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“Timeless”
Painting by Brigit Byron Coons
From fineartamerica.com

some love is timeless
sits beside you
when all the world’s
gone to the dance

some love is timeless
prays in your stead
when the pain
consumes faith

some love is timeless
holds your hand
when the nights
convey terror

some love is timeless
acts selflessly
tending your frailties
minding your pride

some love is timeless
uproots itself
more than content
to follow your dreams

this love is timeless
undeserved
it outlives
this faltering life

No one’s complained yet, but it’s been weighing on my conscience that I make fun of British politics more often and more joyfully than I make fun of American politics. I have several excuses, all of them true but none of them good enough:

1. I grew up in the U.S. and spent most of my life there, so its absurdities are less visible to me. Mostly. If you want to see what’s right in front of you, it helps to be an outsider.
2. Britain wraps its political absurdities in such glorious traditional craziness that it invites satire, from the little loops in the parliamentary cloak room where you can hang your sword, assuming you weren’t in such a hurry that you rushed out without it this morning, to the prayer cards MPs leave on a seat because it’s the only way to reserve one and there aren’t enough to go…

Self reflection can be a vicious circle.  Like staring into a mirror and not really getting an answer.

The good, the bad, the ugly, but trust yourself because the answer that you know in your heart will be the good.

You don’t have to make everybody happy.   But you do have to be true to yourself.    If you are, you will ultimately be the good.

My friend had just ordered a second glass of wine. At lunch.

No second glass for me. It drove up the price of lunch and it was my turn to pay. The wine drinking at lunch was new. It seemed very evolved to me. We were so smart, so brilliant, so confident that we could drink at lunch and then go run an agency, fight poverty, attack racism, settle scores. So what if we were a titch in the bag, a wee titch, don’t you know. Just one glass.

So, out of the blue, my friend said to me, “You need to enjoy raising kids while you’re doing it because there’s s no assurance of a payoff, you know?”

And I agreed with him as I did in most matters because he was my mentor and very wise.

But I thought to myself, I’m aiming for a payoff. I’m working…

Once I saw Sandra Bland’s smiling face in the news reports, I didn’t want to watch the video of her arrest. It was going to be a level of wrongdoing and injustice that would be intolerable to watch, burn my eyes.

What had to have happened between her joyful look in the photographs probably supplied by her loving family and the reports of her alleged suicide in jail would be outrageous, assault everything I keep wanting to think is true about America. We are mostly good and fair. Do I still believe this? I don’t know.

What I believe but can’t fully face is this: it’s so much worse than we think it is.

We only really get what has been going on, what we have been told has been going on forever, because now there is video. Before, when we heard the stories, we might have thought the descriptions…

Miss Marple doesn’t live in our village, but she’d be bored silly if she did. We’re short on murdered vicars and poisoned husbands.

What would she have to make do with?

Before I tell you about crime in the village, here’s my disclaimer: After drawing your attention to crime on the Scilly Isles and to the guy who was arrested for charging his phone on the London Overground trains, some of you were left thinking Britain’s a land with no serious crime. That’s my fault. The police really do have better things to do than arrest disoriented seals who wander into town. Or at least other things to do.

Marginally relevant photo: fog stealing the top of the cliff

But for you non-Brits out there, the point is this: Britain’s a real place and part of the same world you live in. That’s another way of saying that it…

Dear Elizabeth,

Forgive the intrusion of this long overdue letter.  How many years has it been? Fifteen at least I’m guessing and not a word exchanged twixt the pair of us in all that time! How very young and foolish we were to allow that little incident of the wretched jelly fish sting in St Topez to come between us. Naive as I was back then how was I to know that pouring a 10 litre bucket of balsamic vinegar over your infected torso was no ‘cure all’, indeed was an old wives’ tale and would cause you so much additional agony.  On reflection maybe it would have been better had you kept your bikini top on when you went swimming!  I do trust those scars eventually healed though. Still what is done is done. Plainly I should not have posted the snaps I took of you at the time…

I watch from afar. A grandmother does that.

But as I watch, I remember the formation of my own family. I remember when my own daughter went from being one to one of many. She was graceful and helpful about it but looking back I can remember her fatigue with the new job of sharing everything that had previously just been hers. Like me.

One of my granddaughters is taking a crash course in going from one to one of many. Her father is with a wonderful and kind woman who has two children. So suddenly my granddaughter’s weekends have stopped being singular and focused on her, a child orchid blooming with many admirers. Now she is one of many, other children like other things, want to be awake when she is sleeping, inside when she yearns for the playground.

Everything in her life, her weekend life anyway, has to…