Mayor Pete slays the Fox dragons

I can't stand it any more! My eyeballs are roasting in my head! Let's survive tomorrow somehow, and then Wednesday will be a major detox day, no social media, nothing, no no no. Got to stop this obsessive scrolling!!

Wait - who am I kidding? Think he and his goons are going to slink quietly into the night? How will they try to throttle democracy? Jesus, does it not feel as if we've been enduring this election battle for years? In the middle of a pandemic? Enough, the entire planet cries. MAKE HIM GO AWAY. ALL OF THEM. 

What cheered me up today was Mayor Pete. His appearances on Fox have been going viral, one after the other - they set 'em up, he knocks 'em down. Phenomenal - all done smoothly, with prime articulacy and not a hint of condescension. Here's a short bit. Do yourself a favour and find some of the others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQAuuVBFi6I

Today's treat, besides a long visit and a bowl of my just-made leek and potato soup with my dear friend Jason: an hour and a half Zoom call with Trevor, now living in a town near Copenhagen, whom I met a few times in the seventies. He was a post-doc of my father's and spoke at his memorial event in 1988. He has ordered my books and is apparently reading them all, when they arrive in Denmark. We got caught up about our lives and talked about my mother and father, who were, he said, like parents to him. Did you know that biochemists are supposed to be boring? Trevor told me there's a true story about a woman who put a personal ad in the paper "seeking an educated, intelligent man. No biochemists." 

"But your dad was trained as a biochemist," he said, "and could not have been less boring." 

Trevor is an immunologist, a growth profession these days. I hope some day he'll explain a few scientific things to me, like what exactly a biochemist and an immunologist are and do. Next time, we're going to Zoom in Pam, who lives in Amsterdam, another former student of Dad's, the woman who did not have his baby and whom I've never met. What an adventure! Trevor told me it has meant the world to him, because of my call getting in touch with his own past. He has been contacting old friends and remembering. 

That's something else we do, we memoirists — in our search for our own story, we reconnect people with theirs. 

Trevor sent this picture of my parents — a new favourite. Dad mixing drinks, I assume, Mum in one of her 46 white blouses. How happy this image makes me.