Second Coming No. 64 — March 24, 2025

An unelected but powerful official in the New Government asked us to name five things we did last week. Good question. I had to think. One: I sat at my window & watched two cardinals, a house sparrow, a house finch, a yellow-rumped warbler & a pair of mock parakeets share food from the feeders. (The cardinals are a couple & often appear in the yard together or one right after the other, all without interacting, which they do only in private while accomplishing their shared goals.) Two: I went to a class. We read from three journals, three poems each. We discussed editorial choices vis-à-vis our own work. Is that two things? Three? Three: I surfaced from the deep depression I have been in (everyone is in) to make a meal but found I had the bends. Four: Remembered something I’d read (Gibbon? Someone else?) years ago. That during the decline of Rome, previously provided services fell by the wayside. Garbage littered the streets & no workers were paid (or made) to pick it up. Mail went uncollected, un-distributed. (Here, I could be projecting, as I’m not sure that Romans had a post office. Benjamin Franklin had not been born. Just last week when I was doing my five things, a birthday greeting I’d mailed with a little vintage railroad trading card from the New Haven line tucked inside did not reach its intended recipient to cheer him up & my car registration with payment of $78.23 along with proof of insurance disappeared. Plus, for the final time, proof of inspection, since the Local Government will no longer be requiring them in the hopes that poor people with unsafe vehicles will simply drive off the roads in what, one hopes, would be one-car collisions. During the first regime of the now-nascent New Government, I’d had seventy-five handmade holiday cards disappear because the Post Office had needed eviscerating since voters were using it to vote.) These days, the new kind of “garbage” in the streets is human—people down on their luck or ill who, whether they could work again or not, need looking after for a time because that is what a benevolent society does for its less-fortunate citizens, many of whom might have been soldiers in the army of the very Government that now eschews them. What human is not in some way burdensome? (A question that surfaced while watching the birds, not that they are in any way a drain. The opposite, actually—when away, I think of them with joy. In school I learned that thinking is working.) Five: Wondered Is this it? Is this what it’s come to? The cartoon man in rags holding a placard in the street that reads The End Is Near? Or is it the mid-section of the beginning of an extension of a very long end? I thought of my mother, speaking from a hyperbaric chamber after eleven months in a hospital bed before Affordable Care. I guess this is it, she said; I guess I might not ever get well. Mother et al., maybe we need to rethink the meaning of well. Maybe that’s more than five things.