Standing precedes standing up to

Remember Popeye’s famous line: “That's all I can stands, cuz I can't stands n’more!” Were this not a leap year, today we’d be done with February. Yesterday’s snow and this morning’s single digit temperatures and below zero wind chill were hard to take after several days of well above seasonal temperatures, temperatures that are forecast to return tomorrow and continue into the foreseeable future. The warmer forecast made me feel brave enough to ask the Better Half to trim my rapidly thinning hair. I hope I haven’t jinxed us into a belated return of winter.

Yesterday’s snow has already melted from the open, south-facing hillside behind the house, even though the temperature is below 20℉. That seems weird to me but I’m neither a climatologist, meteorologist, nor physicist.

some years look like this in late March

Photo by J. Harrington

Has anyone seen the odds on a (partial) government shutdown by Saturday or next week? The longer we go without actual appropriations bills having been passed, the more complex the situation becomes. Forbes magazine has a disheartening assessment of the possible effects of the Fiscal Responsibility Act if there’s not a real budget by April. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired and fed up with living in a political house of cards, built on sand, in a quake zone. At least warmer weather and an upcoming fishing season should provide some respite.

Under the heading of things could always be worse, I was mildly heartened when I read in this morning’s The Writer’s Almanac that Montaigne "lived at a time when religious civil wars were breaking out all over the country — Protestants and Catholics killing each other. The Black Plague was ravaging the peasants in his neighborhood; he once saw men digging their own graves and then lying down to die in them.” Then I remembered we’re still in a COVID pandemic and appear to be heading toward a religious civil war over reproduction health and book reading. Maybe Artificial Intelligence can bail US out, since we seem to be running very short on the natural kind.

Museum of Tolerance

By Michael Miller

The shirtless man by the ticket counter

  has already broken the gloom here, his crowd

    of two boys and the cashier with the Star of David

      gathered around and mouthing astonishment

as he tells the tale behind every scar.

  Yes, this one on the side was from the camp—

     he tells them not to be shy to ask—

       when he tripped into the ditch

on the run after stealing cigarettes,

  the one on the knuckle from punching the soldier

   in the bar, brave with whiskey, a decade after.

     Touch it, he snarls, jutting out his fist.

That split a real Nazi’s lip.

  In the rooms behind him, the voices lay low

    but touch is the rule, the extended families

      passing in fours and fives as tight

as at church or the carnival. Are they

  all survivors here, dazed and exhilarated

    by the fate that dropped them so far from blight?

      A father heads the line, shirt fat with muscles

and a single proud thumb pushing the stroller;

  the woman and girl hug sideways, then again,

     tight as dancers in a row. At each display,

       the time lines and the whispered assurances

reiterate that what is done is done.

  Pol Pot is dead, the children of Kampuchea

    reading again to go to college; Rwanda

       has forgiven itself and opened supermarkets;

the ghettos are demolished, the Cold War won.

  Sudan, they skip. For now, the beasts are gone.

    They face the new life, the one after the mending,

      after the last mistakes were made.

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