6/9/23

 Friday, June 9, 2023

In bed around 9:30 after watching the news re: Trump's indictment, awake at 5:05 and up at 5:20  to let Lilly out and clean up the kitchen, a full load for the Bosch plus the hand-washed.  52℉ on the way to a high of 72, sunny day, low winds, gusts up to 18 mph.  The sun rose at 5:11 and will set at 8:30, 15+18.

The Squirrel-proof feeder I hung from 2 S-hooks on the tree off the patio turned out to be not white-tailed deer-proof.  When I went outside yesterday to see if any of the seeds in it had been eaten, it was gone, missing.  I thought perhaps Geri had moved it (very unlikely) or someone had come into our backyard and stolen our expensive bird feeder full of seeds (even more unlikely.)  Even the S-hooks were missing.  The mystery was solved later when Katherine found the feeder lying on its side in the hosta garden that Geri has planted under the tree.  She also found one of the S-hooks.  A whitetail must have stood on its hind legs and knocked the feeder off its hooks and onto the ground and proceeded to eat every seed in it.

Patio time with Merlin.  It's chilly this morning.  Even with a heavy flannel shirt on I got uncomfortable sitting with a fresh cup of coffee on the patio.  Plus I confess to some eagerness to read the morning papers about the Trump indictment.  While I was on the patio I had my normal patio thought: how fortunate I am.  How comforting it is to sit quietly, to see the sea of green before me, to hear the soft sound of rubber tires passing over County Line Road carrying neighbors to work, to listen to the neighboring birds.  At first, I hear no birds except perhaps a cardinal.  Then I activate Merlin on my iPhone and Merlin says it hears a mourning dove, a great crested flycatcher, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, a black-capped chickadee, a robin, a house sparrow, and a house wren.  What, no goldfinch?  no house finch?  The longer I sit quietly in the chair I realize I do hear many bird calls, but they are not loud, sotto voce, except for the cardinals and a blue jay.  I think of W. H. Davies' Leisure: "A poor life this if, full of care, we have not time to stand and stare."  Or sit and listen.

Yesterday's Apple Store tutorial on my Apple Watch SE was a disappointment.  There were 2 of us 'students,' both elderly.  The instructor was 54 and a fast talker.  He was very familiar with the Apple Watch features and seemed pleased to tell us about them whether they were of interest to us or not, especially the physical fitness and various health apps.  What my fellow student and I needed was slow, steady, hands-on instruction on the basics of setting up and using the device.  Neither of us could keep up with the instructor, even on features as important to each of us as the SOS feature, 911.  The session was scheduled at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon and was supposed to end at 3:30 though the instructor was kind enough to keep the session going until a little after 4:00, but alas not nearly as useful as either of us learners had hoped for.  [There must have been 15 to 20 Apple Store employees in the store during this session and only a handful of customers.  Surprising.]

Trump's indictment came as no surprise.  It appears another one will be coming in August in Atlanta regarding his efforts to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.  Perhaps another will come in connection with the effort to subvert the counting of the electoral votes of the states on January 6.  One hopes.  It's hard even to conceive of Trump in handcuffs walking between two deputies or federal marshalls or wearing an orange jumpsuit.  An indictment is one thing, trial and conviction quite another, and sentencing yet a third thing.  I can imagine, and even hope, for a number of convictions of various kinds and a sentence of home confinement in the luxury of Mar a Lago, guarded (in a new sense) by his retinue of loyal Secret Service toadies.  What I was thinking about last night during all the schmoozing on Erin Burnett and Alex Wagner and Lawrence O'Donnell's programs was Timothy McVeigh, the Waco tragedy, and Oklahoma City.   I don't expect to see crowds of thousands of screaming protesters storming the federal courthouses in Florida or Washington or the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta a la January 6.  What I do fear are the Timothy McVeighs in America, not too smart, not well educated, but smart enough to buy enough fertilizer for a bomb or accelerant for an arson, nourished for years by right-wing hate speech on AM radio, Fox News, and Newsmax, and on the internet, and moved to 'set things right' in America, to make America Great Again. to start a race war or a righteous war against Communists or Globalists or against George Soros and the Jewish cabal that runs or world, or . . . or. . .   I realize on the other hand that my pessimism about America's future knows few bounds and, thank God, I am so often wrong in my thinking.  But sometimes I'm right and these fears seem to me to be at least not irrational.  Time will tell.  [I'm remembering too the well-to-do, well-educated Timothy McVeighs of the Left, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the bomb-making Weather Underground, the bombers of UW-Madison's Sterling Hall on my birthday in 1970, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army,  H. Rap Brown and the Black Power movement in the 60s: "Violence is as American as cherry pie."]