November 30, 2020

Postcard to JG, who was kind to me in Baltimore, and whom I never forgot. 

Blustery, wintery. David and Daniel sent me a gift card which tuned out to be unexpectedly hard to spend. 

Business at the Post Office. Two women led a very long line of customers, and these women were having frustrating mornings, having come to the PO unprepared, loose boxes flying hither and thither, questions asked and answered multiple times, the pitches of their voices betraying ever-tightening cords of panic. They were universally hated. They must have felt waves of hatred hitting the backs of their heads. That couldn’t have helped. I’m the sort of person who thinks, “A few moments of preparation before going out in public could have avoided all this.” That must read as pitilessness. The second woman seemed to be mailing about twenty individual boxes of greeting cards to the same address. THESE HAVE TO BE THERE TOMORROW she shrieked.  Why she didn’t come in yesterday with them already packed stands outside my imagination. But it did allow her to fumble them and drop them and have them fly open and explode and disarray as though it were a comedy sketch. I remember the passage from The Magician’s Nephew where the crow says, hearing laugher, “I have made the first joke.” “No,” Aslan says, “you have been the first joke.”

I don’t believe America understands the bullet it dodged at the beginning of this month, the barely sufficient detour from the road which must lead to tyranny and civil war, and the probably permanent, probably just loss of America’s prestige in the world. We’re too engaged with reconciliation to note our imminent danger as it ought to be noted. It’s like the aftermath of the Civil War, when voices that wanted a return to normality outshouted voices that wanted justice and political self-examination. Millions of people voted for a demon and demonic policies, which didn’t even bother to disguise themselves. If I could think of the word of waking to utter, I would utter it.

Throwing away my 2020 American Express journal without a single entry in it.