Midlife Meditation

Maybe, at last, this is what it takes for Trump's base to fire him. There are two Donald Trumps. When he's by himself, roaming around the residence, lounging in front of "Fox and Friends," tweeting nonsense on his phone, Trump is authentically being himself: a spoiled rich kid who is shattered at the thought of failure, frustrated in his ambition for the one thing his money can't buy (respect), furious that obtaining the most powerful office in the world is still not enough for him to be taken seriously by the smart people he most wants to impress, lashing out at them for not understanding what a great guy he is. By the time we reach middle age, most of us have known people like this. We may have one in our family. We may even have been in a relationship with one. (It didn't end well.) Of course, most of the Trump-types we've known haven't had access to nuclear codes that could turn one of those midnight tantrums into an act of genocide that...

From Eclipse Day last month: this is not the forehead of a young man. Old wounds are coming back to haunt me. Sixteen years ago, when I was a young man of 40, I drove up to Mt. Hood Meadows for a day of cross country skiing. I went alone, as I did for most of my adventures in those days. It was a beautiful January day, the sky clear, the snow powdery and not too slippery, just the way I like it, and as I clipped on my skis, I knew this was going to be a fine day. I had decided to start my workout at a different location than usual: rather than the single-wide mobile home that served as the Nordic lodge, I was parked at the main Meadows lodge that the chairlift started from. The trail down from the lodge to the easy track I had chosen for my warmup was a short hill, but as I said, I was feeling confident. Fifteen seconds into that run, I realized I was going much faster than I had expected. On top of that, I was going to have to execute a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill, a...

May 31, 2013: Amy at Tunnel Falls. Looking through folder after folder of photos, trying to find just the right one to begin this essay, one thing lept out at me: if it weren't for hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, Amy and I might not be a couple. Before we met, Amy had never been much of an outdoorswoman, but she'd always wanted to give it a try. I, on the other hand, had always aspired to outdoor feats, but had never had a fitting partner for my adventures. Almost all my hikes were solitary affairs, including one 18-mile one-day trek through the Sawtooth Wilderness in August, 2007, that could easily have been the end of me. That one began as an out-and-back, then turned, on a whim, into a loop that was far longer and more grueling than I imagined. I'd started too late, and at that altitude, it was really more than I could handle, but once I was invested in it, I really had no choice: all I had was a light windbreaker and a couple of Cliff bars. It was well af...

Charles H. King, Jr., in 1981. Changes in perception typically take time. The mind accumulates information through experiences, relationships, the media, and at some point, wakes up to a truth it has been stubbornly ignorant to. That's how it was for me with my understanding of homosexuality: I don't remember ever being taught that it was wrong, but my childhood was certainly steeped in the idea that it was a sinful choice some people made. I remember reading a couple of references to it in high school, and not really understanding them (one in an autobiographical essay by Tennessee Williams left me particularly confused). The first gay man I was aware of meeting was a theater major who lived in my dorm at Willamette University who struck me as outrageously flamboyant. Unbeknownst to me, one of my best friends in college was a closeted gay man who did not come out to me until our 25 year reunion. I also had no idea that a woman I was attracted to during my first semester...

Trump goes off script, insisting there was nothing wrong with his response to Charlottesville. I see it in every prepared word he speaks. He wants so very badly to hang onto their enthusiasm, their passion for his cause--which is to say, their passion for him. They are the truest of the true, the deep core, the believers who can never be shaken from their faith in him, their undying trust that he will continue to vouch for them, even when he must do it in coded language. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to disavow him, and I'm sure that's what his advisors are asking him to do. Mind you, they can't tell  him to do anything. That's a recipe for unemployment. But asking, and doing it in an absolutely respectful way, carefully wording the request in terms that are as flattering as they can possibly be--yes, I'm sure they're doing a lot of that. "Just a though, Mr. President: the vagueness of the remarks you made is proving ...

Torch-bearing "Unite the Right" bigots showing their true colors. "How does legitimate white pride look?" Tony Peterson, one of the people I most respect, posted this question on Facebook twelve hours ago. It's generated a great deal of conversation in that forum, to which I contributed one short response:   "White pride" is for those who don't know or, worse, ignore history. White shame is where pale-skinned Americans like me need to start. I posted an essay yesterday about how integral racism has been to the history of the Americas, with a line traceable to the first European explorers and colonists to set foot in the New World. Today's essay draws on much more recent history: specifically, the direct line of racist policies that runs from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. Modern racism begins in the 1960s with the passage of civil rights legislation during the Johnson Administration. That's when, for the first time since Rec...

The Goldendale, Washington, eclipse, as photographed by me, February 26, 1979. It took our school bus about four hours to reach Goldendale, Washington. Along the way, we stopped at the Bonneville Dam. This was a field trip for the physics class and the TAG program of Philomath High School. On our tour of the dam, we saw the fish ladders, visited the cavernous turbine room, and witnessed a barge moving through a ten-story tall lock. All of this was impressive, probably worthy of its own field trip, like the one we'd taken earlier in the year to the Trojan nuclear plant in Rainier, Oregon. But it was really just a prelude, a way of squeezing more learning out of the two minute event we had traveled hundreds of miles to see: a total eclipse of the sun. Geographically speaking, we could have traveled just to Portland, which would also be in the path of totality; but Mr. Gosser, our physics teacher, had lived in Oregon for most (probably not all--I remember him having a b...