Yesterday an old friend got in touch to confide that he was thinking of leaving the United States on account of the political climate. He was writing to me because he had few like-minded friends to talk to. Ordinarily, our correspondence doesn't go much beyond exchanges of personal news occasioned by Christmas or Halloween (his favorite holiday, and one for which I have a soft spot).
I responded with unfeigned sympathy but also noted the evidence that a majority of Americans are sick of partisan polarization. Maybe it won't be much longer till sanity and common decency prevail. Then again, maybe not in our lifetimes. My friend and his wife, who at least would not be separating themselves from a family, will go on considering the option of making a break for it — but to where? Yesterday we tentatively browsed the menu of countries together till it got to be my bedtime.
Now, the phrase "my bedtime" has gained a certain complexity — I like to think of it as an elegiac echo — over the decade or so since I was diagnosed with a lymphoma that's not going away. The disease is also classified as a form of chronic leukemia, a wonderfully indolent form that just nudges me along through passages of fitfully ebbing vitality toward the night when I lay me down to sleep for the last time. I'd like to see America wake from its delirium before that.
Even in the prosaic sense, my bedtime promises otherworldly mysteries: labyrinthine dreams alternating with those treks through the dark house that are common to men of a certain age, during which I delight in looking at the clock and seeing that I still have hours to sleep. This is a pleasure I never knew in my youth, when the dead of night was just a rumored time between two drowsy moments. Last night was especially good. I awoke to a splendid thunderstorm and relished the lightning for the span of my trek before plunging back into Slumberland. This morning the wet earth only hinted at the events of the night, but I had witnessed them.
The approach of the Big Sleep doesn't promise any intra-sleep thrills that a mortal mind can contemplate. As far as my sentient self is concerned, the approach is all that remains; but that holds mysteries enough. I observe this old man and the continually rejuvenated world around him with a bemused sense that the world has the more crotchets of the two. It stuffs its manifold mind with real problems and fabricated ones, with practical solutions and theatrical ones, soon forgetting which is which in a frenzy of contention. No wonder my level-headed friend wants to go in search of his Shangri-La. The world will of course prove more durable than I will, but I can say that when there's no mirror in front of me, and especially when I'm out walking, I mistake myself for a healthy young man — except in one situation. At seventy-eight I can still sprint up a spiral stairway of twenty-nine steps and walk on. However, descending is another matter. The top of any stairway gives me pause. When I look down, the voices of childhood elders start murmuring somewhere in my head: So-and-so had a fall. Broke a hip. Bad thing at that age. Never the same after being laid up for a spell. The bone doesn't mend quite right, either. So active until that happened! All it takes is one fall, though. So I descend with care — pretty rapidly, but deliberately. Not with that brisk scuffing action whereby you float down in communion with gravity while punching the steps with the balls of your feet. I don't believe I could do it now if I tried. I dare not try.
Pride goeth before a fall. In American political life today, pride is the deadly sin that runs through all folly from one end of the spectrum to the other. Followers of Donald Trump have invested theirs in a mountebank who flatters them with a sense of mission. Their nemeses on the left, never at a loss for hubris, place them and practically everyone else outside the circle of respectful engagement. Lyndon Johnson's appeal from the Book of Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together," is the appeal of the many Americans who are sick of polarization, but it's lost on the deaf adders who guard the poles. In their vain certitude, they wage a shouting match reminiscent of a political joke which I shall condense to its essence: When a family find that their house is on fire, most of the members pitch in to put it out, but the proud grandfather stands bellowing at the flames, "We'll see who tires first!"
I hold out hope that America will wake from its crazy dream before my friend feels compelled to leave it and, if possible, before I'm gathered into the arms of Morpheus for good. There should be time yet. I have the relentless energy of a child who doesn't want to stop playing at bedtime; however, I understand that we children eventually fall asleep over our toys and are carried off to bed. I don't exactly mind being the one who tires first. It's just that I'd like to sink into oblivion confident that America will not soon follow.
