[Above photo: Yet another flowering tree in Portland. ]
16 May 2022
As happens, the sun appears, the temperature rises (86 F two days ago!), and weekend activities beckon. I hiked the Morse Mountain-Seawall Beach trail on Saturday with a friend. Morse is only a hill and a modest one at that. Perhaps to the early settlers who built at the top and had to haul their water up, it felt like a mountain. The walk was lovely with the smell of the forest giving way to the wonderful organic scents of the “sea”: rotting kelp, decomposing fish, sea birds, shellfish, and crabs, and whatever else contributes to that alluring mix. I guarantee that smelling the sea 10 miles offshore is unremarkable. The vulture in us, possibly, prepares our brains to find the pungent seashore mix particularly attractive. The broad beach itself is stunning: surf and fine sand with a backdrop of granite ledges topped with spruce. At either end of the beach are the estuaries and salt marshes of the Sprague and Morse rivers.
On Sunday I joined two new potential friends in preparing their sailboat for launch. Since I seem to be of more modest stature than the guys I sail with, I am always chosen to go up the mast in a bosun’s chair or to dive into the engine compartment to inspect or repair. It is appreciated, as the over-6 footers would not fit easily. Yesterday was no exception. I volunteered to scrub the inside of the cabin on their 26 foot Tanzer, since I could slip into the crevices. I did a good job and earned myself a spot for summer sailing. It is even satisfying to enter a grey, moldy space and exit, after two hours of snorting Lysol and scrubbing vigorously, a white, shining one.
As I prepare to move into my new townhouse—-a two story condominium but “townhouse” sounds rather grand—I am accumulating boxes, scheduling a U-Haul, and planning my strategy and tactics. I am also taking long walks around the West End, revisiting my familiar haunts now cloaked in green and bright colors rather than snow.
Ascending to the Western Promenade from the street below, I saw a sticker on a post: “Timon + Pumba”. I thought that is one clever boy, printing up weather-resistant stickers to impress his girl. I admired their names and it made me think of a classic love-story, like Dido and Aeneas or Antony and Cleopatra, a European-African romance. This one is perhaps blue collar, rather than nobility. The feelings and sensations will be the same, perhaps more pure, since neither partner will be freighted with dynastic considerations. I would love to see from a distance the entranced couple, probably middle-schoolers, chatting. Might they possibly be immigrants to the US, and to Maine? My fantasies and future projections for their love and happiness abound!
I confess that I wonder if Merrick Garland was a plant, that Obama didn’t really know his sympathies. His apparent lack of enthusiasm for addressing January 6th and the surrounding events is pretty awful. As with Robert Muller, the voices of moderation are cautioning that he is simply thoughtful, careful, and ethical, trying to avoid a media circus (not so successful, I think) in meting out Justice. I fear that he is reluctant to pursue the leading frauds and plotters with vigor for other reasons: sympathy for their cause, a fear of further dividing a split country, a diminished valuation of the insurrection—“Boys will be boys, you know.”—, and refusing to see the true menace of those lying right-wing tyrants to our democracy. He surely can see how dishonest and partisan the Supreme Court is today, imposing the will of a Catholic and other Christian minority on the majority of the population. I keep hoping, as do many of us, that he’ll pull a rabbit out of his hat, stunning us into admiring silence.
Speaking of miracles, it is wonderful to cheer for the Ukrainians, shoving the Bear away from Kharkiv, back to its den in Russia! Even in the Donbas region Russian advances are slow and there are some Ukrainian victories. Weakening Russia will serve us all. The age of territorial empire has long passed, dustbin-confined. Russia is where spirituality gets scary, as Putin’s quasi-mystical sense of a greater Russian destiny and his desire to achieve that demonstrate. Russia is an historically amazing country with great art, literature, music, dance, and other cultural products. Its cruel and bloody history, like our own, dogs it and, unlike ours, the populace hasn’t had the will to put the mutt to sleep.
I’ve applied for a US Embassy (Myanmar) grant to fund my continued virtual teaching there. I’ll continue it anyway, but would expand my work if I got paid to do so. I do love my students and feel badly about the constraints imposed on them, including their learning, by the civil war.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 