigating the whole social distance maneuver when they encounter one another, I notice that the children, in particular, are mastering this dance. When they see a friend, they prance to about the six-foot line, then move backward as their friend moves forward. Back and forth they go, never touching or breathing each other's emissions of respiratory particles, virus-laden or not.

I'm wondering whether this ritual will evolve into a new mating dance for the human animal, dancing back and forth, six feet apart, until enough trust is established to convince them to encroach upon the safety zone and embrace.

After all, love requires risk. Everyone knows that.

-30-

The Sound of Slippers

When you lift a new pair of slippers out of their box, the first thing you notice (besides the extensive packaging) is that they appear to be identical. There is no right, and there is no left. They're programmable.

So you make a choice and begin the process of training them to fit your feet, or maybe it's training your feet to fit them, I'm not sure, until the day inevitably comes when you mix them up as you get dressed in the dark. Your feet instantly tell you how to fix that story.

As long as you don't think too deeply about it, living is a bit like breaking in a new pair of slippers.

I was not aware of this until recently, when I could suddenly feel my old slippers again and it mattered after many months which one was right and which one was left.

It's called "peripheral neuropathy" when you lose the feeling in your extremities. The doctor taps the reflex hammer on your knee and foot but nothing happens. The jerk has come out of your knee. It is common after a stroke. 

Not to worry. Physical therapists, or the Internet, can teach you how to get that feeling back. It's the kind of exercise that hurts just enough to actually feel good. (Now if only I could make my left hand close all the way again.)

And it's too bad, isn't it, that no one has developed an exercise for when your love goes away.

***

Today, listening to the train whistles as they pass nearby, I'm sensitive to how I'm learning new habits, adjusting to the confinement.

Perhaps, once the shelter-in-place orders are lifted, some of these new habits will persist. Maybe we will each travel a little lighter on the earth, easing the burdens we impose upon it as it spins through space avoiding most of the asteroids in its way.

I remember a sheet posted in the kitchen at one place I worked. It had pictures and words. "Compost these items (food scraps, etc.); Recycle these items (look for a the appropriate symbol); Place the rest in the trash."

The sign's creator couldn't resist an editorial comment: "Almost nothing should go into the trash."

Since helping my 9-year-old granddaughter with her math schoolwork is one of my new habits, I'm acutely aware of the relationship between numerators and denominators. Consider the numbers that flash daily on TV regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. The fraction appears pretty alarming. about 50,000 in the U.S. dead out of a total of some 200,000 cases.

That is an extremely alarming death rate -- 25 percent. 

But we do not yet have any real data about the denominator because so few people have been tested. It could well be the case that the true number of cases to date is 1,000,000. In that case the fatality rate would be 5 percent.

Or, even more likely, maybe the denominator is 5 million cases, bringing the death rate down to 1 percent. Or lower.

This is the kind of situation that can be a reminder of why we tell children that math matters.

As a journalist who strives for fairness, I consider it downright irresponsible for networks like CNN to flash those incremental numbers on the screen day after day. Corona-V may be bad, very bad, but it is certainly not killing one in every four people who contract it.

***

Another programmable element in our lives arrives in the form of election ballots. They're sort of like slippers, they don't arrive pre-set for the right or the left. Nothing compels us to vote the way we've voted previously. 

There are many positions on this year's ballot, including the job of the president. If I could wish for one political mutation, it would be that a meaningful percentage of voters consider their choice with an open mind this time around.

If that should happen, if people set aside resentments and prejudices, they will cast a vote for the person best-suited to the job, free from passion.Aristotle proposed something like that.

Whatever your choice, just tap your finger and be glad that peripheral neuropathy hasn't taken your voice away -- yet.

***

The night before last, one of the quail chicks popped up in the air and landed outside of the box. Disoriented, it scrambled around the bathroom, peeping loudly. Now, its box has a soft netting ceiling.

That chick was the only one to date to escape from its box; expressed as a fraction or percentage, that comes to 1 out of 16, or 6.7 percent.

If that were to happen in an election, the result would be a landslide. Most everyone stays in their box. Few have whatever you want to call it -- recklessness, courage, foolishness, restlessness, physical prowess, cabin fever -- to try and escape.

Writers, filmmakers, songwriters all notice that and the results include movies like "Thelma and Louise." I don't like that movie because of how it concludes. I'd write a new ending. Wait a little while. Someone will come to put you back in your box,  or you'll will find a new box somewhere out there that's a better fit.

Of course some people never do find a box until the last scene. They keep moving down the line until the line stops. One of  many haunting pieces on my playlist is "Travelin' Soldier" by the Dixie Chicks:


"Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his army green
Sat down in a booth in a café there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair

He's a little shy so she give him a smile
And he said, "Would you mind sittin' down for a while
And talking to me?
I'm feeling a little low."
She said, "I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go."

So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said, "I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care.
I got no one to send a letter to.
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you?"

I cried

Never gonna hold the hand of another guy
Too young for him they told her
Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier

Our love will never end
Waitin' for the soldier to come back again
Never more to be alone when the letter said
A soldier's coming home"

Since we're all going to end up in a box, maybe we should just jump now and again. Almost nothing should go into the trash.

-30-