Terminus, Connecticut

Freezing rain out in the darkness; I can hear it slicing at the skylights. Good to be inside, the only noise the furnace purring, the crabby cat crunching a snack, my fingers patting these keys. Just turned off the radio after two hours of listening pleasure, Randy's Vinyl Tap, dancing around the kitchen to "Satisfaction." And now, just the rhythm of the cold, cold rain.

Have to stay up late tonight - my dear Macca is on "Saturday Night Live" which doesn't start till 11.30. I missed Paul's gig at the Sandy fundraiser, have managed to catch only snippets on-line - my guy looking relaxed and youthful in jeans and white shirt, playing with Nirvana - at 70, rocking with the kids. He looks great. Thank you, Nancy - whatever you're doing, it's working.

Speaking of youthful septaginarians - septuagin ... sept ... people in their 70's, I went to the theatre with Wayson this afternoon - a matinee of Terminus, a brilliant local production of a powerful Irish play. We sat on the stage of the Royal Alex, and the actors worked between us and the empty house. It was a play about the devil, evil, murder, regret, death, music, sex, motherhood - life - oh, many things, all done, believe it or not, in rhyming couplets, a torrent of poetic language that could only come from the Irish. It was exceptional theatre but difficult to take - especially today.

Because seeing a play which featured a serial killer and much talk of murder was especially difficult today, with 20 children and some of their teachers newly dead in Connecticut. Once more, an American slaughter, and Obama saying sensitive things with a tear in his eye - only, as Elizabeth Renzetti points out in the Globe, he said exactly the same things not long ago after the slaughter in the movie theatre, and nothing changed, except that gun laws are looser than ever.

One of the murdered children had only recently moved with her family from Winnipeg to the States; today a CBC reporter interviewed the pastor of their church in Manitoba. The family, the pastor said, would find great comfort, at this time of tragedy, in their Christian faith. How, I wonder? How to find comfort in religion, after the mass murder of children by a crazy kid in a country where powerful guns are at everyone's disposal, at every turn?

Perhaps the only possible good will come of this hideous event - that the death of so many innocents will lead the American people, at last, to re-evaluate what the NRA's kind of "freedom" actually means. What it actually costs.