​ “Just remember he’s family!” Mom said when she invited her younger brother, aka my Uncle Murray, to dinner along with whomever he was married to at the time. He always accepted, and he always brought things for our family to read such as far left political pamphlets and items from obscure newspapers that my New York TIMES reading father used as lining for the cage, where Louie, our parakeet, hopped and chattered.
Uncle Murray was a non-card-carrying Communist during World War II and most of the Cold War. He believed that the U.S. government’s main function was to hatch plots with the sole purpose of “getting” Murray Rothman. If the U.S. were ever to bomb its own citizens, a distinct possibility as far as he was concerned, then ground zero would be his dental office on Fort Washington Avenue in the Bronx.     
Despite the aroma of my mother’s roasting chicken wafting through the house, family visits went badly because my father and Murray never got along with each other. The day before a visit Mom tried to negotiate for peace. She called Murray and emphasized the forbidden topics: politics and food.          For days before that, she told my dad to ignore Murray.  “Don’t let him get under your skin.”
          Neither of them paid the slightest attention to her pleas, and her successes at reconciliation and peace were minimal. Her failures were colossal, and the two men argued at every family gathering.
I have to admit that I  looked forward to hearing Murray hold forth on one of his two favorite topics, politics or food.  My uncle was a health food devotee  long before the reign of King Kale. Although he ate everything in sight at our dinner table and always had a candy bar in his pocket, he had an opinion on every food group and he swallowed vitamin pills by the handful.
          A typical dinner conversation might go like this.
“Vitamin K is the best protection we have against radiation. Seedless grapes—that’s the perfect food. They’re high in Vitamin K, and we’d better be ready because “it” is coming.” Murray warned. (“It” was, of course, nuclear war.)
          My uncle got most of his information from Carlton Fredericks, the host of a popular radio program on nutrition during the 1950’s.  At dinner he liked to quote snippets from Fredericks’ shows to my dad, a doctor,  who believed in the powers of  modern medicine and a meat and potatoes diet—with an occasional apple or grapefruit.
          “Rabbit food,” Dad sneered at salads. Vitamin pills? For the record, he considered them worthless, but many years after those dinners, I discovered that he made his patients take Vitamins C and E during pre- and post-operative periods.
          “Helps the blood to clot better,” he mumbled. “Wounds heal neater too,” he added, and he never admitted to Murray his conversion to the two vitamins. 
My uncle had no problem sharing his opinion of each course my mother served. Dinner was often chicken, and, as the guest at our table, he got the platter first and helped himself liberally to Dad’s favorite white meat. My brother and I divided the rest.
“Chicken has hidden fat, especially dark meat.” Murray announced as the platter minus the white meat landed by my father.           
When he heard the “chicken has hidden fat” line, Dad looked at Murray and snarled, “Who said so?”
          “Carlton Fredericks.”
          “What does he know?”
          “He has a Ph.D. in nutrition,” Murray said as soon as he had swallowed his first piece of chicken.
          “A Ph.D.?  A Ph.D.? That stands for phoo and dreck!” Dad shouted out the words and enjoyed saying them.
Murray who did not relish being on the receiving end of any joke, bad or good, defended his hero even after his downfall. In the early 1960’s, Carlton Fredericks was involved in a law suit which questioned the worth of the products advertised on his program. My father was elated; he cut out newspaper clippings and bought every magazine that covered the story. The next time Murray visited, and before he could get his coat off, Dad handed him a stack of papers.
          “That’s your boy, your big shot PH and D boy,” he said triumphantly.
          That visit was the last one for almost a year. There were several other long spells when Murray didn’t visit our house, but my mother kept in touch. She phoned him or his wife once a week, and she was on excellent terms with all three wives even after the first two became exes.
          The first wife was Dolly who was barely five feet tall, and about a size 2.  She was the only spoiled child of a professional gambler and a mother who had a neurotic compulsion about dirt. She took her husband’s money from him the minute he came home and washed the paper bills in Ivory Flakes. The coins she boiled. She also saw to it that  Dolly got everything she ever wanted. 
By the time Murray met Dolly, the gambler dad was dead of a heart attack. Mother and daughter were living off the remnants of life insurance policies and Dolly’s earnings as a receptionist. Her mother who had been an invalid long before the gambler’s heart attack, washed Dolly’s salary every week.
          After they married, Murray, Dolly, and Dolly’s mother set up an apartment in the same building where Murray had his office. Dolly quit her job and continued her old habits. She only bought clothes at the “best” shops and never on sale; she ordered groceries from the fanciest store in New York—and had them delivered to their apartment. Murray was as big a spender as his wife, but what really bothered my mother was the way Dolly set a table.
          “Whatever they didn’t finish at a meal, they’d throw into the garbage, even the bread and butter. When I said something, Mrs. Rhinelander (Dolly’s mother), said that food spoils, and she looked at me as if I was the crazy one.  When they came to our house—with that woman—God forbid that she should stay home alone, she barely touched the food.”
          Dolly’s mother dominated her daughter’s household, even after the births of her two grandsons. When the children were still toddlers, Murray began to think that there had to be a better way to live than with a helpless wife and an interfering mother-in-law. By the time the younger boy was three, divorce was inevitable.
            Dolly got custody of the boys, and together with Dolly’s mother, they stayed in the same apartment, furnished, of course, with “the best of everything.” Murray moved downstairs one flight which meant his office was on the first floor, his bachelor home on the third floor, and his ex-family on the fourth.
          Murray paid alimony and child support until the youngest child was 18; he also avoided his ex-family as much as he could and cursed every dollar that he spent on them. Since Dolly still refused to shop at discount stores, and since she still threw away leftovers, the money wasn’t enough. She went back to work. Mrs. Rhinelander suddenly regained her health and got a job as a salesperson in Lohmann’s department store where she had to handle unwashed money every day.
In spite of the added income, Dolly ran short and called Murray at least once a month for something. She came to his office, and when they got old enough, the boys came—always and only for money. Murray fought with Dolly in front of patients, over the phone, in front of the apartment building, and before his sons who told their aunt everything when they visited our home. My mom listened, and she never sent the boys home without a few dollars tucked into their coat pockets. 
          When Richard was in high school and Kenny entered junior high, Murray introduced my parents to Arla, a fellow radical whom he met at a Socialist club meeting. Arla, who was short, dark, and stocky wore slacks, and she had pierced ears. Mom did not wear slacks. She also disapproved of pierced ears.        
“Only gypsies and girls who aren’t ‘nice’ pierce their ears,” was her conviction, and the words she said to me when I wanted to have my ears pierced. Despite her pierced ears, Arla was a nice woman, and she was not a gypsy. 
She shared most of my uncle’s opinions. Like him, she had strong opinions about food, but unlike him, she wasn’t a hypocrite. When she came for dinner, she didn’t eat a mouthful of my mother’s meals. She came to the table and said, “Nothing for me, thanks!” at the same time that she swung a large brown paper sack onto the table from which she would remove a cucumber, a carrot, a piece of celery, an apple, a piece of cheese, a hard-boiled egg, and a large black and red thermos bottle with some liquid in it.
          “Caffeine is bad for the digestion,” she said as my mother poured the coffee, and she poured whatever it was from her thermos into a cup.
          Dinner with Arla was very crunchy. She brought her own knife to the table, and she methodically peeled, cut, or diced her food onto a plate. She then ate it with her fingers. By this time, my dad was deeply immersed in his own food, and my mother was reduced to silence. As we watched her heavily ringed fingers cut cucumbers or apples and listened to her chew the food she prepared, my brother and I were round eyed with fascination.
          “You should chew every mouthful 32 times, once for each tooth in your mouth,” she told us. It’s called Fletcherizing your food.”
          (Horace Fletcher, (1849-1919) was to Arla what Carlton Fredericks was to my uncle. He touted a weight loss diet of chewing food but not swallowing it.)
          When the meal was over, Arla wiped her knife on a damask napkin and placed it back in the brown paper sack. Next, she emptied the peelings and scrapings from her vegetables and fruits into that sack along with the egg shells. She explained to our silent, staring family, “Mulch for my garden.” 
          Since they were married for less than a year, there were only a few meals and not too many conversations with Arla. Echoing Murray, her topics included the American fascist government,  the surveillance she was sure she and Murray lived under, and the utopian socialist brotherhood they both espoused.
          Murray had a soul sister in Arla, but like his first wife, Dolly, she drove him crazy with her complaints about money. They never had enough, and she wanted him to either work harder or stop paying alimony so that she could quit her job and have a baby. He had already seen half a dozen lawyers about the alimony payments, and those appointments almost always resulted in increased payments for Dolly.
          “He pays child support to children he never sees and alimony to that silly wife,” Arla complained to my mother in the kitchen where she helped to wash the dishes from which she never ate.
          “They are his children,” Mom said.
          “It’s just a biological attachment—meaningless.” Arla answered.
          One Sunday, Murray came for dinner and told us that Arla had left him.  Since there were no children, there was a quick annulment. Arla  never visited us again, but my mother called her fairly regularly for a few years.
          “Why do you call her?” I asked Mom.
          “Who else has she got?”       
          “But why you? You’re nothing to her.”
          “She was married to my brother.”
          “That’s ‘was,” Mom, ‘was.’ Besides you don’t even like her.”
          Her eyebrows would go up. “Why do I have to like her? She lives alone, and she’s not that bad.”           
          As the years passed, the calls to Arla became less frequent. She spoke to my mother about going to New Mexico to live on a commune. By then she was close to 60, and soon after that last call, she faded from our lives.
          For a few years after Arla left him, Murray substituted psychoanalysis for a wife.  He decided that he had suffered a deprived childhood, and he drove my mother crazy with his accusations of parental neglect.
          “Mom never wanted me,”
          “Not true. She adored you.”
          “No! “Whenever she got mad at me, she told me I was an afterthought, an unwanted child.”
          “I don’t believe you.”
          “Why not? You were Pops’ favorite. And to Mama, Harry could do nothing wrong.”
          “You were always getting into trouble!”      
          “My analyst said I got into trouble so that I could get attention; otherwise, nobody ever paid any attention to me.”
          “Everyone paid attention!”
          “I never had piano lessons like you did!”
          “You had a trumpet AND a trombone!”
          “It’s not the same thing.”
          “How is it not the same thing? Murray, stop it!” My mother, who never yelled at anyone, was, by this time, yelling.
          “See! See! Just like her, you pick on me!”
          “My mom is right!” Listening in to this conversation, I had to interrupt.
          Murray stared at me. “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder!”
          My mother was furious. “Chip? How has she got a chip? She’s 15 years old.”
          “So what? By five years, she was what she is now. My analyst says that after five years of age, there’s not much you can do to change anyone.”
          And so the arguments went round and round. Murray often phoned to tell Mom the analyst’s latest pronouncement.  She listened, no matter how angry or how disgusted she got with him.
          During one long phone call,  he explained why he picked Dolly for his first wife. By that time, when he started discussing his marriages, my mother could tune him down, not out, but down.  She said to him in response to his query: “Do you know why I married Dolly?”
“No, Murray, I don’t know why you married Dolly, but I think you’re going to tell me.”
          “I married Dolly because she was the exact opposite of Mama. Mama was tall and clever, so I married someone who was small and helpless.”
          “You fell for Dolly the first time you saw her. You thought she was the cutest thing.”
          “But that had nothing to do with why I married her. My analyst says I married her because I wanted to cut the umbilical cord to Mama and show her I was capable of going out on my own.”
          Unfortunately, my dad, who didn’t believe in psychiatry, was listening to that call. He shouted, “You didn’t cut the umbilical cord! A real doctor did that!”
          “Real doctors? Real doctors? Real doctors don’t know the first thing about how to make people well except cut them open and give them drugs!” 
          And so it went any time Murray used those fighting words, “my analyst says. . . .”
          Once when Murray was with us for dinner, he got going on the “why I married Dolly” explanation. Mom interrupted, “All right, already! I understand why you married Dolly, but what about Arla?”
          “I knew you’d ask that, and my analyst and I have talked about it.” Murray smiled. “I married Arla because she was the exact opposite of Dolly.”
          The answer bewildered my mother. “The exact opposite of Dolly? But you said Dolly was the exact opposite of Mama, and Arla is nothing like Mama.”
          “You only think they were nothing alike because you don’t know what it was like to be brought up as an afterthought.”
          Mom started to speak, but Murray stopped her. “No, let me finish. Mama didn’t want me, but once she had me, she held on and tried to make me as dependent on her as she could.”
          “That is absolutely---“
          “True!” Murray finished his sister’s sentence. “She kept me in short pants when the other kids were in long pants. I had to beg her for my first haircut. She made me keep a curfew when I was in high school.”
          “Harry and I had curfews too! How did it hurt?  Do you realize you are making no sense?” My mother was anxious to stop this argument before my dad weighed in.
          “I make a lot of sense. Mama tied me to her apron strings, and that’s what Arla wanted to do. She wanted me to give an accounting of every nickel I spent.”
          “After Dolly I would have thought you’d be grateful to have someone like that.”
          “That’s the point.” Murray shouted. “After Dolly, I married the exact opposite! Now you see I’m right.”
          Mom looked into Murray’s beaming, red face and said nothing more because in battles with Murray, she always lost.
          The psychoanalysis lasted about four years. When Murray married wife number three,  he stopped going to his analyst. Hilda was tall, sturdily built, a super cook, seamstress, housekeeper, and accountant which occupation she had worked at successfully since her first and only husband’s death. She was uninterested in either politics or vitamin pills. She was nothing like Arla or Dolly and as close a replica of Murray’s mother, Clara, that one could find on earth, let alone the north Bronx.
          My mother got along with Hilda as well as she did with both Dolly and Arla. She was happy for Murray who prospered in every way under his wife’s care. His practice improved, his home sparkled, and so did he. When he came to dinner with Hilda, he managed to get through entire meals without fighting with my dad, and after one Sunday dinner, he told Mom how much he enjoyed the visit.
          That was when Mom said to me, “You know I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling Murray how much Hilda resembles Mama, but if I say something, it could spoil things.  I hope she stays with him.”
          She did, and as she grew older, she even developed high blood pressure, the disease that led to Clara’s death,  but unlike Clara, she took better care of herself, and she and Murray lived happily ever after.

​My grandparents were hated in Russia because they were Jewish.  They fled from killers and pogroms that terrorized, fled from serving as cannon fodder for a regime that despised them.
 
My father went to fight in the Pacific and wept when his returning ship came safe home by Lady Liberty.  He taught me that this country offered many important freedoms and had been structured with good laws to protect all its people.  My father believed in an America where people were free to believe as they wished.  Or not.  Where people from all over the world were welcomed to try their luck here.  in my father’s eyes Jews, Quakers, atheists, Christians of all kinds, Hindus, others were equal before the law.  When I was a small child I was taught that that was a key to America’s character and strength.
 
Now we have forsaken these virtues.  We speak of building great walls to protect us from outsider criminals, animals, rapists.  We say the skinheads and those protesting their march and their Confederate heroes are somehow equal—“good people” on both sides.
 
Congress refused to consider a solid moderate judge by stonewalling.  Instead rammed through a lesser candidate, a conservative ideologue, with obvious inability to maintain an even keeled detachment, who showed his venality to the public at the President’s direction.
 
Never have I felt my country move so drastically away from all its features my family once held so dear.  Years ago I held a glorious  idea of America as a beacon of hope in the world.  I mourn for the loss of that feeling.
 
In this moment it is harder and harder to recall that pride and sense of rightness.  Now there are 69 million homeless on this planet, more than ever before, fleeing oppression, war, disease, drought.  In Syria, Sudan, Kurdistan, Iraq, the Congo, Myanmar, Yemen, other places.  What are we to do? 
 
But I too feel displaced, though I have plenty of food and shelter.  My disheartening displacement is that the pillars of my country’s pride, decency, and principles are being torn down by criminals, cheats, bigots, bullies, and haters who love only power and wealth.
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

            I slid the 78 rpm record from its paper sleeve, and placed it on the turntable.  Hartz Mountain birds... this wasn’t like the records I’d tried out in the soundproof booth at the music store on Main Street.  When the clerk offered me ‘bird music’ it was “Peter and the Wolf” and flutes for chirping tones.  Didn’t he understand I wanted real birds not suggest-sounds!
            Noticing a speck of dust on the shellac, I lifted the 78rpm from its short metal spindle and took out the brush to wipe it.  In my hands, it felt similar to the blackboard erasers at school.
            An uncle, who worked with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians told me that an automatic record-changer would soon be coming out for personal use.  How could several records be piled up and automatically dropped without scratching?  What would happen to this sturdy Stromberg-Carlson cabinet that also had a regular and short-wave radio?  I put the needle on a groove and my ears captured the magic I wanted.  I turned up the volume and ran into the dining room.
            The metal cage hung from a floor-stand.  Sunlight from the eastern exposure streaked the room.  My mother had already taken the cloth cage-cover from the top and my yellow canary was on its perch.  I pursed my lips and whistled, adding to the spray of sound from the living room. 
            My canary.  A turtle barely moved and seemed like a blob in a jar.  Why my goldfish decided to leap from the glass container and die on the kitchen floor bewildered me, and how did the tiny fish jump through the narrow opening anyway?  But Woolworth had something more wonderful in the back of the store beyond the window shades and table linens: canaries.
            Each canary was in its own wooden crate with spindle sides.  I went up and down the aisle waiting for one to want me.  Bird seed wasn’t part of the war rationing, and my allowance would cover a lot of it.  I got close to each crate, humming, waiting for a gesture.  A flutter, then a few notes, and I knew which one to take home.  I hugged the crate, brought it to the soda fountain, ordered a chocolate milk shake and showed the clerk my prize.  Unlike a fish or turtle, I would talk to and sing with my bird, and the color of sunshine in my favorite room with its crystal chandelier was perfect, and the bird would greet me when I came home from school, and I’d tell it my day.  Swell.  Totally swell. 
            I swirled on the leather stool and the clerk smiled.  He dropped my coin into the brass cash register, and I slid from the stool and waved goodbye.  Walking along the displays of purple perfume and sterling silver barrettes, I knew I wouldn’t be having my initials engraved in barrettes for awhile, nor would I buy any of that perfume for my sister; my bird was going to be part of my life and my money.
            My mother, as always, was supportive and my dad found me the treasured record someplace; he could do everything!  She’d lined the cage with newspaper and I could see partial words from Roosevelt’s speech or war-effort or Japan stuff; without telling her, I turned the paper so the comics showed.  My bird was happy and didn’t need to be involved with the blackout shades, tales of bombers, draft boards, food and gas rationing, and all the horrible.  Together, we’d insulate ourselves with music and the joyous color yellow.
            My mother had already placed a tiny water cup, and bird seed in the cage; together, she and I released a side of the crate and my bird flew into its new home.
            When my piano and singing teacher came to the house, the bird chirped many times and I just knew the record playing would then make it think many birds were in the room.  I told my teacher that; she nodded with approval.
            About two weeks later, the bird, that transformed war and air raid drills in school and such to music and joy, was dead in the bottom of its cage.  My mother sensed my needs, gently placed it in a box, and we went into the back yard and dug a deep hole.  We buried it with prayers, and marked the spot with a small rock.  She then gave me some money, told me to get on my bicycle with its balloon tires, ride to Woolworth, and bring home another canary to fill the cage with music.  She stroked my silky strands of hair, said it would never be this bird, knew nothing could replace it, but I should provide a sunlit home for another lonely bird sitting in a wooden crate.
            Records that were as big as 10" played music for 3 ½ minutes.  I squat on the floor in the living room with my new yellow canary still in its crate, let the bird-tones etched into grooves that a diamond needle brought to life be a welcome sound, and whispered “don’t die”.  I lifted the needle-arm and put it on its holder, walked into the dining room to the pretty cage and introduced the bird to its house.  My mother had cleaned it, placed fresh newspaper down, filled the seed and water cups, and helped me release the canary to its large and pretty surroundings.
            We both then went into the backyard, bent, touched the small rock, and I told the ground that another was in the large cage but I would never forget the happiness and singing of this one.
 
©2009 The Jewish Press
reprinted April 2010 Clear Mt.
 
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​Coincidence?  Maybe that’s a ‘connection’ of sorts I can’t easily see.  I grew up turning a dial on a radio, waited for the fat tubes to heat up, and then magically a broadcast came on.  My mind saw whatever it wanted for background, actors, singers, sounds of rain or even hoofbeats. When my parents took me to sit in a studio and watch a broadcast being done live, it was quite awful; the ethereal quality of rain was nothing more than a person shaking a piece of tin, and the hoofbeats that I’d romanticized coming from an Arabian horse galloping with its mane blowing were cup-like things hitting a slab of wood. After that, as sounds streamed through slots in the radio’s box, the romantic visual left with my childhood.
            I also disliked the growing-up phrase that things happen for a reason.  The vague wording seemed more like an attempt to justify misfortune that there’s no control over. When breath abruptly left my 45 year old father, what possibly was the reason?  No sermons or philosophy courses could connect the dots for me regarding such.
            Aging altered some views and, yet, rationalization seemed to linger. Driving to a famous golf course in Virginia, my husband’s pinkie-finger was broken.  A friend, also a golfer, should have understood our 10 hour each-way drive was to actually just play a specific Nature-beautiful course, and understand our emotional pain with him no longer being able to do that, but, rather, he offered his Eastern religious philosophy: our driving was delayed to attend to the finger, and it was predetermined that we should pause because an accident might have been ahead and we were spared.  Was that just ‘comfort talk’, or might that belief be possible?
            Last summer, on a trip from our home near Canada’s border, to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, had me thinking of that Eastern belief.  My younger son, his wife, and their two daughters, who live near our house, took their van; my husband and I were driven in our sedan, for our personal comfort, by their son.  Several days later, we all began our ride home. We three in the sedan left about twenty minutes ahead of the van, and the GPS was effective going so we trusted it with the return. Paper maps, and AAA Triptiks were things of the past. The present, with a computer voice, said ‘right turn ahead’; the path divisions had a right lane but also a road veering to the right at the same spot.  We took the road.  About a quarter mile up, re-calculations began, and the directions altered.  Re-routing done by the system always found the route to our destination, so, of course, we followed the changes. 
            The mountains were steep, and the stretch was narrow as if only horse-drawn carriages should occupy its width, although old-radio’s hoofbeats would sound wrong on pavement, yet it was open for two lane travel. Constant curves made visibility difficult.  Our grandson kept a 30 mph speed.  Higher we climbed;  our ears felt as if we were in an aircraft.  Eventually, we began to descend, drove over a one-lane bridge appreciative that the traffic in the other direction was sparse, and assumed we would be miles and miles closer to home and pick up a main road many towns nearer to our final mileage.  Not so.  We’d gone in a complete circle!  Ending up at exactly where the ‘right turn’ took us on a right turn and not merely the right lane, we saw the car in front of us: it was the van my son was driving with the rest of his family! 
            Grandson apologized for the situation, which did not require any apology as the GPS misled us and then its usual re-calculations couldn’t do more than take us twenty minutes out of our way in order to be at the exact point of error.  I felt, suddenly, that, maybe, it was ‘meant to be’ so we could ride in tandem with the family, somehow watch out for one another for the long trip.  We all stopped at the same rest stops and also had lunch at the same time, and the thruway sign indicating the final exit was seen within minutes of one another.  The ‘error’ was responsible.
            Was that coincidence?  Was the GPS misleading us for a reason? Could my generally rational mind accept such a concept?   I touched the travel-amulet around my neck, a 14k gold locket given to me by my parents when I turned age 18 and contains photos of them at that point in time, and whispered “thanks”.  Since radio waves are invisible, but they exist, maybe the GPS was ‘taken over’ by what I can’t see?  
 

Charles Hayes, a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Publishing House, Burning Word Journal, eFiction India, and others.

​Today Dr. Pangloss announced his retirement as he stood on the steps of the White House.
"For most of my life I have seen American behavior as it was portrayed from behind an Oz-like curtain. A behavior that has constantly tried to diminished others by pretending to be something grand. I would try to reassure others that there was no reason for alarm. I would point out that such behavior was only a building block on the road to a better world---that by such behavior we were assuring that buckets of uncertainly were being extinguished from the minds of others. I maintained that by allowing them to become confused and question the "truth" they would, a bit more move."
The good Doctor suddenly paused, seemed to choke, and tore off his bandanna. After wiping his eyes, he raised the clenched rag. The features of his face morphed from one of sincerity to one of firmness. It reminded me of the visage of a young Castro riding a tank into Havana. It was neither hard nor soft. It simply was.
As he tossed the bandanna and let his eyes water, he made his lasting point.
"Today glory be, rejoice!!! My work is done, it is done. IT is the best of all possible worlds!!!"
My my. Take another little piece of my heart now baby.