What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?

"If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool."

-Carl Jung

"As I walk through this wicked world

Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity

I ask myself, "Is all hope lost?

Is there only pain and hatred and misery?"

And each time I feel like this inside

There's one thing I wanna know

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? Oh-oh

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?"

-Nick Lowe

8.19.24

Monday back at Tara, after an eventful few days punctuated by lots of sleeping.

Friday I wrapped up an expert deposition at the farm, no masterwork but passable, and we raced out to the Mighty Columbia, struggling to extricate ourselves from an extended conversation with a loquacious countertop installer at the house to take measurements. By around 4:30 we were in the air, trying to beat some bad weather home.

The first leg took us to KGSO for my $400 pair of free socks at the FBO there, worrying along the way about a line of nasty thunderstorms maybe a dozen miles west and northwest, slowly drifting our way. We made it back into the air with a few minutes to spare before the storms reached the field, and were soon flying up the Shenandoah toward KELM.

We landed in Elmira a little after ten, and by 10:45 were flopped onto the couch over a tray of cheese and crackers and a glass of red wine, Dean and Slane letting us know how happy they were that we'd returned. Dean's been suffering from a pretty bad upper respiratory infection, to the point that his little cat nose has been bleeding a little, and Slane seems to have picked up the sniffle, so the celebration was muted.

Saturday we let ourselves sleep past eight, and then loaded the cats for a trip up to the condo for what promised to be a rainy weekend tinkering (for tax purposes) and maybe napping over a book. The rain held off, for better or worse, but we stuck to plan and just hung out. After a brief flurry of activity in the kitchen pulling together an epic batch of chile colorado to simmer all afternoon on the stove, Peg took a full two hour mid-afternoon nap, while I just sat there looking out over the water with her legs across my lap, no phone or tablet or anything work-related to distract from the moment.

It was somewhere in there that I found myself pondering on an observation in a book I've found engrossing, A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It's historical fiction, not my usual thing, and follows in granular detail the lives of Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins as they make their way in the world as young men, eventually finding themselves at the center of the French Revolution. It's fascinating, tragic stuff, watching these idealistic lawyers (all lawyers, of course) push principle all the way up to the scaffold and the guillotine. At 750 pages, the book and I are probably going to maintain a relationship through the holidays.

At one point there's a conversation between one of them, Danton I believe, and an actor and playwright in their circle, in which the character observes of the playwright that he should have some insight into the political motivations of the other side, because it's his job to imagine and commit to paper what must be going on in a character's head. It occurred to me as I read that, and later sitting on the porch gazing at Canandaigua Lake, that this is the problem with the political moment, and a blind spot of my own. We've all become too quick to make political opponents into cartoon characters, not willing to grant them the legitimacy of at least some of their grievances or fears. That mindset makes it awfully hard to find solutions in a diverse political system. Or, facing the practical reality that it's likely impossible to find common ground with folks who seem mostly concerned with power, to try to see things through their eyes and find the weaknesses and the blind spots to exploit.

It's amazing the things that drift through one's mind when there's no device or even a book to distract, just the buzz of Peg's blissful little snore lying there next to me on the outdoor couch. We all should demand for and of ourselves more spaces like that.

The remainder of the weekend we feasted on the chile over a movie, awakening during the night to the alimentary disturbance that is sometimes the price of eating well. We gathered for a brief celebration of Dean and Slane's fourth birthday, or birth month anyway, with a candle stuck in a piece of pate we split up for them but they refused to eat. They love pate, which tells us how puny they must feel.

After another very long summer's slumber, Sunday brought church and a supply priest who did a pretty good job with the week's Gospel message of eating flesh and drinking blood, which sounds ghoulish enough to someone who's been to seminary---I can't imagine being a newcomer to the faith who wanders through the door that particular Sunday. After church we enjoyed a wonderful brunch at a sidewalk cafe in Canandaigua, something we couldn't imagine doing back in PC this time of year, then went to Lowe's to look at shower inserts (it's always something). From there we swept through a Sunday market in a closed old warehouse filled with tatted up freaks who all appeared to be high on something, your author standing out like a sore thumb in a monogrammed white oxford and khakis (they all turned to look at me as I came through the door, as if to say, "Who's the freak?"). This in turn led to more lounging on the porch at the condo, followed by declaring the end of tomato season by tossing the dead plants over the balcony, then a drive home through the beautiful Naples Valley, then through Cohocton and past Avoca, Bath, and Campbell, finally returning here just in time for the last four innings of the Braves game streaming out on the front porch.

The first hints of fall have already arrived, with the slightest hints of yellowish brown in patches on the hillsides around us. It can't get here soon enough.