While Rome Burns

"We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening."

-Moonlight Graham, Field of Dreams

About to start a deposition and already a little behind the eight ball this Monday morning even though I spent a chunk of Sunday preparing. So this will be brief.

Today's a big day on the P and Me Calendar. On June 9, 2013, I met Peggy Bowen for the first time, standing in the center aisle of the sanctuary at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church. I'd made an announcement that we were recruiting for EfM, and she rather insistently let me know she intended to sign up right then and there. I've told that story before. This beautiful but tired looking woman who wouldn't be denied. I didn't quite know what to make of it. Then we became real friends in a way the EfM program uniquely facilitates, with all that unvarnished honesty about our hopes and disappointments on this walk with the divine.

And now here we are married all these years, and living about half the time in a place I couldn't have found on a map that Sunday.

Here's the oldest photo of Peg on my phone, from March 18. 2016.

We were both attending EfM mentor training at beloved Sewanee, her for the first time and me getting my biannual recurrency training. Lovely she was, and is.

But I feel like I've fallen into a plotline from Dr. Zhivago, with true love growing like a turd blossom in the midst of a nascent civil war. He's called out the Guard on pretext; Hegseth threatens to call out the Marines on American citizens engaged in a lawful protest. The Boston Massacre, but now we're the redcoats. And last night he promised it wouldn't just be L.A.; soon troops will be "everywhere" as he declares martial law and starts coming for all of us. We'll be at one of the protests on Saturday at the same time as his Kremlin-style military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. Will we be arrested? Shot? One of the ugly things we're learning is that our highly militarized police force, a result of decades of bad policy decisions, has grown into a threat to all of us. Not all cops are bad, but coming at unarmed people with an assault rifle, body armor, and a mask doesn't tend to bring out the good in someone who's already wired as a bully.

Would I have it some other way? Not if it meant life without P. Just strange times, I guess.