Hidden soundtrack

The cicadas are chirping, sounding the alarm on another sweltering day. Their drone is a vibrating metallic noise that shakes the trees. It rings in my ears, like a thousand whistles or a bow drawn slowly across the strings of a violin. It reminds me of a bicycle chain before it breaks free from its toothy ring.I rarely see these annual minstrels. But their symphony is unmistakable.

Harmless, like a benign tinnitus, their low and ever-present song plays in the background of my mind until my thoughts go silent.

The insects filter the world's soundtrack almost to distraction, making me pine for the churning of air conditioning and the cool, dry air of the indoors.

I feel guilty hiding here. Having banished my children into the sauna outside. They have to stretch their atrophied education muscles. Visit the library. Practice getting out of the house in the morning like it's on fire.

Schooling has already started in my house, though classes won't resume for another week or so. The noise of postponed summer projects has finally cut through the din of other distractions.

I want to rail against the last-minute-ness of this preseason panic. But I can't muster any enthusiasm for I-told-you-so.

Such a gloat would backfire anyhow. I told them next to nothing as they plodded along with their mostly unencumbered summer days. I prefer to think of myself as more of a workhorse than a nag.

The last year of high school for one; the first year for the other.

Both suddenly realizing the stakes. Though they seem like two sides of one coin.

One shuts off the world for a bit to focus while the other opens up to its many avenues of assistance. Then, like a coin toss, they flip.

Nature seems at play, even here.

The one who insists on courting perfection never leaves any room for the subsequent disappointments to morph into happy accidents. While the other reaches only for the low-hanging fruit, not exercising gumption until the effortless supply is exhausted.

I've forced myself not to worry. Not to take on the weight of a future I can't know, not to celebrate too loudly. Instead, I just plod along, trying to do my best. It doesn't feel like work when you are just standing there, lightly pushing back. And even in the perfect moments — the ones where you witness success, or progress, or just a little extra effort — the moments where it is possible for pride to drown out the low drone of life, it still feels wrong to harbor it. I'm not proud like I thought I'd be.

It's tempting to think they've won this for the team. In the soundtrack of your mind, the song of cicadas changes to the roar of a crowd. But it seems like tempting fate. 

Best to be humble and to keep plodding along with the low drone of the work at hand. Just as their failures are not entirely mine, neither are their successes. 

The struggle may be real, but it's hidden.

The summer before our discontent

My son was on a mission to find the perfect back-to-school backpack, and he was willing to comb through countless stores, be they outlet or otherwise, to find it. He finally found what he was looking for in the corner of a boutique, the name of which we couldn't pronounce despite ample force-smiled pronunciations from the sales clerk.

But one thing was clear: this bag was exactly the thing a newly minted ninth-grader needed for the year ahead. 

It wasn't flashy -- just a slim rectangle constructed of heavy-duty black canvas with brown leather accents that could be expanded twice its width by one extra track of zipper -- but it was expensive.

His father wasn't convinced that it would be big enough to tote books and binders back and forth and suggested we keep looking. 

But it was those brown leather accents - and my insistence that not all heavy textbooks need to make a daily commute - that sold it.

I wasn't quite prepared for the sight of him: all stretched out by an abrupt summer growth spurt, ready, willing, and able to do whatever it takes to get back to school.

He was finally a big kid.

And as my eyes welled with tears at the presence of my last-born child, who stood before me with a brand new backpack as if this were just another summer day before school starts.  

If his sly grin and bedraggled hair weren't enough to show me the time for grieving had passed, his misaligned socks and properly-fitted mask let me believe that we have the ability (and the peer pressure) needed to soldier on.

As we look forward to another school year in pandemic land, I want to wish us all the fortitude to withstand the shrieks and rantings of a few angry voices.

We've heard you rage, bare-faced, into the microphones insisting you will not be inoculated by common sense; nor masked by common decency; nor silenced by common knowledge. 

We know no experience from your many years upon this earth can dissuade you from blindly following your terrible intuition to its final resting place. 

But restrictions can save the rest of us.

Don't want to get vaccinated? That's fine but you won't be able to get on a plane. Or go to a restaurant. In time, there may not be room for you at the hospital.

Don't want to wear a mask? Sure, you still have that choice, but you won't be allowed into school. Or the library or your doctor's office. 

Because we do still hold some truths to be self-evident: That vaccines are still our best hope for an end to this suffering and that mask-wearing, like its predecessor, hand-washing, is an effective way to minimize the spread of infection. 

We know that when ICUs are filled with COVID patients, there's little room for heart patients, or cancer patients, or any other emergencies.

We know that children with curable diseases will be put at greater risk of death. 

And we know that our healthcare system is already strained beyond a sustainable capacity. 

At some point ... this dam protecting us will break where it has not been maintained and the floodwaters may drown us all. 

We need to use the only tools we have in our proverbial backpacks. Get vaccinated. Wear your mask. 

It is the very least thing we can do to protect each other. 

Small worlds

 My father had been taking a breather on a park bench while his grandchildren shopped for summer treasures on this unusually hot-for-Maine day. He heard the announcement before I did. I had been herding one generation of vacationland wanderers towards another and hadn't noticed my phone alerts going wild.

"I just can't believe it,” dad exclaimed after I had circled back to him. “I was sitting next to this guy from Boulder who was talking to a girl from Boston, and they were asking me where I was from and when I told them 'New York' they said, 'well, your governor just quit'."

The phones around us started to crow with the news and I handed mine to my dad so he could read the bulletin for himself.

Despite being a life-long Democrat, Cuomo-the-younger wasn't my dad's favorite. It didn't matter to him what malfeasance finally caught up with the state's highest-ranking official.

"Well, good riddance to bad rubbish."

Dad's beef with the governor wasn't about the man's treatment of women. It was about taxes, and the shady ways they are levied. And it focused on one tax in particular: He had asked a question about a charge on my mother's nursing home bill — a fully-refundable gross receipts tax only private-pay nursing home patients were charged — and it pulled a string that unraveled one of the underhanded ways the state silently slips its hand in a pocket.

"Why would you give the state a no-interest loan if it wasn't intended to be a swindle?"

The next year, when the refund was capped at two percentage points below what he had paid, my father sued for the difference. He won, but the judgment was again only personal. All the other private-pay nursing home residents that were assessed the tax would have to file lawsuits of their own to get their due.

It may not seem like much — a few hundred dollars tacked onto a bill — but to him, an elderly man watching his wife slowly fade away, it was crime more insidious than armed robbery. 

And then when the state misrepresented the numbers of nursing home deaths as a result of COVID last year, he cursed Cuomo and thanked God for taking her before a time when all these souls passed alone.

So I was a bit surprised when my father handed back my phone after reading the news and promptly changed the subject.

"Ok, do you think it looks like rain?"

That's when I realized what I dreaded most was not the noise, but the silence. 

My Twitter feed became a feeding frenzy of expectations as people opined about all the worse crimes they would attribute to the Cuomo name, it seemed clear that sexual harassment is the mail fraud of the modern era. They may not get you on murder, but it's the charge with teeth.  

We seem unable or unwilling to make a distinction between the unpleasantness of an awkward exchange, that should lead to an apology and a behavior change, and the undue difficulty of handling an abuser who exploits those same awkward moments, turning them into a pattern of abuse.

Staying quiet is safer. Abusers know secrecy works to their advantage, too. Rarely do those who speak out find their situations improve. Instead, they enter battles they might be unprepared or ill-equipped to fight. It's usually easier and safer to stay quiet and move along.

I'm grateful for people who find the strength to speak out. I'm grateful for people who do the thankless job of going against the expectation of silence and the pressure to move on. And I am ultimately hopeful that support for truth and accountability will be harder to suppress in the light of this new day.

Two paths diverged in the wood

We stopped near a small, windowed gatehouse and waited as a man arose from a folding chair and made his way to our car. 

The ginger-haired trustee adjusted his spectacles and smiled as he recited the basics we should know: there is no fee for trail use, but donations are always appreciated. So too would be any efforts on our part to park our vehicles just as conservatively, leaving as much room as possible to accommodate other motorists, since the small parking lot is likely to fill up by midday.

He didn't bother with the "thou shall nots," which are prominently displayed elsewhere though they are widely understood by most day hike enthusiasts despite their varying levels of enthusiasm.

1) thou shall not camp

2) thou shall not build fires

3) thou shall not litter

4) thou shall not bring dogs

5) thou shall not tread off of the pathway

The instructions were as familiar to me as the paper-clip-shaped gate that closed the trail to traffic but opened the parking lot to at least 20 more cars. 

Eighteen if you count ours.

The eight of us - roughly two families' worth (give and take) - had arrived in tandem. 

But the familiarity didn't lessen the dread that had kept a steady, elevating rhythm in my chest.

It was a beautiful day and the two-mile trail to the beachfront was easier than expected since the trail was a literal road in only recent-seeming disrepair. 

I wasn't sure what to expect as we headed toward our hiking destination, the least of which was how we would find it. Literally or figuratively.

Oh sure, I knew the place would be beautiful and surprising. It had come highly recommended. It would require only moderate effort but would yield maximum return for the investment. 

I knew at the midway point, there would be the prize of a long, sandy beach. We would rest there and be soothed by gentle ocean waves as we ate our packed lunches. We wouldn't even have to contend with wind gusts that might threaten to make sand an actual ingredient of the sandwiches. 

I could also guess that sunscreen would be less evenly or liberally applied since the sun hid behind clouds of murderous mosquitoes and green-headed biting flies. All of which would inflict damage to be reckoned with later. 

Before this worry, though, I had worried we wouldn't even find the place. It wasn't a foregone conclusion that someone in programming had already alerted GPS maps to be on the lookout for a small sign posted near a small road, tucked between a dense thicket of pine trees, that would lead us to the trailhead. 

A part of me even hoped we'd wind up lost. 

Expectations are like this. The things you remember later, and it doesn't necessarily matter how they measure up or how fond one is of the memory. 

My mind always goes to the problems we will encounter mostly from internal forces, like in the angry, scrunched up faces our children - not to be confused with the other children amongst us who are always more amenable - would rather do anything else but walk through a wooded path with their parents. 

Doesn't matter if that path leads to a beach of uncanny beauty or not. 

No, mostly I wondered if the familial bond would tether or fray as we enjoyed and endured the exploration together. As we silently compare ourselves and sit in our own hazy clouds of burning judgment. 

Except this time we weren't together. 

Illness and infirmity had splintered our family group ever so slightly. Free will had also been part of the calculation for the first time in my recollection. It was no longer a foregone conclusion that everyone would be expected to participate in everything.

Thus, our son -- whose sour stomach gave cover for his more usual sour experience of the great outdoors -- elected to stay home.

This was a new experience for which I wasn't entirely ready. And the fact that no matter how beautiful the trees were behind the veil of fog on that island in the distance, they were so much less because my son was not there to complain about the long car ride or the uphill climb to a beach or the relentless nature of biting insects. 

And he was happily home, resting up for his quest to lead us all down a bowling lane.

The epiphany

Elise Stefanik's incredulous statements in response to the opening day of testimony during the House select committee's investigation of the criminal events of January 6 don't deserve a reaction. 

As we see her and her colleagues twisting uncomfortably under the supposed magnifying glass of plain sight, we should all understand what’s happening. Namely deflection.

Victim blaming is nothing new. But transferring blame with such cognitive dissonance has become the ultra-conservative power play that, up until recently, has worked in their favor. 

Try to bring your mind back to all those “Pelosi” flags waving as the Stop the Steal Tourists erected gallows, broke windows, dragged police officers, and hunted down certain members of Congress who were proponents of counting votes. 

Stefanik is on stage playing a part that has been lucrative for her. The telegraphing taunts make for good headlines and blood pressure-raising retorts by a plethora of pundits, but the only purpose they serve should be deeply disturbing to us all. 

I'd caution that her sophomoric provocations directed at Democrats -- which seem slapped together with the same spittle and mud favored by the bloated, candy-floss coiffed talking head she turned by carrying bucketloads of his fetid water -- are nothing more than theater. 

But our nation seems immovably transfixed by this Debauchery Show whether it plays live or in syndication.

Little by little, trained as we are to chant along with the refrain, too many of us would sell our souls for the click counts. 

We all watched into the night as she came back from an office bunker after riding out an attempted insurrection and stood up to loudly and proudly continue pushing a bad-faith case for the subverting of our democracy.

And with this slime, she was anointed.

Stefanik soon replaced Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference after Cheney upset the applecart by voting to impeach the party's golden goose.

She knows this script as well as anyone. Deny and deflect. Take the inconvenient burden of guilt and toilet paper the nation's house with it. People will always be willing to blame the occupants for scrimping on the candy. 

I could rant forever about Stefanik and those like her whose public disservice is gerrymandered into seemingly infinite revolving terms. 

But I won't.

For far too long we have been blinded by our own brutality and acceptance of inequality because of the thin layer of politeness on the surface.

And that politeness, now stripped away, shows the ugly truth we need to address.

Stefanik represents a problem that can only be solved when the rest of us become better citizens. We the People have to demand more than this particular dog and pony show from those we elect as our representatives. We have to demand decency, accountability, and the seeking of fact and truth before it’s too late. Our leaders, the people we entrust with power, have to be more principled because when they aren't, as we can plainly see, the laws are rarely applied. 


It's time we recognize the game and refuse to play it with folks whose only strategy is to upend the table. 

Swing states

I thought I'd found the keys to the universe outside of a climbing cube at our neighborhood playground many years ago. This was back in the early-2000s when I was an exhausted, mid-30s mom with two small children who ALWAYS wanted me to play.

It was the first time that age didn’t seem like a number as much as an advancing collection of physical ailments rooted in lack of sleep.  

"Oh, moms don't play," said a gravelly voice from the park bench beside me. 

"Moms," the woman, who might have been my twin had she been a full foot shorter, explained "have a sworn duty to watch and referee. We don't PUL-AY!" 

Her children did not seem convinced by her theatrical pronunciations. 

They tried to pry her off her shaded perch and join them on the slide by calling her out on her obvious falsehood. 

"Last week you went on the teeter-totter and the monkey bars."

But she was planted quite firmly in her arguments.

"I know it's disappointing. The rule was just handed down yesterday by the higher-ups in Momgress.

"Section IV of Article IX of the Momstitution states quite clearly that children must learn the propulsive mechanisms for achieving variable pendular levels on playground apparatus with minimal guidance. And since the best way to learn is by doing, the most I can do is four pushes at the swing."

To be honest, I liked the idea of rigid roles. Especially in that moment when I didn't want to try and fit myself into something smaller or suffer the almost unbearable nausea that accompanied any amount of spinning whatsoever.

It also fits the dominant parenting philosophy that moms and their kids can't ever really be friends because the power structure prevents it.

Often, we think of this as a sad declaration on the state of the family as a hierarchal mentoring unit that's sole purpose is to apply wet blankets to the fire within. 

I think the thing we tend to gloss over is that "friends" like "family" aren't monoliths. But they aren't interchangeable either. Like the teeter-totter, it’s not just a balance. Without the highs and lows, there isn't a ride. 

This became clearer to me once my children grew into teenagers, one of whom drives a car and has a job and will be going off to college in just one short trip around the sun.

Mom, it turns out, isn't a job description. There's no real contract with codified rules. You don't get to retire. It's more like a never-ending TED Talk where you are mostly in the audience alternately fearing, hoping, or grousing about having to be on stage. 

Of course, your experience may vary. The keys to this universe are always getting lost in between the couch cushions of our communications. No matter how much GPS tracking we apply, these keys are often un-couched by memory or the retracing of steps. 

Sometimes the work at hand is as easy as asking point-blank if the help their asking for is with taking the lead or following it. 

Quitting time

It's after six. She's been waiting for an hour to hear the quitting-time whistle: which for her is the thud of my car door and my footsteps as I climb the side porch. 

My dear old floppy-eared dog, whose own workday follows a narrow patch of sun around the house until it slowly disappears into the dark of evening, is beyond ready to stretch her legs. She has a tough job, lying in that sunny spot all day, wherever it is, with only the briefest of respites to engage quite fully in her second job: patrolling the yard to chase visiting birds and resident marmots. 

I can hear her pacing and panting before I open the door. Walk! Walk! is the translation of her excited greeting. Nothing else matters, not even the sky with its ominous shade of gray. 

The exertion of her greeting isn’t enough, not when the neighborhood and all its mysteries await. There's good old "squirrel alley" to explore, not to mention a new "poop corridor."  There are homebound dogs who will be waiting to sound the alarm at the proximity of our temporary territorial intrusion.

Also known as our evening walk. 

It takes a minute to change and gather up supplies. The leash is in its usual place, but the waste bags are missing. She will bark at me accusingly as I try and locate a fresh roll.

She is so insistent on getting outside that she doesn’t notice the thickening air that is all around us.

But all I can see is a giant swirling mass of marbled fissures in the clouds when I look up at the sky. A low rumble off in the distance gives me pause. It could be a truck speeding over some neglected section of winter-heaved pavement. Or it could be thunder. 

The daily rain hasn't helped the situation. I run through all kinds of mental calculations before I commit to this practice of unwinding.  I consult the weather radar; I plan a route that builds in the prospect of temporary shelter should we get caught in a storm. If we are lucky we will be back before the deluge. 

The news has me worried about washouts. 

Before we leave, I remind my daughter, who is getting ready to start her workday, not to drive through standing water. 

"You can't tell if the road is still there. Better to turn around and go another way."

I wish we could all turn around and go another way. Toward a direction that examines the problems we face without trying to consumer-select a way out. There will never be a refrigerator efficient enough, nor a bottle recyclable enough, nor a straw reusable enough to mitigate this disaster our modern efficiency greed has rendered. 

The dog is whining now. I'm off on a tangent while she waits for the leash to come out of its basket. 

"Stupid human. You will NOT solve climate change, or any of the ills of consumerism, by grasping at straws. You cannot stop nature from taking revenge.  But you can stop me from these, my appointed rounds."

The astro-naught years

I knock on the door.

There is no response.

I can't tell from the hallway, but I imagine he is cuddled up in a chair with headphones on, tapping away at a keyboard and oblivious to my would-be intrusion. He is probably floating through a world of graphics and gizmos that he and all of his virtual friends are tethered to by bright blue cords, like the one that spirals from his computer, out of his room and down the stairs before it slithers into the snakes' den of wires in a closet nearby.

I turn the knob and crack open the door slightly, careful not to breach his space with anything more than my curiosity. Privacy is to a teenager what piracy was to a toddler. Something of mythic proportions.

The air stabs at me in little prickles as it spills into the hallway.

"Hello!" I venture again.

From behind the door, a strange figure leans into the light. A chair creaks under his shifting weight.

"Hello," he says in response. “I'm fine. How are yooooooou? …. And yes, I will mow the lawn today.”

I hadn't asked any of those questions. But he is aware of the boundaries of our expectations and how to stay inside of them, mostly.

Cocooned in a blanket, my son is at his desk, which is surrounded on all sides by towers of dishes in various states of uncleanliness. His clothes carpet the floor.

He has found a way to keep his room from assaulting him with the earthy smell of foot funk: Air conditioning set to a subarctic temperature.

I wonder when icicles will begin forming on the edges of surfaces.

A part of me, the part that has a sense of smell, rejoices slightly while the parts that fret about electricity bills and the costs to the environment pretend to be occupied with inspecting the flooring.

If I were his father I might be breathing fire into that room. Melting his chill with the heat of patriarchal pragmatism: "You might be wasting your time by doing nothing all this summer, but you won't be wasting my energy. I fill the tank, you don't get to crank."

But I'm not good at bringing that kind of heat.

I remember being a lethargic 14, lost in the plots of fictions of dubious merit, while the people who paid my bills were pleading with me to find something better to do with my time.

It's hard to convince a person that all nothings aren't created equal. Some nothings are everything.

So the easiest way to appease them was to disappear. Take a walk, or the bike, and find a place to be out of sight and out of mind.

It's not much different now except I'm the one expected to find something better to do with his time. Not to mention that a kid being out of sight makes parents go out of their minds.

So I try not to worry about the world opening up behind his closed door. I'll just keep knocking until he lets me in.

We came, we saw, we conquered

 The backseat of the car pinched the backs of my legs as I shifted them toward the window. The exposed flesh below my shorts had adhered to the pleather by a thin layer of perspiration. 

The pain momentarily diverted my attention from the annoyance of the wind lashing my hair around my face. I want to crank the window all the way up, but the car isn't air-conditioned. We would suffocate. 

I would have asked my parents the most pressing question of all for any under-12-year-old traveler ... but I could tell from my mother's expression in the rearview mirror that we were nowhere near there yet. 

It's been 120 hours since we left New York and I know the reason my childhood memories have come flooding back is that I've spent ALL of them in the backseat as my car-sick-prone kids take turns riding "shotgun."

The designation, however, comes with the responsibilities of navigator, which attaches some degree of skill and the near-constant hazard of failure. 

Let's just say I am content to slouch down in the back, where I can try to nap while the front seat passengers bicker between themselves about whether we are traveling north or south, and which exit is the one we should take: this one or the next?

I don't know how people do this. Go into a new place acting like it's no big deal. It seems we go from one hotel and its swimming spot to another hotel and swimming spot.

When we can't agree on things to do. The oldest wants to get dragged behind a boat as an already open parachute flings her into the air, while the youngest non-adventure seeker shames us with logic: "Who wants to go to an Adventure Park in 98-degree heat?" 

The Para-Sailing's sign seeking Experienced Help Wanted kinda puts the pandemic pause into perspective. "Maybe next year."

Instead, we will find the thing we could have done at home (movies, bowling, shopping) and do that for a few hours before we argue over where to go for dinner.

I have wondered if inconvenience is the thing that kills a vacation more completely than indecision.

"We might have gone to see Wilber and Orville's miracle ... but making a left is just so difficult there."

There is also the failure of research. 

For instance, had the roadside billboard not spelled out "APPLES AND CARROTS KILL WILD HORSES" as we sped past, my brain might not have pulled up a vague recollection of reading something somewhere about the famous Spanish Mustangs of the Corolla.

I could barely Google before I realized we were moving farther and farther away from this colonial-era wonder.

And that momentary sadness of not having seen a thing the place is known for was just as quickly replaced by the relief of knowing that at least we didn't screw up its very existence. Taking home a printed memento of the conservation's educational efforts (a lunch counter impulse purchase) was enough to reestablish my tourist's sense of fortitude via retail therapy. 

We came to the Hotels and Swim Spots, we saw the guidebooks, and we conquered the trinket shops. 

We have finally traveled. 

Not my first Roto-Rooder-o

The People for Less Unrest in Marriage (or PLUM), an entirely imaginary and long-dormant think tank of which I have found myself a spokesperson, and now its descendant entity, People for Less Unrest in Municipal Parenting (or PLUMP), would like to share the following announcement:

Never be the one to say, “I told you so.”

You may think it quite a bit. You may even go as far as writing it on pieces of scrap paper you will burn in ritual protest over the backyard fire pit as your family roasts marshmallows that will inevitably gum up strands of their hair - but you should never say those four little words aloud. Even if you think them to be cheap words to work into casual conversation.

Even when the parties you so told disregard all that sage advice and come to see the error of their ways, you don't get to be smug. It's a bad look on everyone, and it could be costly.

So what if it's going to be cold later? You don't have to be the defender of people who should bring sweaters.

Is it really necessary to follow weather predictions to their logical conclusions? Pfffft! Runners should know not to go out during thunderstorms. And couch potatoes should know to charge their phones. 

Though playing Battleship by candlelight for old times' sake (and to ward off boredom) might be one of the things you use in future arguments about unplugging, but I wouldn't. I Told You Sos can be sneaky that way, too.

There is not a person in the world who doesn't know they've stepped in something awful until Captain Obvious pointed it out.

Personally, my favorite time to lob an I Told You So, is when the kitchen sink drain starts to slow and the person who is most likely to tinker with things refuses to call a plumber.

Since this is not my first Roto-Rooder-o, I know there's a backup in the lines that no manner of lye-based products left to marinate at sink level will solve. We've already taken the plunger and exhausted the extent of its effectiveness. 

But Tinkering Partner will need to try.

Tinkering Partner may also attempt to curtail Operations Management's insistence that two functions - say hand washing dishes and machine washing clothes - can (and should) be able to happen simultaneously.

This is where you can stand your ground by doing nothing, letting the standing water speak for itself. Eventually, (and from experience) I'd say we're only a few days out from Suds on the Floor behind the Washer as the Triggering Event to an Actual Solution.

This is when an I Told You So can go so horribly wrong.

Because the intricacies of ancient plumbing may be lost on such a person, not to mention the cost of professional intervention.

As maybe Tinkering Person spending an afternoon in a basement up to their elbows in effluvium, is the best thing after all.

As long as he doesn't say, I told you we didn't need a plumber.

The odds-on favorite

I saw the opportunity from across the patio, and I had planned to ignore it.  

My husband was talking to a nice man, and together they firmly planted a small-talk flag in what would ordinarily be my talking-point quicksand. 

But with the blessing of slight anonymity, liquid refreshment, and the desire to keep politics on mute, I was determined to stay on solid ground. 

For the first time in I-can't-even-recall-another-time, instead of taking the bait, I was going to just smile, nod in agreement, and ask the host for "a little more of this amazing salad."

I was so ready to just enjoy the evening and the company. It didn't even matter that just minutes before, a well-meaning stranger dropped into my lap the most dreaded of all getting-to-know-a-person questions: "So what do you do?" 

I didn't even flinch. I just said with a creepy wink: "I mostly make trouble," then stood up and asked if anyone needed any refreshments from the snack table. 

But just as I reached the food, my husband looked at me and, with the wave of an arm in my direction, announced: "you should talk to my wife - she has a more interesting take on this topic than I do." 

I withdrew my hand, which had been hovering over a platter, trying to decide which delicate morsel to select as if it had burned me. My appetite was suddenly gone.  

I hadn't been to a party in 18 months, yet, somehow, all the stomach-twirling discomfort of being a social misfit rocketed back as if it had never spent the last year and a half in semi-isolation. I was ready to enjoy the company of other humans without having to be diametrically opposed to everything they had to say, especially when we mostly agree. 

Of course, having heard only three words -- Gillibrand, Franken, and forced-resignation -- I knew what the consternation was and why it had resurfaced. 

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand -- one of the most prominent Democrats who had called for the resignation of popular Minnesota Senator and former SNL Comedic star Al Franken after several women raised allegations of sexual misconduct -- had missed a vote to bring a law on equal pay to the senate floor. It doesn't matter that Republicans announced they would filibuster equal pay so there would be no football to snatch away at the last minute. It certainly didn't matter that Franken chose to step down instead of wait for the outcome of an investigation. "She made him do it."

This perceived "Fauxmality-Pas" was just another reminder that liberal-minded Democrats prefer a tow-headed jokester with sophomoric antics to a career politician who wouldn't take one for the team.

It didn't seem to matter that Franken's charm, in Congress, wasn't nearly as effective as it was entertaining. (We still got Kavanaugh.) It also doesn't seem to matter that Tina Smith, a capable and qualified politician, took his seat and has been re-elected, twice.

I suppose it's just difficult to resist the gravitational pull of personality. 

I wished I could stand up for the funny man, too. I have fond memories of prank calling local bookstores in 1996 to ask if they could tell me the title of Al Franken's new book? My only goal was to giggle uproariously when the person on the end of the line obliged and then repeated: "Rush Limbaugh is Big Fat Idiot" for all to hear.

But the credible allegations against Franken made it difficult for me, if not impossible, to accept that such behavior toward women should be just buried for the sake of solidarity by the party that aims for higher ground.

And when people tell me the man is innocent until proven guilty, I tell them when women are the victims it's usually the other way around. Fairness is not something we have come to expect as much as recrimination. 

I mean, a man claims he was swallowed by a whale and spit back out, and we just marvel in amazement. A woman says she was groped during a photo op, and we ask her how much she'd been drinking.  

Another shot

 It's 9 p.m. My eyes dart from the television to my watch, and, finally, to a window that looks out over the driveway. Waiting and uncertainty cause my stress levels -- now quantified and reported by the proprietary technology on my wrist -- to spike.

Several times already, lights from traffic on the road out front tricked me into thinking her car pulled into the driveway. Each time, my heartbeat inches higher momentarily and then retreats. I let out the breath I've been holding in, only to imprison it once again.

My body and mind will figure-eight through this pattern until the door swings open and my firstborn child walks through the door, smelling of pizza and sauce and sounding her delight or displeasure her hours of restaurant service has wrought.

This moment feels normal and celebratory and panic-inducing all in one shot.

She flops down on the couch and pulls out a fistful of wrinkled bills. She tells me she is starving as she smooths the cash and starts to count: Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty.

Not a bad haul for a Tuesday.

I start a pot of water for pasta as she tells me about all the outrages and intrigues. And the curious story of the asymmetrical piling of pizza boxes how it caused her to burn her wrist.

A Connecticut-shaped welt on her arm looks about as angry as a bad sunburn. Commissary loves company.

"Maybe you should ice it," I suggest as I break a fist-full of angel hair into the boil.

"Do we have any paper towels? My boss says that wrapping wet towels around it is better."

I smile and nod.

It's official. I have joined the category of old wives who tell tales, I guess. The point is magnified by the fact that, as I type this, I am sitting in a hot car, in the parking lot of our pediatrician's office, banished from the annual proceedings by the onward march of maturity and a teenager's desire for independence.

I wonder what the doctor will say about the burn?

My level of panic is temporarily held at bay by a constant vigil at my smartphone's screen. I am at once afraid there will come a situation in which I will be needed, and anxious that there will be no need for me at all. My presence is on the wane.

Why does it always feel that we only get one shot? Maybe it's just in these moments of uncertainty, the moments where we have to cede control, where our minds hold us hostage. These are the moments of imminent change.

A parade of new parents with babies pass by my mobile waiting room.

I remember those days like they were yesterday. Though it concerns me a little as the time ticks by and those same parents make their round trip. There is still no word from my child.

And just as I look down at the screen, it lights up with a message. "You need to come in and sign for me to get a vaccine. The doctor says I need a parent or someone over 18 to give permission."

"See that ... There's always another shot."

The customer is always wrong

 The machine sprang to life with the push of a button, as expected, and then it forced out a giant exhalation of air and an anemic stream of hot, brown water. 

Not even a mouthful.

"Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do," I said to myself, with all the expletives I could muster and none of the yesteryear-words my grandmother would have used. 

I tried again. Pushed the buttons and waited: this time only drops drip from the device.

The fancy new coffee maker was on the fritz, and, I'm not ashamed to admit, it put me on the proverbial warpath. Trying to get a decent cup of coffee before you've had a decent cup of coffee often leads me to dark places. Not to mention, this would be the second machine, just over its warranty date, to decaffeinate unexpectedly. 

 "This doesn't make sense," I told the air around me as I unplugged and replugged the device, and then opened and closed the levers. How could this be a user error? I questioned myself as I continued this costly experiment pressing the two buttons in various combinations and speeds as if the coffee elevator would arrive at my crazy floor any faster.

Trial and error here was just literally a waste -- two inches of coffee would cost me $4 in supplies.

Rage momentarily clouds my rationality.

You know ... because we've all grown accustomed to buying new because repairs are just as costly and twice as inconvenient. 

Showing me no other solution besides taking my credit card to the store and starting from scratch, after which I will grouse about the latest in a string of disposable appliances I've managed to drag to the edge of the driveway muttering to myself about "highway robbery." 

"Or ... you could google the problem and see if anyone else has run across it," said the boy with a smirk. 

A quick internet search sends me to the page of people just like me who have indeed had this very mishap dampen their mornings. And they found solace and some degree of success running warm soapy water through the chamber a few times.

I try it to no avail. There is little build-up to remove, and subsequent test pours continue to squeeze out progressively less volume.

The interwebs show me how to find the one-eight-hundred number of the manufacturer, so I call it, pleased to find that the service number reaches real, live human beings 24-hours a day. Apparently, they have applied the happy-hour sentiment -- about it always being "quitting-time somewhere," -- to the expensive coffee machine world. Someone is always waking up to a cup of disappointment. 

The voice that greets me after a moment on hold is scripted to within a dry monotone. Her helpfulness is debatable. She can't believe I am unable to locate my account number or the receipt that would verify the age of my machine. She instructs me how to find the serial number, and as I turn the machine over, water drains onto my feet.

This is not going well.

I just want a simple answer to my problem, and she has a whole menu of steps to lead me through for the next 12 to 18 minutes of a call that might be recorded for quality purposes.

"First, you will need a paper clip and an unused toothbrush. ... I will wait."

I tell her I'm fresh out of toothbrushes.

"She insisted. You will need a soft brush of some sort. I will wait."

I could tell I was already a disappointment.

Not only was I a luddite customer without the sense God gave a goat when it came to basic problem solving, and I was also incapable of following simple directions.

"Next, you will need hot water ... almost to the point of boiling."

"I'm in an office without hot water," I stammered. I'll have to do this later. What's the next step?"

"You don't have a microwave?"

I imagined she was mocking me to the other service techs while she muted her end of the conversation. 

"I .... didn't think of the microwave," I stammer, fully intending to come up with all further supplies she tells me I need, without exception. If I am not successful, I will pretend otherwise.

 

"Run the machine until there is no longer water in the reserve chamber."

I hum while the machine chugs along, slowly spurting scalding water out its spout into the empty container. It all goes as planned until she asks me an open-ended question: "How many times did you depress the button?"

"Six," I said with improvised confidence because I wasn't keeping track.

"The chamber only holds four," she says with derision. "I'm going to have you reset the device to factory specifications, and then we will do some tests with used coffee capsules.

The reset was all of holding one button down for a count of five seconds.

"You are going to have to count slower than you are used to for this to work."

When she asks me to press the button again, I can tell that the output volume has also been restored to its original factory setting, Yet her belief in my competence has not changed.

I pretend to carry out her request of filling three separate cups to test the serving consistency. "They all look the same to me."

"They should all be 4.3 ounces ... are they?"

"And so they are. Exactly."

May the road rise to meet you

The pain is minor. It's just a pinch at the top of my hamstring that feels like a muscle pull. It hasn't been obnoxious even if it arrived unannounced and lingered for a day before it slowly started to nag. It hasn't even been hanging around long enough to even make me consider consulting with the Dr. S.C. Connally School of Medicine at Google University, let alone panic-dial a real MD.

I do not stop running. Slow down? Yes. Take longer walks between intervals? Maybe. Stretch a little longer and more often once I get home? You bet. 

I've felt this before. Lots of times. I'd call it a grade one tear that Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation should take care of in a couple of days. It's the same direction a real doctor once gave me right before she suggested I run in a serpentine fashion on a less busy roadway. 

Not that I do that. It's crazy enough to be running every day on the same roads, I'm not sure I could handle the stares (let alone the beeping of car horns) were I to slither from one side to the other. 

I blame the roads, especially where they heave in the center, having succumbed to the forces of the universe and four seasons of weather, which conspire to make a runner's one hip work harder than the other.

I am almost at the end. 

I will lay on the floor later and think about this as I perform leg lifts and deep knee bends and side angle lunges. I don't know for sure if any of these exercises help me, but they don't seem to be hurting any. Unless you count my pride when a kid of mine will ask if I need help to my feet as they stumble across me accidentally.

They probably guess that I will be the proverbial Old Woman who will lay there for days, not wanting to admit that she's found herself in a pickle. They check on me now and again just for practice.

Maybe it's all the groaning I do during transitions: going from standing to sitting, sitting to standing ... or just the act of thinking about kneeling. Standing up from the position takes more thought, surely, but it doesn't take an assist. Not yet. 

Truth is, the best years are coming. That's what a recent story in the New York Times said anyway, as it refers to runners who get their starts later in life. 

They have mounds of statistics and data to back up such claims, of course. But I'd believe it without a shred of proof.

I speak for myself when I say, we older folks are grateful for just being able to put one foot in front of the other; our goals aren't that high. This starting from zero and getting incrementally faster is the polar opposite of what my track star friends seem to experience. 

At some point, though, we all meet our apex. That highest point in the journey, where we look out over the top and marvel at the majesty before we turn around and make our way back down. 

Some of us don't recognize it and fail to take a few extra moments to take it all in. 

I'm not sure where I am on that journey, but I know to mark the milestones. Today I finished 365 days of consecutive running, amounting to fourteen-hundred-and-forty-five miles during the course of one year; at every time in the day, in every sort of weather. I ran through shin splints and blisters and headaches and allergies. I ran through local streets and unfamiliar cities. I ran around my pool as my kids doused me with water soakers just to keep the streak going. 

And as I stand here on this mountain looking down at my accomplishment, I'm filled with gratitude and a sense of completion. Enough of each to stop, on my own terms, without injury, and without regret. And rest. 

And for anyone out there starting their streak again, I hope that the road rises to meet you just as gently. 

Self serve

 Lost my wallet again. 

It has a tracking device inside it, which has a dead battery inside it, too.

Who knows where it is. My best guess? It's in a parking lot somewhere, having tumbled from my lap where it had balanced, forgotten between errands, for who-knows-how-many miles. 

This is usually how it happens.

Though I also leave it at the checkout quite a bit. Forgotten between slipping my credit card into the mouth of the do-it-yourself till and the moment I reach my car and start unloading the bags from the wonky-wheeled cart into its trunk.

If I am lucky, I notice right away and not five hours later, when I go back to the store for the thing I went for in the first place.

I used to love the grocery store. 

When my kids were little, their father would tag in so I could make a little vacation at the market. I'd start at self-serve coffee and spend an enjoyable hour sipping as I strolled through every aisle. I'd stop long enough to kvetch with my brethren browsers about how management must move half of everything at least twice a month, just to ensure we look close enough to forget our lists and tip a few new things into our baskets. 

On the hottest summer days, I'd orbit the store to stay cool. Studying the ice cream with the doors open, leaning into a tower of mint chips until the glass fogged. ... Or until people came.

I hear my mother's voice inside my head: What-do-you-think we're doing here? Heating the great outdoors?"

People. "Perfect strangers," she'd call them, emphasizing the perfect part. 

I remember her chatting with some of the less-than-perfect ones in the dairy aisle: catching up on the news as she inspected her would-be purchases for cracks.

"Good egg, that one!" She'd say about her friend as we headed for the butcher shop.

She snorted the words "Butcher Shop," as we stood in front of a refrigerated shelf of stretched-wrapped meats painted an impossible red. They were the only two words that could transport us to a place closer to home. It was long gone now, but the memory of the shop was still fresh. The specter of a man in a straw hat still vivid as he cut a steak to order, wrapped it in brown paper, secured with a string, handed it to my mother, and added a folded slice of bologna for me. 

I'd like to think my kids will have a random memory of me float back to them, and they will smile fondly. But it won't be any of me in the grocery store. Especially not the time someone admired my boots.  

"And there she was ... in the pasta aisle ... balancing on one foot as she handed her shoe to a stranger who only wanted to know if it was heavy." 

In my defense, the boots were new, and compliments seemed novel. I can admit I got carried away. 

And then they stopped going with me. But not because of that.

In pandemic times, it's been safety first. 

Things seem different now. 

Perfect strangers don't talk to each other anymore. We barely exchange glances. When we do, we only see something to judge or some fresh hell to catch. Stranger danger is infinitely more frightening than ever before.

If silence was golden, avoidance is now platinum.

I try not to worry about a future that's unprincipled. Just like I try not to think about a future that's unpeopled as I check my own groceries through self-serve.

But sometimes it's hard.

I wish all of our troubles were as easy as not finding lost wallets. Cancel and start over.

Pet Peeve

 IT was a mystery addressed to me: A plain brown, double-walled corrugated rectangle emblazoned with silhouetted illustrations of batteries. A flat-packed box had arrived two days after my birthday after numerous anxious inquiries from my husband.

“Any deliveries today?” he asked with a conniver’s grin.

“Not today,” I lied and left the box on the porch.

This gift wasn’t exactly for me.

"Anything liquid, fragile, or potentially hazardous?" I imagined a postal clerk might have asked the sender.

To which my husband - had he been there to witness the standard business shipping exchange - would have joked about the message inside being the most incendiary part of the delivery:

A printed note that said simply: "If you don't tell me what you want for your birthday, you get a vacuum cleaner. I don't make the rules."

Inside was an automatic floor cleaner. A circular robot with sensing whiskers roams the house in search of debris to sweeps into a central chamber.

Its motor whirrs at a decibel that annoys more than it disrupts, though it seems to have a proclivity to find all the cords and draping fabrics the instructions suggested the "We" (in the most royal of senses) remove.

To the casual observer, this might seem an indictment of my housekeeping skills, although my husband might tell you his Interest in buying me floor cleaning devices and gadgets of the utilitarian persuasion it's merely an assuage of his own guilt for lack of helping. His contributions toward the load he rarely lightens.

Moreover, this cursed device startles the cat, which, if my husband's extensive, giggle-filled research of cat-mocking videos of late is any indication, the gift was not merely to delight but to lightly introduce torment as well.

He is positively gleeful as he pours over the instructions I would have recycled unread.

"It's got Bluetooth," he gushes as his fingers tap the glass of his cell phone repeatedly. "It will send me messages!"

I roll my eyes as this gliding ashtray scuttles around in an erratic trajectory, the adult equivalent of a remote control toy. It's clear for whose amusement this gift is intended.

Purse my lips as the cylinder cyclone bumps into the dining room table, recoils, and tries again four inches further, only to be thwarted once again from sweeping under the table by a tight cage of evenly spaced chairs.

I move one of the seats to allow the vacuum access to the dust bunnies underneath and am met by my husband's horror.

"How will it learn to navigate our house if you keep changing the furniture?"

I have to admit I have no snappy answer, just stunned silence as stare at him while I slowly lower the chair.

But my perturbation is as much of a put-on as his theatrical showcase of abominable gift-giving.

We both understand that he is resurrecting a memory; one in which we already danced on our gender roles’ grave.

That time, long ago, when he came home from lunch to find me sitting on the couch watching a movie and eating bite-sized morsels of chocolate like a replicate of a ‘50s era storyline.

“What? I’m vacuuming!” I retorted as a robot vac chugged on by.

But eventually, I will have to explain that the joke has played out. The machine knocking off the faces of radiators and getting stuck under couches will get old.

But not just yet. …

"Oh! Just got a text!!! It's trapped in the corner! Needs assistance!"

He jumps up to rescue his new pet.

Siobhan Connally is a writer and photographer living in the Hudson Valley. Her column about family life appears weekly in print and online.

Reconnecting

 I bought a cassette tape at a yard sale about five years after I got rid of the last device I owned that could play one. 

An impulse, borne of the promise of an author and activist I adored, reading to me from her work as I carried on with the more mundane moments of my day. Driving from here to there and back again, waiting around, during the interstitial moments of life. 

Somehow, in the excitement, I had forgotten all about the technological advances to which I'd already adapted. It took only three cars to go from cassette to CD to some wavy blue lines that work like magic.

And here we are.

I still have the tape sitting in a bin by the side of my bed where so many good books go to be read but, through no fault of their own, face only neglect and a thin layer of dust.

A reminder of little heartbreaks that await beneath unexpected excitements that at first delight. It's not the worst thing that could happen.

Just as things slowly returning to normal may not be the best thing.

How are we to know?

Idling in the drop-off line at school while we await our turn. A staff member, clad in a face shield and mask, will aim a temperature gun at my passenger's forehead and let us know what kind of day we'll be having. 

A smile and a "have a great day," prompt my boy to shift his weight in the seat and groan, as if the transition from car to the classroom wasn't even anticipated let alone expected. He lumbers out of the car and rifles through the backseat to collect his things: a trumpet case, a backpack, a binder that won't fit inside.

I can't tell from his expression how he feels I can only intuit from the calm of his demeanor that he is content to move along through the day as expected. 

 Not that I know what is expected.

I have stopped aligning his schedule with the steps of my day. I have no idea if his math class corresponds to my 10:30 mail run or whether he has English or Health when I go on my "rounds. "And though I receive reports of the occasional missing assignment, I have stopped breathing down his neck while looking over his shoulder.

I barely remember to pick him up on Mondays, which has recently been added to my to-do list. His sister’s review class after school has kept her from toting him to and fro through May.

Usually, I meet him as he’s already walked a half-mile from campus, still wearing his mask as he juggles an armload of things.

Neither of us seemed to be able to plan ahead.

"What's Ruth's phone number?" He asks me. 

I stare at him in the fog of disassociation. "Ruth?"

"The town historian? You know her, right?"

"I've met her. We've spoken. But I don't really know her."

"Well, I'm supposed to call her TONIGHT and do an interview for school."

 I don't say what I am thinking: those things we are supposed to feel about planning, and common sense, and the unbearable disappointment of one's own shortcomings leading to natural consequences. 

I just send off an email with our phone number and the hope that she's online and willing to speak to a 13-year-old boy at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night. 

In a few minutes, the phone rings and the boy picks up. 

"Thank you for calling."

The call doesn't take long. I see him in a half-hour's time as he rummages through the kitchen, looking for a snack.

I asked him how it went.

"Did you know she didn't go to school for history? She got an English degree and started doing historical work when she moved here and discovered that Dutch influence seemed to be largely overlooked in the stories of the founding of the country."

In the time it took him to toast and butter bread, he had conveyed the bulk of his 20-minute inquiry about careers. In between bites, I could sense the satisfaction.

"Sometimes not having a plan becomes the plan."

A desk job

 The lady at the Post Office smiled a little when she saw me at the counter, a slip of yellow card stock in my hand and a glimmer of hope for a special delivery of caffeine. Hope that was instantly erased by the question she asked of me:

"I hope you brought your car," she said before turning away and heading to "The Wall," where all the oversized packages are stored.

Alas, the box that had arrived didn't contain the tin-capsule encased coffee pods I had been expecting with anxious mint-flavored breath. Instead, the Post Office Lady lugged a door-sized, flat-packed box into the lobby. Something clanged metallically when she tipped it sideways to slide it through the door.

"It's heavy."

For a moment, I blink repetitively into the blinding light of the unknown.

The package is non-descript. A beige box, without pictures, inscribed with the name of a beige company that doesn't give away any secrets about the product contained within.

The label has my son's name on it.

A memory floated back to me from within the window of shipping possibilities: it was of the boy visiting me on the living room couch late one evening as I filled myself with warm caffeine and fiddled with something or other on the computer.

"I have some money saved up. Is it okay if I buy something online?"

I usually ask him about whatever it is his heart desires, and we chat for a bit about computer games I don't understand. The discussions have evolved over the years from extracting from the boy an accounting of the level of aggression his games would engender.

Back then he would assure me that nothing on his wishlist had been rated M for "mature."

On this evening, however, I had been preoccupied. I hadn't stopped to converse. I'd just nodded my head and shrugged my shoulders.

"Sure, go ahead," I had said, assuming the biggest inconvenience would be a momentary lag in broadband as whatever graphics-heavy game he wished to own took its sweet time downloading. "Just leave the money in my jacket pocket. I'll get it later."

It occurred to me, as I wrestled the box into my car, schlepped it up the porch steps and into the house, that I'd never even checked the deposit to see what he'd spent. I dipped my hand into my pocket and came out with a fist-full of crumpled cash. Much more than the ten or twelve dollars I'd expected.

I called up to his room:

"There's a delivery on the porch for you."

And then there came a thunderous trampling of feet down the stairs, his tousled head tilting as he skidded to a stop in the kitchen.

“Which porch?”

I tilted my head ... “Side.”

“What did you get? It was heavy.”

“A new desk! I wanted something more modern and without drawers for my computer. Want to help me put it together?”

“No. You'll just have to wait until your father gets home. I'm going to wait here for my coffee.”

kNOw Justice, kNOw Peace

I have a sign in my yard. It reads "kNOwJUSTICE, kNOwPEACE."

My children and I painted it last year after news broke that a police
officer had kneeled on a Black man's neck for an excruciating nine
minutes until he died.

The kids added BLM and a drawing of a heart to my handiwork.

During the past 11 months, there's been a lot of honking past our
house. Some of it accompanied by cheers, but much more, sadly, the
noise of jeers, or a forceful middle finger, or the occasional tossing
of rubbish.

Despite the uproar ... and the anonymous complaint to code enforcement
over whether a person with such a sign in a town such as ours has the
right to display "matters of politics," since there are rules
regulating the presence and placement of political signage during
election season ...
our sign stayed.

When it got egged, I cleaned it.
When it was tipped over, I righted it.

I'm not taking it down.

Even after my phone erupted with good vibrations last Tuesday after
the Verdict was read ...

"Guilty, Guilty, Guilty."

The moment - while triumphant right now - will pass.

I wanted to feel elation at the verdict. It was clear and correct, and
it was necessary, but whether it is a turning point for this country
seems unlikely.

Given the facts of the case -- the video evidence and heartbreaking
testimony of eyewitnesses, some of whom were children -- it seems
almost impossible for a jury to come up with any other decision.

And yet they have and regularly do; hamstrung, many say, by laws or
policy that give police an almost uncheckable power.

In the time it took to convict a remorselessly murderous cop, at least
two more police shootings of Black children hit the news cycle. Two
more chances for other citizens to argue about the permissibility of
discounting their lives.

It seems painfully clear that without the courage of a 17-year-old
girl who filmed the murder of George Floyd, this trial may never have
taken place. Similarly, as the verdict was read we learn that states
all over this nation are turning their legislative work NOT toward
fair and equitable policing BUT to further restrict citizens' rights
to gather in protest.

We have much work to do as a country. No one action will bring about a
solution to our many problems as a nation, but there are things we can
and must do to ensure an equitable future for us all.

Perhaps even more so than training, we must work to rid police ranks
of dangerous cops. That "One Bad Apple," saying has a literal ending
we ignore to our peril; "spoils the bunch."

And we in the media have our part to play, too. We have to reevaluate
our reliance on police as primary sources of information.

I wish I could impress upon you the benefits we all would gain by
having a policing system that is more compassionate and professional,
one that humanizes suspects, and one that is accountable and
responsive to its own failures.

I wish we all could know, without question or fear, that reform is not
only necessary it's a moral imperative.