Floating
This is another partial response to listening to the conversation between Ken Burns and Cassidy Hutchinson. It has to do with my state of mind today and how this might connect with the way that Cassidy Hutchinson and MAGA people see the world.
For the last two and a half years since my wife Kathe died I have been floating. All of a sudden, what most tethered me to my home and my community, was gone, leaving a huge emptiness. I was not entwined in my house by love and the presence of a person who had been part of me for 50 years, I was not one of a couple moved everywhere as a couple, who was invited out for dinner as part of a couple, I was suddenly an unattached old man with whom nobody knew what to do.
But if that sounds sad, it was very sad in one way, but not in another. I had traveled all my life, often with a cluster of students around me. Kathe liked to travel and we had great trips together, but she liked traveling her way to visit friends without being pushed and was not eager to leap into new experiences in unknown places. Suddenly I was free to see a cheap flight to a place that sounded interesting and to, without checking with anyone as I had my whole life long, click on a booking site and, if I didn’t change my mind within 24 hours, commit myself for a month in Greece or Morocco or Uruguay or anywhere on earth. And following that click I was free to search on Airbnb and find a place to stay. All I had to do when I got there was to take a taxi from the airport to the Airbnb and then settle there for a month. It was so easy, much easier at 85 than it had been at 45 when family and work kept me at home.
So that is what I have been doing for two and a half years, floating. And that is what I am doing again this week. Again, I am in the strange place that all travelers are in before coming or going, being very much in one place and being at the same time in another. Right now I am at my dining table at 140 College View Drive drinking coffee after a simple meal of Udom noodles. But at the same time I am at Nooit Gedacht, the old Dutch Governor’s house outside of Galle, Sri Lanka, near the Una Watuna white crescent beach on an 80 degree, sunny day. I am sitting on the verandah outside my room with a four poster bed with a white mosquito netting, eating ripe papaya and watching white blossoms fall into the blue pool in the center of the courtyard. And if I had to make a choice, which I don’t have to make, I would just as soon sit on the porch at Nooit Gedacht for a month as to sit in Swannanoa, although I feel very comfortable here at home.
So what does this have to do with Cassidy Hutchinson? I’ll get to that tomorrow.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 