On the Move, Again

[Above photo: Dogwood in bloom on the Vineyard.]

27 May 2022

I missed last week’s blog, as I was returning from a visit to friends. This weekend I’ll be moving and cannot reasonably expect to write on Sunday.  I’ll pen a note today.

I travelled to Martha’s Vineyard last weekend to see my good friend from medical school, Jeff, and his wife, Bonnie. I’ve previously described their place, set in 8 acres of conservation woods. Each time I visit, the progress of Bonnie’s remarkable gardening is evident. Their home is now surrounded by beds of flowers, flowering shrubs, trees, and stone walls, creating a layered illusion of complexity and distance. It is lovely, redolent of Japan.

The Vineyard, at least through my lens, appears to be a tranquil, pastoral paradise with well-to-do and well-educated neighbors: not bad for a later chapter in life. And perfect for grandchildren, if one is so blessed, to visit in the summer.

My trip there, the first of some distance in my Leaf, was laced with a low-level anxiety: How far would I get on a charge? Where is the next charger? How often do these things not function? I mistakenly didn’t fully charge before I left, so I did a quick charge in Saugus, Mass. On the way back I found a Level 2 (not so quick) charger near the Cape Cod Canal and added 30 miles in an hour. Then a final 30 minute charge at Braintree got me home easily. My next trip will be simple: leave fully charged, a quick charge at Braintree going down and returning and I’ll be home free. Well, cheaper. The trick is finding the damned chargers in a massive, many-acre mall with open parking and a multistory garage.  But now I know where three are and, if properly planned, it’ll be a breeze. It is nice to stop for a cup of coffee or even lunch.

Ariane has clarified for me that my smugness in driving an EV is unwarranted, given the environmental destruction associated with mining lithium and other rare earth metals necessary for the battery, as well as the lack of recovery and recycling of the same at its demise. This is all true. But as EV’s become more popular, SCIENCE will rescue us, with clean mining and efficient recycling, so I’m told. I’m just ahead of the curve, pushing the envelope. Ha! The fact is, we shouldn’t all be tooling around in our private vehicles; an efficient system of [electric] minibuses, as are used in developing countries, would be much less expensive and much more environmentally sound.

I sign the closing documents on my condo this morning. I have some trepidation about my move, planned to begin this afternoon and continuing for 4 days. My apartment is mostly packed and far from the 2 boxes, three suitcases, and 3 duffels I imagined, I have many, many and heavy, heavy boxes of books, kitchen stuff, food, you name it.  Does it reproduce in the darkness of my closets, cupboards, and ‘neath-the-bed?  Then there will be the Uhaul to Bar Harbor, emptying my storage space, retrieving some furniture from Ari’s barn, shopping local antique stores with her, driving the entire mass to Portland to meet, hopefully, two strong gents from Rocket Moving who will assist me to shift it all inside in 2 hours. I feel like lying on the couch as I contemplate it. It will be good to be settled, although one of my students suggested that I could be of great use to them in Chiang Mai, which is a sweet and livable Thai town. Ah, such choices. I could go for a month or two during the winter.

As to my fantasies about Timon and Pumba 10 days ago, my friend Mary alerted me to the fact that these were characters from “The Lion King”, a meerkat and a warthog, rather than love-sick middle-schoolers. I prefer my imaginings.

I’ll paste here a letter I sent to the NY Times yesterday, rather than create anew a state-of-the-nation notion today:

________________

To the Editor:

In reference to “Evil Swept Across Uvalde” (NYT 5.25.22), citing “mental illness” and failures of the mental health care system as a response to a mass shooting is as ineffectual as saying, “We’re going to pray for the families.” or “We’ll form a committee.”. 

Mental health professionals are unfortunately poor at predicting violent behavior in previously non-violent individuals. We do, however, know that executive functioning, which helps us make considered decisions and is crucial for impulse control, is located in the forebrain, which does not fully mature until  26yo. We also know that military-style rifles are designed to kill a large number of humans quickly, not a deer.

The steps required to diminish the frequency of mass shootings (213 in the first 145 days of 2022) are obvious. They would not infringe upon our Constitutional rights.  Although a small minority of Americans would be infuriated, that’s the price we’d pay to protect our innocents.

While Republicans in Congress do not support gun regulation, a large majority of Americans do, giving the lie to representative government.

______________

As a former gun manufacturing executive put it, “The system isn’t broken. It is functioning exactly as designed” [selling many, many more guns and consolidating a political base around the erroneous ‘Freedom’ issue.].  We have to get rid of the filibuster, create term limits for the Supremes, and have publicly-funded-only elections. What a mess of a system!