Midlife Meditation

These jerks have a lot in common. The voters have spoken, and the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. Or perhaps it won't. Or maybe the kingdom will divide, and Scotland and Northern Ireland will remain in the EU while the stump of England and Wales leave. Except London would rather remain. And with the promises used to convince voters to leave turning out to be mostly exaggerations, if not out right lies, maybe they'll take another vote. Or not. It's all so frustrating, so counterintuitive, so irrational, so...familiar. The Brexit campaign was led by two British politicians: Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, and Boris Johnson, former mayor of London and probable contender to replace David Cameron as Conservative party leader and possibly prime minister. In their quest to flush the British economy, and possibly that of the rest of the Western world, down the loo, Johnson, Farage, and the campaign they spearheaded said many thi...

It begins: toasting our first house together, June 26, 2012. I've just entered undiscovered country. On the day I was born in San Jose, California, I was already getting ready to move: my father, then an American Baptist minister, was candidating for a new position up the coast in Fort Bragg. Five weeks later, we moved there, and the die was cast: for the next fifty-five years, the longest I would keep an address would be the four years I was in high school. I can't pin it all on my father's profession (although switching to Methodist, as he did in 1964, locked him into their peculiar practice of itinerant ministry); from college until Amy and I moved into our current home, the longest I kept an address was three years. Note the word "until" in the last sentence, because as of today, I've set a new personal record. We moved into this house four years and a day ago. For the first two years, we were renters, but then our property manager infor...

The SIG SAUER MCX, the gun used to take 49 lives June 12 in Orlando. This graph tells a story: It comes from an article in The Economist  dated August 10, 2015, so it lacks data from the Santa Barbara and Orlando shootings; but even without those numbers, the statistics are stunning: the number of people killed or wounded in mass shootings has increased significantly since 2004, when the Assault Weapon Ban was permitted to expire. Here's another graph that tells a parallel story: Since the election of Barack Obama, gun sales have gone up while, simultaneously, the number of gun owners has gone down. A minority of Americans is amassing personal arsenals. From time to time, one of those gun owners opens fire in a crowded place, and these weapons of mass homicide carry out the function for which they were designed: quickly, efficiently slaughtering multiple innocents. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, anyone with a constituency has been making pronouncements....

I don't know whether to be proud or aghast. There are many things I want to say about the Democratic Congresspersons "occupying" their own meeting chamber. This being an opinion essay, I'm going to reverse the "inverted pyramid" and start with the least important--which is, oddly enough, the issue that would be my acid test for a politician were I to be a single-issue voter: gun control. House Democrats staged this sit-in, disrupting the chamber's business and leading House Speaker Paul Ryan to take draconian, and futile, steps to stifle media coverage of the protest, in an effort to force a vote on the weakest gun control legislation yet to crash against the insurmountable reef of gun lobby influence: barring persons on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns. Had this measure been in place, it would have done nothing to prevent any of the mass shootings that have proliferated since the Assault Weapons Ban expired. Should it ever see th...

Catherine Cawood is as tough a cop as you'll meet on any American crime drama--and she does it without packing iron. The world keeps forcing us to think about the unthinkable. Yesterday in Orlando, Florida, a young man carrying an AR-15, the same assault rifle used in the Sandy Hook massacre, single-handedly killed at least 49 people at a gay night club. As always, this incident of gun violence raised a flurry of "thoughts and prayers" from legislators in the pockets of the NRA, and of resigned frustration from less gun-lobbied politicians appealing for minor restrictions on gun sales, knowing that such measures will get nowhere in Congress, no matter how desperately the American people want them. It's as if the minority of Americans who insist on absolute libertarianism with respect to gun ownership have a louder voice than the blood of the victims. I'm not going to spend any time here arguing about whether this was an incident of international or ...

Starting in September, I'll be teaching here. I felt it Monday morning when I woke up: a slight increase in the gravitational field holding me to my bed, coupled with a tightness in my throat. The pull of the bed I put down to still recovering from a bad fall I'd had Friday while out on a run, the throat scratchiness to the flurry of floral procreation going on throughout the Willamette Valley. Bruises, allergies--yeah, that's what's up. I shaved, showered, had breakfast, packed my lunch, kissed Amy, and headed off to my last full week of school. Five hours later, the teaching portion of my day complete, I stepped into the cafeteria to do lunch duty, and within a minute, knew I had to go home. I checked with the vice principal to be sure she could handle it by herself, notified the secretary I'd be leaving early, then spent 45 minutes contradicting myself by ensuring everything was in place for my sub, and headed for home. That night, I had a fever of 100.8...

An-Di-Fan is no more. My grandmother took possession of the house 71 years ago, purchasing it, sight unseen, from the botany professor who'd owned it, I think, since it had been built. She bought it as the most tangible part of her new life: my grandfather, had died suddenly, and rather than retreat into widowhood, Grandma chose to make her own mark in the world. She'd led a productive life already, working alongside him in his positions as a missionary in Shanghai, then a college president, first in McMinnville, Oregon, and finally in Redlands, California. She'd already established herself as a free-lance writer--I remember seeing a feature of hers in one of the old (1940?)  Life  magazines she kept upstairs in her house--but she aspired to more. She earned her doctorate and returned to McMinnville to be a professor and administrator at Linfield College. This house was waiting for her when she arrived. "An-Di-Fan" was a name brought back from Sha...

Do a Google image search on "Bernie Sanders," and you'll get a whole lot of this: It's the quintessential Sanders, voice raised, hand up to emphasize the point he's making, hitting on the same points he's made hundreds of times in the last year about the inequities of American politics and economics. Of course, he didn't just start campaigning for these values in April 2015, when he announced he would compete with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. He's been an activist for leftist causes since before I was born, and his message has never wavered: equal rights for all people; redistribution of wealth and power; socialism as the cure for all our nation's ills. That stubborn consistency singles Bernie out from the political class, who by and large succeed by adjusting their positions to match or at least work in sync with the shifting views of their constituents. It helps, in Bernie's case, that his entire car...

Sometime soon, these two may be able to occupy the same room with smiles on their faces. Think back to a time when you wanted something with every fiber of your being, wanted it so desperately that you would've given your life for it, in fact in some ways you did give your life for it, and once you realized you couldn't have it, you grieved so deeply the world could have been destroyed around you, could've been destroyed because of you , and you wouldn't have cared, in fact you wanted everyone to feel your pain and no one to ever smile or laugh or enjoy life again. That paragraph was far too easy to write for the simple reason that I've been in that place myself several times. The occasions: losing an election when I was 17; being "friend-zoned" by a girl I had fallen deeply in love with a week before I turned 21; and the apocalypse that kept on giving, my first divorce (because when kids are part of the picture, you get to revisit the hellmouth...

It was just a marble: a small sphere of glass with a ribbon of color in its center. ToysRUs will sell you 160 of them for $4.99. I had bags of them when I was a kid. And when Abel put it in my hand, it felt like the Nobel Prize. I first met Abel as a feral kindergartner. Kinders are developmentally puppy-like: inquisitive, cuddly, playful, unhousebroken. For no reason at all, they will pile on top of each other. They will also hug anything: each other, a teacher's leg, a post. Abel had all these qualities, plus two more: he had the body and face of an anime version of a Mexican child, round eyes, round face, a shock of black hair, a teddy bear physique; and he spoke no English. I assume that was the case, because in the five months I taught at Margaret Scott that year, I never heard him say a word. He also seemed not to understand anything I said to him--or perhaps he chose not to. He'd run across the gym on a whim, forcing me to stop the music lesson entirely and...