Drive time

 Have you checked the mirrors? 

“Yes, mom.”

The boy was sitting in his father’s car, making the finishing adjustments on the driver’s seat. It is a slow and methodical process that requires patience. Unless one has the sequence committed to one of the car’s digital memories. 

“There are so many buttons and knobs, and they move so sllllllllooooowwly.”

As he lowered the seat and eased it backward from where I’d had it set, the whirring of the mechanisms seemed almost comical. 

I tried not to laugh. 

Driving is a serious business. 

He’s almost ready. Maybe just a titch more arch in the lumbar region. 

My car isn't that fancy. But what it lacks in bling and built-in safety features, it makes up for in precision: notably a manual transmission, which ratchets up technical (and psychological) difficulties of learning to drive at six whole speeds. 

He's ready now. He starts the car. Shifts into gear and eases off the brake. The car inches out of the carport at the speed of seat position. 

He flexes his fingers and tightens them around the wheel. “This is the way you do it, right? Ten and Two?”

That is the way we do it. But we learned on our grandfather’s clock. 

“Yeah. The new standard is to grip around 5 and 7 or 4 and 8.”

“Why? That seems too low?”

“Airbags.”

“They come out of the steering wheel?”

“And when they do they might break your arm if it gets in the way. Also, you don't have to use as much force to crank the wheel as you did in the olden days thanks to power steering.”

He’s cleared the garage and is straightening from the hard left turn into the driveway. And with the swiftness of molasses, we are heading toward the open road. 

A part of me wants to hurry this along. We might rack up the 50-hour minimum drive time required to schedule the licensing test before we get home from the ice cream run. But the part of me that understood the mission, to navigate two stop signs, three traffic lights, and one traffic circle, between the end of our drive and the grocery store five miles away, I would wear out my welcome as the passenger seat driver.  

As I had more than three years ago when his

sister rushed to the end of the driveway as she'd witnessed my counterpart in motor vehicle instruction doing countless times.

Her face tensed and her lips would disappear into a thin line as I breathlessly called suggestions and gripped the closest armrest. 

“You're too close to the shoulder …

“You should speed up here 

“Slow down there!

“Ohmygod! what-are-you-doing? You are turning into oncoming traffic!”

It took her years to get over the hassle of driving with me. 

I needed to do better this time.

Up until then, I had always loved driving my kids around. 

Whether I was toting them to their friends’ houses, doctors’ appointments, or to far “away games,” the drive has always proven to be a real trip.

I suppose it’s time to get used to being driven.

The die is cast

Breakfast was almost over, but the smell of bacon and eggs hung in the air. It mixed with the sweetness of maple syrup and a second course of waffles that its cook had dealt like cards toward any newly vacated plates. 

This breakfast bonanza is as much of an indicator of our typical vacation as the wall-to-wall humidity and the games that have piled up at the end of the table.

I said no thank you by selecting one of the five decks of cards and started to line up seven little stacks in front of me. My lips move silently as I count: One up, Two down, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven … Two up, Three down, Four, Five, Six, Seven …

On occasion, the cards stick together as I deal them out or as I try to shuffle to the third one to reveal my next play. Ordinarily, this would cause some perturbation, but the gift of being in proximity to sea air is something one really shouldn't grouse about.

Hardship, it is not. 

Also, I figure, I’ll use the adhesions to apply little cheats until it becomes evident that I will not win the game of solitaire this round.

I scoop the cards and start again.

I will play until someone asks to gets dealt in and we parlay into a new game.

This is the ritual in the dwindling days of a holiday: table games are usually the things we can all agree on as a family as we try to pass the time until the next meal.

Dominos used to be favored. It was an easy game to learn and  satisfying to handle tiles, hiding them from the gaze of opponents or clicking them noisily, as we awaited our next turns.

Lets play Dominos?

Anyone?

Anyone? …

Somehow it lost its allure.

Each game has had a season of play and a season of retirement: Go Fish, Rummy, Hearts, Crazy 8s, Kings in the Corner, and Euchre. When the season ends, we can't rest assured that we won't outgrow it, or that our grasp of rules will remain. 

We know we will never be ready for Bridge.

This year, we’ve just rolled the dice.

“We are playing Yahtzee,” says the girl after she clears the table of breakfast dishes.

The game is her favorite and consists of five dice, a printed piece of paper that helps you keep track of your rolls, and a plastic cup that MUST generate the most noise possible as players shake and dump the numbered cubes onto the table.

The last one, of course, makes for the most excitement. Bonus points awarded to the adult who requires headache remedy before the final scores are tallied.

Luck has everything to do with it, but we still employ strategies.

I go for the “specialty” rolls first: The Straights, the Full Houses, and the Threes and Fours-of-a-Kind. I like to get them out of the way so I can relax in the idea of just rolling for Yahtzees that never materialize.

My daughter focuses on the top-tier rolls: The Ones and Twos, she admits are throwaways, but the Fives and Sixes can set you up for a bonus that would obliterate any Yahtzees that do float out of the ether …the ones that often roll up for her father.

 

Not that we are truly competitive despite our tendency to groan at the roll that spins the number we gambled on and settles on the number we gambled with originally.

I think we are getting better at celebrating the wins and ignoring the losses.

At least it feels like there are fewer hard feelings.

“Bye-Bye Mr. Four-of-a-Kind,” she sings. “This will be the day that I die.” 

Closer to fine

 

As we walked through the lobby, clad in a wardrobe one could rightly call drab, my daughter and I passed true believers: People for whom Barbie measured 10 feet tall. People who would wear pink and be gleeful as they watched a slice of their childhood light up the silver screen. 

I was worried I'd be the one who would only see the tarnish. 

I pictured myself hunkered down in the cool embrace of a resplendent reclining chair with no small amount of regret, not because I didn't have a personal relationship with Barbie but because I worried I may not have allowed my daughter to have fully realized hers.

Between trailers and teasers and wink-and-nod reviews of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” I couldn't imagine how a movie about an 11-inch doll could ever measure up to all the hype. 

Not gonna lie. 

I expected a lot. 

I had so many questions.

Was Barbie a feminist? An anti-feminist? Was she worthy of all the love or any of the ridicule? What message would she have for us now and would it be transformative?

The narrator in my head laughed as she reminded me that these are the items we have to bring to the table, they aren't even sold separately.

But deliver, it did. 

Though at first, it delivered like a gut punch. 

“Do you remember how I wanted a Barbie?” my daughter asked as we settled in for the previews.

My shoulders gently lift toward my ears as I fumble to find the recliner’s controls and an answer with a positive spin: “I remember you being a Barbie CheerleaderTM one Halloween.”

She smiled and tilted her head, pointing at the button partially hidden by the dimming light. 

I couldn't mod-podge over the moment she had just uncovered. 

“You got me a Barbie cake for my birthday and one of my friends told me it wasn't a real Barbie. You must remember.”

I hadn't forgotten. She has been a Barbie girl in my tomboy world.

I also hadn't realized until it was too late that the star of the party - a cake-skirted doll - had only a flesh-colored spike stabbing into the frosting instead of legs encased in a cylinder.

“Don't feel bad, I was more of a Calico Critter kind of kid than a Barbie Girl.”

And surprisingly I didn't feel bad. Because for the next 114 minutes, I could only marvel at how much Gerwig was able to pack and unpack into the trunk of this candy-colored vehicle. 

 

It not only passed the Bechdel test, it felt like it managed to devise a similar rubric to apply to cinematic representations of Ken; perhaps future viewers might even call it a Ken-del test. 

“Am I making that up,” I asked my kid as the credits rolled and we uprighted our recliners. 

“That was the part I liked the most!” She exclaimed. “Right from the beginning - when Ken crashed on his surfboard and the doctors were fixing him you knew they weren't going to turn the tables.”

She was right. Even as Doctor Barbie explained that his body would heal in the time

It takes to explain that he actually had no injuries, Stereotypical Barbie never once diminished his feelings or told him that it was all in his head. She just let him know she thought he was brave.

The film not only centered her in security, it allowed us to bring our experiences and meet the same gentle understanding.

Barbie seemed all-encompassing and there was no wrong way to be in her world.

And as we were making our way back to our oversized car in the parking lot, rehashing the movie and all the moments that stayed with us for the next several hours, I felt something pleasant and unexpected: the realization that I may have been a Barbie girl all along.

“You do know Mattel is releasing a Weird Barbie, right? I think it's right up your alley.”

Alive and kicking

Upon hearing I would be retiring to the state of Maine for the last gasp of summer (unofficially and increasingly known in these parts as the season when you can only buy swimwear from a big box Halloween store that has just taken up residence, albeit temporarily, in one of the many unoccupied warehouses that sold groceries for a generation before it up and split) a friend drew my attention from the cool-down portion of our mid-week run to an amazing news item out of the aforementioned Vacationland.

“It's the craziest story: a woman from Brunswick, Maine, awoke in the wee hours of the morning to find a teenager standing in her bedroom with a knife, saying he was going to cut her.”

Blink. Blink. 

Now, I must say, I believe my eyes may have widened and protruded from their sockets as confusion clouded them when the delightful story I was expecting pushed sideways and teetered over a rabbit hole of horror. when

 

My friend assured me that the take she was about to tell would forever endear me to the land in the upper-east corner of our mainland where women only grow more powerful as we age. 

And I listened raptly in the middle of the street as she recounted from memory: “The victim, an 87-year-old woman, said to herself, ‘Well if you're going to cut me then I'm going to kick you,’ and she jumped out of her bed and into her shoes, grabbed a chair as a shield and the two battled for so long  the boy became weary and wandered into the kitchen where he announced he was starving.”

So, according to this retelling, our lady hero made the attacker a snack of cheese and crackers and said he could have the whole box if he'd leave, which he did, and which somehow helped police and search dogs find him later for a resistless arrest. 

My friend marveled at the pluck of this woman saying she'd do it all again if, for some unfortunate reason, history were to repeat itself. And before I headed for home I agreed salt water must run through her veins. 

And just a little honey, too, as the woman said she hoped the kid got the help he needed to turn his life around.

It wasn't until later on when I searched for the news article that I learned how truly bonkers the story was: in addition to the chilling discovery and violent attack, the half-dressed intruder turned out to be a teenager who had mowed the lady’s lawn a few years prior and by her contemporaneous accounts “had done a darn good job, too.”

And that he had gained entrance to her home through a window by shifting the accordion slats of air conditioning to create an opening through which he could wriggle past.

In addition to providing safety tips for other central-airless homeowners to beef up security for these vulnerable window conditions, she also noted how having a rotary phone slowed her ability to contact police, 

“I dialed as fast as I could,” she told the reporter as the memory of the mechanical sounds of the carousel rotating and releasing came flooding back. 

As did a reminder that whoever wrote this story is a gem of equal luster. A reminder, perhaps, that journalism is alive and kicking. 

Turns out the most important thing she had in her time of crisis (besides ready access to shoes and a bedside chair shield) was having her wits about her. 

For this and so many other reasons, I hope to be a Mainer when I grow up

Stretched on her grave

The lives of celebrities can be intoxicating. Their deaths, perhaps even more so. An unknowable person who has influenced us from afar.

That’s what I was thinking when I heard the news that Sinead O’Connor had died at the age of 56. 

I’m not going to lie: I was angry. Just the mention of her name brought me back to 1987 and the moment I heard her beautiful voice howling out “Troy,” her anti-love song with its inspiration grounded in Yeats’ poem, No Second Troy.

I searched through my old cassette collection and found what I was looking for:

“I'd kill a dragon for you

I'll die

But I will rise 

And I will return

The Phoenix from the flame

I have learned

I will rise

And you'll see me return

Being what I am

There is no other Troy

For me to burn”

The lyrics came out of my mouth as if time hadn’t marched on. I had turned up the volume so I could pretend I could hold a tune. 

She had been an inspiration. A songbird filled with longing and rage. Her haunting beauty matched her evocative voice. 

I had missed it.

This also brought me back to the turning point in her career after she ripped up a photograph of the pope and the world turned against her. The subsequent banishment was nothing short of vicious. Blue chip stars voiced rage and mused about their willingness to commit violence against her. And even when that rhetoric receded the mockery did not. In short order, she had become a punchline. 

Honestly, for a very long time, her disappearance from the center stage felt like a gut punch. 

Black Sabbath had written a song in the 70s that asked the listener to imagine if they’d like to see “the pope at the end of a rope” with little uproar and certainly no real jeopardy to their careers. But it was an opinionated woman we just couldn’t abide.

But in so many ways I was wrong.

She hadn’t been silenced. She couldn’t be silenced. 

I just hadn’t listened closely enough.

I had even discounted her own words on the subject of her career-ending performance as a musical guest on a sketch comedy show.

She had been adamant that the career that ended wasn’t hers, it was the career her agents wanted for her; the one that would have afforded them extravagant estates in tropical places. 

Her immediately recognizable voice had never disappeared.

Throughout her career, which spanned 40 years, she stood against the abuse of children; against racial injustice, she supported the rights of women and LGBTQ communities. She had been open about her struggles with mental health.

She kept working and struggling and collaborating and fighting the good fights.

And while her death is most certainly a tragedy, her life is what will always be a revelation.

Her fans have always been stretched on her grave, and we’ll lie here forever.

Bear necessities

Everyone has been talking about bears. And by everyone, I mean people I know, or barely know, or am related to. Also the people I know of who post “helpful” advice to neighborhood busybody sites such as NextDoor. 

It's a little bit dizzying, frankly, 

For some people, the bear is an unconventionally attractive actor (I'd say Young Frankenstein-esqe) who plays a talented but tortured chef trying to upgrade his family eatery from dingy to destinate, and owing much of the success to the dedication of his beleaguered staff. 

For others - especially in suburbia - the bear we’re all discussing is Ursus americanus americanus: the black bear so nice they named it twice. 

For my husband, the bear is a phantom, a nighttime visitor who sets off the dog in the wee morning hours and leaves behind a multi-textured “gift” center driveway. 

I can't tell you how many people I've met at the coffee shop who have handed over a cell phone to show a disbelieving audience some blurry first-hand evidence.

My husband is one.

Still, I marvel at the population that seems to have ballooned in recent years. 

The bears must have had a few good winters since the virtual pushpins of area sightings keep multiplying on interactive maps. Click on one, and a whole Wikipedia-style entry, complete with pictures and anecdotal notes, pops up. 

“Wow! That's a big one! Did he take down your bird feeder? Crazy!”

A part of me judges, of course. What do wildlife experts have to do? Come to your house personally and impound your feeders?

Honestly, though, I feel slight pangs of jealousy as I scroll through my photos. There's little there to excite the coffee klatch. A dog snoozing on a sunny patch of floor. A meal that looked pretty. A series of selfies I have caught and released. 

There are no bears of any kind, not even of the Teddy variety. Which momentarily makes me sad. 

The closest I've come to a coveted sighting was a bear behind waddling into the woods over a country road. I almost missed it because my attention was focused on the car ahead that had come to a screeching halt. 

I considered taking a picture of the Adirondack-themed dish towel that seemingly appeared out of nowhere and is slung askew from the handle of the oven door. The only black bear I could document is appliquéd to its front. 

But I know I should be careful what I wish for. 

I've heard the stories from camping enthusiasts in bear country and how these hungry animals eventually thwart our best attempts to keep them from feasting on our provisions. 

And how conventional wisdom has gone from "hang the food in a bag from a tree," to "keep it in a bear box," to "leave it in a locked car," to " leave the vittles at home and just hike on through."

It won't be a good thing for any of us to live with bears. It's one thing to substitute your bird feeder for a bird bath and quite another to take out all the fruit trees and wall your house off with impenetrable cement. 

The bears will find their necessities.

Out of nowhere

The day was finally ending.

It had been a tough one. I was ready to put it behind me.  

The sun was still high in the sky, which was a brilliant blue. The kind of blue that is so rich and beautiful that it doesn’t seem ominous.  

The dog started pacing beside me – all shedding fur and shivery nerves. She weaved back and forth on a carpeted runway, refusing to settle or be comforted. 

Something was coming. 

And as sure as I am confused by the colorful animation of the weather radar, my dog seems naturally centered in the eye of the storm.

Dogs know. She had already been preparing for the worst long before I was startled by the sudden disharmony of sounds: wind beating against the windows and something resembling metal being dragged along pavement, then silence for a moment followed by a deafening crack. I fully expected the trees outside to be clawing their way in through the roof. 

Now my heart felt like it was jumping rope. 

Outside, the rain started coming down in sheets. The sudden deluge turned every surface into a container threatening to overflow. Gusts were turning the sun shades into billowing sails. The wall of windows that helped sell me on the house now seemed terrifying.

Yet, the sky was still smiling at me as the weather conjured its worst.

Meanwhile,I tried my best to regain my resting heart rate and remain as calm as a frequent flier during heavy turbulence. Lead by example, right? 

Right?

Wrong.

It never works. My startle reflex had set this panic in motion. I couldn't make my inner turmoil seem stoic.

So I did the next best thing: distraction. 

I turned on the television to the least terrifying thing I could think of: game shows

of the home improvement variety. 

And for the next four to seventy-seven hours I watched two extremely enthusiastic women organize the homes of their friends, famous people and famous people who are also friends.

So while the winds howled and the dog snoozed (thanks to the miracle of veterinary medicine) I watched a zillion episodes of a team of people color-coordinating possessions and making 10,000 tons of stuff fit neatly into a five-pound pantry. 

I rolled through the seasons like the thunder rolled through the neighborhood. With lightning speed.

Losing myself in watching strangers turn their troubled overflow rooms into tidy, ultra organized architectural masterpieces.

Honestly, it feels good to be in the closet. There’s something deeply satisfying about bringing order to chaos. I feel calm listening to careful enunciation of the show host’s S’s and T’s. I can feel my blood pressure dropping with each click of a space-equalized clothes hanger. 

Even if I have no personal interest in lining up my shoes or organizing my jeans and sweatshirts into an ombré of creams, charcoals and chambre, I feel at the edge of ease. 

And that’s close enough for now.

Especially as the storm rages on.

Summer job

His hair was a masterpiece. Its thick black peaks spiked unevenly in all directions. It was a little too perfect to be the result of bedhead, but his face still had the swelling of sleep.

“We have any breakfast sammiches?” he asked nonchalantly as if I hadn’t asked him several times over the course of the week if there was anything he’d like special from the grocery store, wherein his answer took the form of a series of shrugs.

He needed to have a good breakfast.

We told him he had to work this summer. 

We just couldn’t abide another seven sweaty weeks spent holed up in his room playing video games when he wasn’t sleeping.

The only evidence of him is a pile of dishes materializing overnight in the kitchen sink.

It didn't take much convincing. Even he knew the fresh air would do him good. And the money wouldn’t hurt.

He had already earned his driver’s permit and a mandate to practice navigating the local roadways for at least 50 hours under our careful and fully braced tutelage before he could apply for the coveted junior license.

So there was that. If he wanted our help to get to the magic number, he’d have to have some skin in the game, too.

So he got himself a camp counseling job. And in addition to minimum wage, he is bringing home a seemingly endless supply of colorful stories and rubber-band friendship bracelets he makes on the daily.

His day is made by the adoration of a handful of half-pints and a director-paid round of soft drinks on a sweltering day.

And while we were glad he was enjoying his work, his father wasn’t sure the money wouldn’t hurt.

But we don’t necessarily agree on how he should manage his money.

I try to keep a hands-off approach, aside from an occasional thumb on the scale.

The husband wants to lay down some family banking rules geared toward solid returns: Half, he believes, should go into savings while the other half should probably also go into savings because what else are you going to do with it? “I don’t want you to blow it on virtual outfits that dress up your game players.”

It was a suggestion the boy did not take well.

He had planned to use the bulk of the proceeds of his camp counseling gig to buy himself a new gaming computer that he would build from parts. 

And then all eyes were on me: The arbiter of what fiscal responsibility is owed to the joys of life. 

“I'll talk to him,” I promise. The boy will sometimes do for me what he would dig in heels for his dad. 

And when I do have the talk, I find that I do more listening.

I like to think it’s the hearing that makes the difference. It doesn’t take long to understand that my son doesn’t have a clear understanding of how banking works. Even something as simple as how to cash his new paycheck or that he can keep as much or as little of the cash as he wishes. The simple mechanics of filling out a deposit slip is enough to allow the chore to slip his mind as the paychecks pile up.

Mistrust the process

I opened the folder and skimmed its contents. The files inside were arranged by some form of chronology that merged creation and last perusals, but their subject lines were empty. As I drew my cursor down the list, I focused my attention on the window to the right of each draft, which showed the first three lines of the text therein.

I hopscotch across platforms. I was jotting down notes on my phone and shaping them into thoughts on my laptop whenever the time allowed, usually while the television remote was under the control of others.

Often, and usually, well before sunrise on the last day possible, I sit in the dark under the bed covers, rearranging words one last time before I send whatever patchwork of thoughts I have made off toward its final destination.

This has been my writing process since I could say “Gmail.”

When it works, it works.

I find the file I want and double-click.

The treatise opens as if tapped by a magic wand.

When it doesn’t work?

A stopwatch of dashes circled my screen as a notice told me to have patience while some magical process of computation – perhaps ones and zeros inside the machine, or perhaps squirrels – worked together to download my file from a server.

When the watch finally stopped spinning, a new message appeared in an empty window: The server was not responding. Try again at another time.

So, of course, I try again, and again and again with furious speed, until I can feel my stomach inching up into my throat.

I email all the people I know who are at least a decade younger, pleading with them to disclose the one small trick I know they must be gatekeeping: A string of code, perhaps, something like Archive://spin around three times and/VoiLA_Remove@trash, and my lost prose would magically reappear.

 Of course, they cannot help. There is no hidden pocket into which my work has been slipped. My friends quietly listen as I talk myself into the delicate understanding that it only takes one elongated internet disconnection for all those words to fly out of an empty window and be lost forever.

None of them want to venture a guess as to why the gray ghosts of my missing thoughts continue to haunt me after their untimely departure from the nebulous realm that is my drafts folder.

For that, I need to consult a scholar at least two generations removed.

Luckily I didn’t even need to enlist a volunteer since my daughter happened to be home from college and sitting on the other end of the couch creating a cacophony of disharmony by simulcasting tiktok on her phone and Netflix from her laptop.

“I feel like I have to tell you that I’ve discussed this situation with alllllllll of my friends, and we’ve concluded that the old thing that gives away your age is your constant refusal to use Google Docs.

“Here, hand me your laptop; I’m going to start a file for you … You will find it in the docs folder under “MOM NEEDS TO GROW UP AND GET WITH THE PROGRAM.”

Something fishy

The premature death of the Burdett Birth Center is not just a broken promise, it is an abject example of short-sightedness.

Breathed into life as a compromise, the stand-alone obstetrics and gynecologic facility was the product of the 2011 merger of Samaritan – the last secular hospital in Rensselaer County – with the religiously-affiliated hospital conglomerate St. Peter’s Health Partners. In addition to offering prenatal and birth services in Rensselaer County, in a stand-alone space, the Burdett Center vowed to offer preventive reproductive care unaligned with the Catholic doctrines of its parent company.

Somehow that promise only lived for a decade, and only on a single floor of the center’s facilities. It reneged altogether two years ago, when, citing the economic hardships of the pandemic, Burdett officials "reabsorbed" the floor into the operations of the remainder of the facility.

It seemed it was a viability issue, then as well. 

They just couldn’t afford to ensure women had access to some reproductive health services. Especially, it would seem, the ones that didn't align with the church. 

And now, Burdett can’t afford to supply any of its clinical services to the community, including the urban and rural folks we know to be medically underserved, and for whom traveling longer distances for appropriate care is a burden. 

Perhaps nothing can prove the failure of profit-driven care more than the disappearance of birthing centers like Burdette.

As we crest the first anniversary of Dobbs, a decision that holds that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; and that precedents Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are overruled, we are in nothing short of chaos. 

Patients are having to travel, placing strain on the healthcare system.

Doctors are now worried about being prosecuted for performing critical and necessary care.

People in need of miscarriage treatment are being turned away from hospitals until they get sick enough to warrant life-saving care.

The courts, out of ideological hubris, have imperiled the Federal Government’s ability to regulate prescription drugs, like mifepristone, creating panic for women and providers in states that have codified a woman's right to care.

And it will only get worse.

Dobbs will mean fewer doctors to care for pregnant patients. Fewer doctors mean worse health outcomes for women and families.

Women will suffer even in states that have professed a commitment to better health outcomes. We can already see it in our own backyard.

We can’t prioritize live birth without prioritizing their mothers.

When will we deliver on those promises?

Maybe never.

Last week we also learned another member of the Supreme Court has shown himself to be an unethical rube. A photograph at the top of the story showed Samuel Alito, flanked by his moneyed friends, smiling for the camera as he held up a trophy catch. 

ProPublica was reporting the justice took substantial gifts from people who had business before the court and had not reported them on his financial disclosures. The piece laid out the timeline of an Alaskan fishing trip gifted to Alito and paid for by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.

But before that report was filed, Alito busied himself by writing off these perceived moral and ethical shortcomings in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal. Certain the important people would understand that a Supreme who is so fervent in his conservative beliefs can’t be corrupted by the equally conservative friends who, as it seems, keep him. 

He believes a person would have to be unreasonable and biased to doubt his impartiality in cases where other federal workers would be required to recuse themselves.

Furthermore, it seems from the reporting, Alito is just another high court judge who doesn’t think laws apply to him but who remains unequivocally sure that the Constitution does not protect women’s right to decide their own health care.

He can not conceive of how reproductive healthcare connects with the founders’ three stated declarations of inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And that he’s entitled to the gift of a luxury fishing trip from a person with business before the court because “a seat, (on the private jet) that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.” 

It sounds more like the reasoning of a petulant child than a justice on the highest court of the land. 

The short-sightedness of our leaders in justice and health shouldn’t be so surprising. Yet here we are.