Thursday in Easter Week

Did dinosaurs have fleas? It never occurred to me to worry over that, but a question in a science article I was reading online in a Haaretz newspaper column just before turning out the light last night and actually sleeping until six o'clock this morning. Well, one wakeup call, but straight back to sleep. Fleas and rats, to be the sole survivors through the next mass extinction event, abiding as natural selection evolves to provide abundantly for them again.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and BMW took them both" with identical appearing gasoline and electric cars, reads an editorial comment I liked! Above, the 2023 BMW 7 Series sedan, "i" for the electric versions. Me, I've got my car and intend not to be in the market again, otherwise I was hoping Cramer's proposed new dealership at PCB would offer BMWs, but pandemic-related supply chain issues have pretty much sidelined the automobile industry as a bulwark of the American economy anyway.

What then? Reading. I have a book here to open, "Learning From The Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil" by Susan Neiman. My reading it won't change anything about our Southern obsession with the CSA and flying its Confederate battle flag from the corner of our pickup truck beds; vis a vis Germany's somewhat successful obliteration of the Third Reich, but maybe it'll help me better understand the psychology of our own Untermensch. Freedom of speech &c carries its own problems and challenges and threat to society; but who to monitor?

Other reading. My two favorite magazines back in the day, forty and more years ago when I was on cross-country flights several times a month, were "The New Yorker" and "Atlantic Monthly", each for great reading in flight. After a while I gave up counting on grabbing one from the magazine rack in tourist class and started buying one, as I've remembered here before, most often at the concession shop in Washington National, long my favorite airport.

Changed and changing with the culture though they be, they're still favorites, and pandemic-wise I've bought a subscription to both, both of which arrive both downstairs in the mail box and online. So, reading. Mostly on my laptop screen, where I can enlarge the print (yah, point and laugh, but if you're so makarioi makarios blessed happy fortunate as to be facing eighty-seven with your eyes open and still good, and looking to keep them so, you also'll appreciate a machine that give you bigger and easier print on command!) instead of reading the paper copy. Anyway, with paid subscription you can opt to receive free newsletters by individual writers whom the magazines offer and sponsor. I'm getting about half a dozen, most from Atlantic.

One that started yesterday is "Brooklyn, Everywhere" by Xochitl Gonzalez. She grew up in Brooklyn and begins, her first newsletter, writing about Brooklyn, moving to Providence, Rhode Island after high school to attend Brown University, and couldn't wait to return home to Brooklyn on graduation, which she did. But she found her native language, Old Brooklyn, fading, faded from existence as Brooklyn upgraded from rough to chic. It's homey and relaxing and I'm looking forward to it as her newsletters arrive in my email.

Reading it makes me recall, back to BMW and Robert Frost and "The Road Not Taken", and "two roads diverged in a yellow wood", that as I was retiring from the Navy, this would have been in December 1977 or January 1978, and conjuring up job interviews for myself, another Navy organization flew me to NYC to interview for a non-GS Grade 15 position heading their procurement operation. The position was in Brooklyn, and the interview was vigorous from both sides, and I was well-qualified, and they ended up asking, "Will you take the job if we offer it to you right now?"

It's an interview question, right? and the drill is that you're sharp on your feet, right? So I let a thousand thoughts run through my mind in five seconds and decline. Why decline? First, I was not there to spontaneously accept a job offer, I was there to practice and perfect doing job interviews, so they caught me up short. Second, on the spur of the moment it occurred to me that Linda would absolutely refuse to relocate Tass from Harrisburg to Brooklyn, and that I'd be living in Brooklyn alone and commuting to Harrisburg by train weekends. Third, in my ignorance I was afraid Brooklyn might be a terrible place to live. But from time to time over the forty-some years since that moment, my mind has returned to those two roads diverging, and I've contemplated and wondered what life would have done for me "if only".

Reading Xochitl Gonzalez's newsletter last night brought it all back. I think, therefore I am. The imagination takes on marveolus adventures, doesn't it. Maybe I'd be speaking Old Brooklyn by now. Or at least New Brooklyn, as Gonzalez tells it.

And, oh, here's our Collect for the Day:

Thursday in Easter Week

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ's Body may show forth in OUR lives what WE profess by OUR faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Changing third person plural to first person plural is my usual edit to this collect, which is also appointed for one of the Sundays of Easter Season. I do appreciate its theology, that in the Resurrection of Christ, God provided a way to reconcile God and man, if only man were interested.

RSF&PTL