“I live in the best country in the best of times.” That sentence has left my mouth plenty over the last ten years or so that I have been driving around America to pitch a tent. Sometimes I history camp by routing my travels so that I can see what I have read about. Civil War histories have sent me to many historic sites, including Appomattox Courthouse.

Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant spent ninety minutes in McLean House signing the surrender order of April 9, 1865, that was to end the Civil War. I spent an uneasy night camping in Buckingham State Forest just a few miles away, thinking about the Civil War in 2013. Hanging around such places brings out ghosts. Visits to Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, and Vicksburg are even more disturbing.

Of course, it did not really end in 1865. It raged on through Jim Crow. I grew up in the segregated south that made the Civil War into the noble War Between the States. It came to another near end around 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson pushed through civil rights legislation that federally mandated freedom for all, or so I thought.

It was still not over. The loss of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s successor, in 1968 to Richard Nixon featured the openly pro-segregationist George Wallace and set up the underground “us v them” politics that leaders in the Republican party have exploited for decades to undermine the credibility of those who wanted to the civil war to end.

The primary underlying plank of “us v them” is white supremacy. A significant portion of people with my pale skin type need to elevate a vision of themselves in some long ago society by attacking others, especially African-Americans. They attached themselves to a lying narcissist who railroaded the Central Park Five into the penitentiary for a crime they did not commit. They cheered on that supporter of the Obama birther doctrine. Trump’s racism is a hallmark that draws fans to his brand.

He took the continuing war to a new climax again on January 6, 2020, by inciting a mob to storm the nation’s holiest place, the Capitol building, where Congress was in session to declare Joe Biden as the next president. The insurrection was broadcast live for all to see.

The Capitol invaders waved the rebel battle flag adopted by Southern resisters as a symbol of their noble cause. The insurrectionists went too far this time. The majority of Americans do not approve of a President sending a mob into the sanctuary of democracy to kill, injure, deface, pillage, and destroy.

The arc of history has bent further forward but the continuing civil war has only subsided. The national Republican partly leadership is still controlled by President Trump, and 187 Republican legislators voted to perpetuate the lie that somehow the 2020 election was rigged despite no proof at all. The appalling act has some of those whose careers hinge on Trump’s popularity pulling back, but there is no wholesale disavowal of the dark force that undergirds their party.

For the war to finally end Republicans must reclaim their traditional conservative party. Its existence is necessary for balance and full representation of all views in government, but it can not be the party of Trump and hatred of “the other.” It could become the party that used to draw my interest and respect.

My love for our country is strained and will remain so as I contemplate the vitriol unleashed by Trump’s presidency. The war continues and we do not live in the best country in the world in the best of times.

At the beginning of Act III of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion Henry Higgins shows up unannounced to his mother’s at-home day tea.

Mrs. Higgins (dismayed). Henry (scolding him)! Go home at once.

Higgins. Oh bother! (He throws the hat down on the table.)

Mrs. Higgins. But you mustn’t. I’m serious, Henry. You will offend all my friends. They stop coming whenever they meet you.

Higgins. Nonsense! I know I have no small talk, but people don’t mind. (He sits on the settee.)

Mrs. Higgins. Oh! Don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay.

Higgins. I must. I have a job for you. A phonetic job.

The job is to test out Eliza Doolittle in mixed company. She looks the part of a lady in such a setting and for a while she succeeds at the gathering–long enough to catch the eye of Freddy Enysford Hill and to keep Professor Higgins interested in turning a flower girl into a lady.

Liza’s small talk soon turns into large talk about details of her personal life in a Cockney register that does not fit the at-home day gathering. Small chit chat about topics designed to go nowhere were the rule for such gatherings.

My head comes back to ways of talking at Christmas because I missed the chance to engage in any kind of talk to speak of due to the pandemic. I can speak small talk. My way of doing it is by listening much more than I talk and just giving back occasional signals to others that I am listening and interested. I can work a room.

Yet I am not at ease doing so. I like large talk. What I mean by large talk is conversation about a significant idea that develops. I crave conversation that builds thinking on one subject with two or more people exchanging thoughts that form something that is larger than anything inside one person’s head.

Maybe my desire for large talk comes from teaching English. I loved critical reading questions that started with one student saying what he thought using logic and facts that led to someone quickly jumping in with a slightly different take on what had begun the conversation. On good days I just stepped back and played the role of conversation promoter.

I can find such conversations on National Public Radio. I love to listen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air because she is always prepared but never pushy. She asks questions of guests in a way that draws them out and she knows when to take her foot off of her mouth accelerator to allow the guests to bring forth something significant that had not been planned. Good conversation requires the ability to listen and to allow slight pauses to ripen.

I love to listen to someone who is smarter and more prepared on the subject than I am. I relish thinking that challenges and extends what I know and am thrilled when what I have heard makes me rethink what I thought I thought. Of course, I am talking about civil, polite conversation. Conversations that become heated do not necessarily offend me, but I hate cable news shouting matches and talkers who are locked in to set way of seeing the world that precludes outside ideas.

To my mind good conversations can attack an idea but not the person. They can be about any subject or experience that is more than just a report from a speaker that does not invite a response from a listener. My favorite subjects are from big ideas in science and civic life that affect all of us. I like seeing what is in a speaker’s head and heart about climate change, government, pandemics, or the future of retail or almost anything that connects us all as citizens.

I like talking to friends who think like me, but I do not seek confirmation bias. I like best talking to someone who knows more than I do and has thought deeper than I have. I like the mental tag-a-long that is created in my head trying to follow a train of thought down its tracks.

Small talk that sticks to the superficial and skates around here and there without landing anywhere ultimately bores me. Like Higgins I am best at conversational large talk, but at 72 I am not looking to sell my perspective as gospel and I am open to most any subject.

Yeah, like most people in this pandemic-stricken world, I miss talking to people period. For now I will just keeping reading books, listening to NPR, and occasionally talking to myself around the dog.

Serving a pallbearer for my former best friend led me to start this blog or collection of writing. Nathan was remembered at funeral presided over by preachers. My end will not be like that but I do want a way for people who have known me to connect up the way I did at that funeral.

My idea was to write about what I think and my life from time to time–mainly in the dark winter months when I am more likely to be indoors. I have included various specimens of written self so far. My idea was that it will be a public face for me after I die, but sometimes people stumble onto my online existence in current time.

Recently a dear friend from about age thirteen left a comment, having stumbling across my name on this WordPress site at danielforrest.org. Jimmy remembers me from that age and then his memories stop because he moved away and we never saw each other again.

Jimmy and I both had crew cuts back in that age of astronauts. He lived in a blonde brick home across from my Uncle Earle’s house. It had a carport on the righthand side.

We palled around, played basketball, and talked the way thirteen-year-olds do. I remember his easy smile and gentile disposition as much as I remember his personal form. What I remember most was an embarrassing situation.

I think I spent the night at his house and wanted him to spend the night at mine. He came over and we started out on what was a big deal at that age but the overnight was aborted. My father and mother got into a big fight over my dad’s drinking. There was noise and more. The details are gone but I know that Jimmy could not stay with me and I was embarrassed.

He was a good friend at a crucial time in my life and I still see his smiling face in my head. His leaving a comment for me about something I wrote touches me. The older I get the less I seem to exist in the way I did when I was younger and working. I do not have a regular wide audience.

He confirms to me when I need it that I am still here and count for something to people in general. Thanks, Jimmy. He also connects me to Donna.

She, too, left a comment. Unlike Jimmy I remember her cousin. We both remember Donna. Seems we were both in love with her.

I have always been shy and am more an introvert than not, though I can get quite wound up on a few cups of coffee. At thirteen I attempted to connect to Donna who was a kind of teen goddess to Jimmy and me. Brenda facilitated the connection.

Donna had beautiful golden skin and, like Jimmy, a bright white smile. I loved looking into her eyes but was afraid to hold her gaze. She had thick light brown curly hair and a beautiful figure. She was gorgeous.

My mind goes to seeing her and Brenda at a picnic table at the swimming pool across from the diving board at the end of the log dressing room. I think she and Brenda were sitting under an umbrella. Donna had on a two piece bathing suit–my mind says it was green or lime and checkered.

She is so stunning and I am so pleased to just be in her presence that I can not think of what to say and do. Man oh man would I love to travel back to that time to see our young selves. Two cute girls and my stumbling gangly self.

I think I expressed myself in some letters–not sure–and I do remember holding on to the idea that she would be my girlfriend. I remember once I got a car driving go Joanna, SC, to see her but not summoning the confidence to do so.

At 71 I see the importance of living in someone’s mind. Donna and Jimmy live in my mind and that they remember my young self delights me. Remembering them takes me out of my COVID funk and reminds me that I still have an audience. I exist in memory.

We have been out of touch and I hardly ever see him. He called yesterday for the first time in more than a year and asked me to bring in a bag hooked to his mailbox.

Without delay I stopped eating to get the task over with. I stepped out into the light rain, walked out the front door and down Ragin Lane two houses, and unhooked the bag from the doorless mailbox. The only “mail” was a bird’s nest.

I walked down his unpaved driveway and found myself trapped between his beat up Kia and a significant mud puddle. I jumped it because my stride would not bridge the little lake and used the overgrown sidewalk that led from the driver’s side door to the house.

More than ten feet out of range of the front steps, I bent low and then lower to negotiate the weeds and bushes that obscured the way to the steps. My first step up felt loose. The front concrete stoop was pulling away from the house, a house that can not be seen beyond faint outline due to overgrown shrubbery and volunteer trees that push against the structure.

I knocked hard on the front door and got Robert right away. He is a small man and now much smaller and thinner than before, short of 100 pounds. He looked down and I was in a hurry as a courtesy knowing he has to be ashamed of his living conditions. His glasses rode down on his noise and his beard was sparse and prickly with black stubble.

He thanked me and I said, “Let me know if you need help.”

Today he called five times, getting me up each time to walk toward the phone. He talked in his rapid way but had to stop after each sentence or two to gain his breath. Would I go up to Walgreens and get him a 20 oz. Coke and two packs of Camel Silver crush pack menthol in the black box with the green circle around the Camel? He said he would pay me on a certain date. Save the receipt.

The follow-up calls were classic Robert. He wanted me to make sure I got the right kind of cigarettes. His idea was for me to take my phone to Walgreens and hand it to the cashier so that he could tell her.

In one of the follow-ups he had the idea of leaving an old pack on the front steps so that I could take it but he could not locate a pack. He wanted to know about the time of my arrival. I was vague but said I was going out to walk and would have the package in about one hour.

I made my daily walk in the direction of Walgreens and bought his supplies with aid of a clerk who knew a thing or two about smokes so I felt good about the purchase. My walk route was not scenic but it gave a purpose and direction to my only outing on this rainy day in the COVID-19 era.

I tried another way to Robert’s front door but was forced back to puddle jumping. As per his instruction in one of the follow-up calls, I left the package inside the storm door and knocked hard. I could hear him talking on his phone inside what must be his lamp-lit living room.

What I feel somewhat bad about is the note I put inside the bag. In it I told him to forget paying me back the $14, to stop smoking, and not to call me. I told him if he needed serious help to call 911.

The money is nothing to me. The favor was no trouble but getting entangled with Robert is always sticky. I know from past experiences that once he calls a habit is formed. Maybe he just needs to talk, though he has very little breath and is on oxygen.

In one of today’s conversations I asked him about food. He said that Medicare had just sent him a box. “I’ve got food.” Not so sure. Medicare sent?

He talked about a sore on his leg and keeping “stuff” on it. I suspect that he lungs are diseased to the point that the daily walk out of his house down the steps to his car are too much.

What should I do?

My mind goes back to the time I agreed to meet him at his wife’s death bed along with a lawyer. I think back to his children–two were my students–and the entangled history of his residence. Mostly I remember the phone calls.

I will let him sort out his own affairs even though I could and, perhaps, should help.

Moods are expressions of how people feel and countries, being collections of people, have moods, too. COVID-19 hangs ominously over us now but from the threat of an epidemic good can emerge.

We are all in the same dilemma, rich and poor. Rich people can not comfortably remain apart and aloof. The constant emphasis on division that has characterized the national mood since the election of President Trump is likely to wane.

Facts and data matter. Fox News and the Trump administration are notorious for claiming their own set of facts and creating a kind of separate reality. What people insist on in this time of crisis is factual data that is observable by all of us. The President is now less able to just throw out statements on Twitter and haphazardly on Fox News and walk away with the confidence that what he proclaims is accepted as factual.

Science is of the utmost importance. It has taken a beaten since the beginning of Trump administration. Important government posts go un-filled or staffed by those who lack credentials but support whatever the Trump party line is. There will be less patience with conservative pundits who proclaim science, especially in regard to climate change, irrelevant.

COVID-19 proves that government is the best hope for our national good. It is not a dirty word. Business and commerce may still be emphasized by President Trump and his incredibly loyal believers, but the necessity for government rises at a time of crisis. The government is all of us working through a system of laws and traditions and is the only instrument at our disposal for responding to the national emergency.

Unity or common purpose will best the purposeful division that has been in vogue. The angry old mood was bound to come to an end. How long can so many people stay angry? The gloomy spell that has seized us will lift because most citizens will see that the need to work together.

The political consequence will be that the 2020 election will be a setback for the Republicans. Moods emerge and wane and we are all subject to them. From this crisis a calmer mood will emerge that will allow us to work together again.

Saluda Baptist Church

Today I ate a saltine. The taste lingered on my tongue. I thought of taking communion as a boy in Saluda Baptist Church.

I marched up and down the front steps singing Onward Christian Soldiers, threw spit balls into a spinning fan during Sunday School, and rode in a Cadillac hearse to my father’s funeral at 13.

• 

Grasshoppers

By 1958 I was smart enough to identify the make, year, and model of a car from as far away as I could see and kid enough to love grasshoppers. The grasshoppers of my youth were colorful and still overrun Saluda, South Carolina, in the hot summer months.

I zoomed in on the one pictured above a few years back in my mother-in-law’s yard. She didn’t realize that most grasshoppers are green or brown, less flamboyant.

Of course I walked around barefoot, even went to school barefooted, so I was expert at stepping on them. They crunched loud enough to be heard and ran around in groups or families in the swarming time of summer. I delighted in the range of sizes; the smallest were mostly black and less colorful.

I remember looking down to be simultaneously pleased and appalled to see grasshopper guts oozing between my toes and outlining my feet. Catching them was my first form of hunting.

Before the hunt, I would find a jar with a lid that I had already punctured or get a fresh jam jar and poke holes in the metal lid with an ice pick. Once I miscalculated one of my jabs and sent the metal of an ice pick through the soft tissue of my palm so that its tip emerged from my flesh.

Clay Cockrell, my brother Cally, and I would head out on hunting trips to see who could jam the most critters into a jar. Capturing the prey required kneeling down and anticipating the coming jump.

Once in hand the grasshopper tickled and scratched–fascinating to a boy who had not yet formally learned about exoskeletons. In my imagination I was subduing a little monster. Up close they were as fearsome as the monsters I saw in the double feature movies at the Indian Chief movie theater downtown.

Frank Hite’s Grill

A through traveler headed west through Saluda on Church Street would end up in McCormick, South Carolina, almost in Georgia and pass by my old house on West Church Street, four blocks from the site of Frank Hite’s old hamburger cafe downtown Saluda.

How many times a week would I walk past it? Seven or more for sure. I was always afoot. My mother Leona would lock the screen door and bid her children to stay away until meal times. Ever seen Opie Taylor walk around fictional Mayberry? I was a real version of him through the boyhood of the 1950s and 60s, except for the times Leona left my father Harold to take us north to live in or near Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Hite’s was just a business I walked past on my way to the Five and Ten (an elaborate forerunner of today’s Dollar General) or to the F & S Drugstore to peruse the latest comic books. I made daily tours of downtown businesses including C.B. Forrest and Sons Drygoods store where my dad worked.

I took the two doors of Hite’s for granted as a small child. In the early 1960s I started working for Alfred and Miriam Adams at the Saluda Red and White Supermarket just past Truman Trotter’s barbershop four doors down from Hite’s. One of my duties their was to deliver hundred-pound burlap sacks of russet potatoes via hand truck to Mr. Hite’s cafe. I came to know the place first from the back entrance.

Alfred Adams was savvy businessman who had developed a strong following of both black and white customers. He had a white Chevy van with a Red and White store logo on the sides that I drove to deliver groceries–primarily to African-American customers along Boughknight-Ferry Road in their separate part of downtown.

Sometimes I would take lunch in his place on Saturday. I entered via the left-hand door, stepped to counter to order a hamburger grilled in sight with a side order of fries from the potatoes I delivered. Frank patted hamburger to form my meal with a metal spatula chewing an ever present cigar in his mouth. He cooked, nodded when the order was done, and seemed averse to talking. I never saw him without his white paper cap and dirty apron and I am not sure I would have recognized outside of his cafe.

I liked sitting in one of the small tight booths to claim a space for my own next to the junk box music selectors. For a quarter I could hear Ray Charles sang as I ate. I liked is lyrics and delighted in hearing anything by Sam Cooke.

I usually ate alone as my fellow employees never left the Red and White Supermarket during operating hours together. We had about fifteen minutes to grab food and had to be on duty to provide customer service that was unparalleled to patrons who overran our small “supermarket” Thursday through Saturday.

What came to worry me was the door to the right. African-Americans came through that door to order and had little or no space to sit down to eat. The grill behind both doors was one unit but the wall was a kind Berlin Wall separation. I so wanted to go in via the right door for some inexplicable reason.

Black and white customers did not mingle by law and custom. I began to think about the world I lived in by then at age thirteen forward. At night at home I begin to follow the Civil Rights protests led my first and foremost hero, Martin Luther King. My conscience led to formation of a sense of social justice.

The double doors are a symbol of the terrible duality of existence that I took for granted growing up in my white world of separation.

Saluda Swimming Pool

This pool was about a two-mile walk from my house on West Church Street. As I child I would walk to it in the summer nearly every afternoon, coming home with wrinkled skin from near constant immersion in water. Back then the building pictured was longer and the missing extension was built of logs, dank and white-washed. There I changed clothes, showered, and took my wire basket of clothes back to the window at the entrance for safekeeping.

I learned to swim in it around seven or eight, taking lessons from a visiting swim instructor. My pals hung out there and we played childish games like listening to the bottom of the a metal ladder to decipher a message from above. We lined up to do various dives including flips, our most daring feat.

The longer building held a commons areas with a juke box and table tennis table. As I aged, I came to meet up with girls and socialize. Going to the pool was what I did as an elementary school child in summer. My days were arranged so that I could walk to arrive at opening time, 1 o’clock, I believe, and leave at closing, 5 P.M.

It was my world but it, like the right-hand side of Frank Hite’s Grill, was a white world. Back then I never gave a thought to the all-whiteness of it. In my old age I have accumulated all the history books available on my old Saluda and I discovered that the pool was dug as a Civilian Conservation Corps project during to Depression. How it became a club for whites only is not clear.

Indian Chief Theater

Until the summer of my thirteenth year I spent nearly every Saturday afternoon in the Indian Chief. I made sure I had about 50 cents and walked five blocks to reach it. Always a double feature.

I usually arrived early to climb on the two magnolias that used to be on the courthouse lawn just in front. We climbers must have looked like so many monkeys moving through the limbs.

Pay a quarter out front, once in turn left and stop just before the curtain to buy a Zero bar for a nickel or a bag of pop corn. Move way down front, maybe one or two center aisles back, take a seat, and wait for the previews of coming attractions to start. God, how I loved the previews and the big sound and big screen.

Saluda County Courthouse

Go back to 1963 or 1964. Make it Saturday afternoon. I am walking across from the courthouse pushing a two-wheel cart full of groceries to a customer’s car as a bag boy for the Red and White Supermarket. As I moved down the street to follow the customer I would weave in and out of heavy foot traffic.

The wall in front of the courthouse would be near full up with people sitting in the sun. Some would be in overalls but many would appear to be dressed for church. They were an older crowd, mainly men. Strangely they were a mixed crowd of black and white. People just talking, telling stories, watching the street action and passing cars.

Downtown Saluda of the era was like a section of Manhattan or Brooklyn. All hustle and bustle. People came to town to do business and to socialize. Walking around involved dodging pedestrians entering stores or window shopping.

What pleased me but seemed odd was that they were a mixed crowd, black and white.

Leona, Butch, Cally, and Me

That is me on the left around 1953. Butch is just inside the front door on my mother’s right side. I suppose my father Harold took the photo.

We are in what was known as a living room in the 1950s. I was not allowed to hang out in the area too much, though I spent a lot of time in the chair my mother is sitting in.

Why? I was often guilty of “back talking.” For the crime of not directly obeying, I could be sentenced to it for half an hour. Of course, I was switched and I tasted the flavor of a bar of Ivory soap a a few times for saying something I should not have.

The taste of soap is unpleasant and a switch across the back of the legs stings, but I could endure both better than sitting. I tried hard to conduct myself in a way that would keep me out of the chair by the front door.

I tent camped in Greenbelt Park in College Park, Maryland in 2010 and walked through the woods each day for about a week to catch the train to Washington, DC. I walked around the nation’s capitol and found no site that touched me more than the Lincoln Memorial.

In 2007 I retired from teaching after 34 years and set out to see my country via camping in my new REI tent, which has sat on the ground in 47 states. I begin photographing what I saw and established a record of my journey through America on dmforrest.smugmug.com.

The years have eroded my emotions in a way that means I do not tear up often, but I teared up at the Lincoln Memorial. I listened to a park ranger talk among a large crowd of Americans of all types and visitors from countries who languages were foreign to me. I don’t think anyone saw me crying but cry I did all the way over the Vietnam War Memorial.

This land is so deep inside of me as I drive across it to visit parks and camp on the portion of Earth known as the United States of America. I love American top to bottom with all my heart.

My faith in American is shaken today as I listen to the impeachment hearings that so clearly show President Trump to be utterly unfit to lead our country. What shakes my faith is not PresidentTrump per se.

What causes my love of country to falter is the unwavering support of what he calls his base. How can his supporters, my fellow citizens, blindly support everything he does? My imagination can not expand enough to follow how President Trump’s base forgives all of his obvious transgressions of what America is supposed to stand for.

I search my own admiration for Lincoln and more recently President Obama. They were wrong at many turns in their administrations. I admire both but not blindly, utterly, and completely.

I hope to live long enough to see my faith in my fellow citizens return to the bounds of reason. My faith in America is at a low point but not lost. We will eventually return to the nation that I hold in my heart: a nation that respects law and all of its citizens.

Jim Leher (May 19, 1934–January 23, 2020) died today. He was one of my heroes.

This website has a mission statement expressed in What I Plan to Do with DanielForrest.org at the top next to Home. In short I want to set up a record of myself in words so that I can look back at it later, and when I die, those who want to know who Danny Forrest was can look at it, danielforrest.org, and dmforrest.smugmug.com to see who I was if they are interested.

One way to know me is to know whom I admire. Jim Lehrer co-founded PBS’s Newshour. He was a journalist who believed that reporting was about the subject matter and not a form of entertainment. He was intelligent but plainspoken.

His Newshour endures in the fashion it was created. It is one of my mental places of refuge. Watching it is a conduit to what is best about America and humanity in general. Jim Lehrer endures through his legacy.

I wish I could have sat down with him to tell him about the Greyhound bus camper I saw in Gaudalupe Mountains National Park. He loved buses and revered reporting in the best sense of what journalism strives to be.

“Moondust,” Episode 3 Season 3 in Netflix’s television series The Crown, portrays a slice of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband’s life. In it Prince Philip is suffering from middle-aged malaise, complicated by the extreme restraints placed on him as a royal. In another life he would have gone further in his military career, perhaps becoming an astronaut.

We see him living up to his duties by giving enumerable speeches and presentations at various businesses and civic organizations. Outwardly he is a gracious representative of the British monarchy, the epitome of spit and polish. Inwardly he is lost in a near Walter Mitty fantasy stimulated by his very close attention to U.S. astronauts walking on the moon. He longs to be in a role that allows him to test his limits and to be an individual.

At his insistence he is given a private audience with the three astronauts who completed the moon walk achieving “one small step for man and a one giant step for mankind.” He prepares by spreading many newspaper articles across his desk and by reviewing television reports.

He uses his fountain pen to carefully compose salient points and derive questions for the space explorers. He works the way a Supreme Court Judge does to see into what to ask that is most important. He distills the wild fluid that has been boiling through his mind in recent months.

Ushered into the presence of Prince Philip at Windsor Castle, the astronauts sit quietly waiting to answer his questions. They are deep, philosophical questions that have been boiled out of all that he has read, all that he has thought about in regard to to the giant step for mankind.

The moon visitors’ answers are short, unsatisfactory and not at all what he expected until the astronauts begin talking at once finishing each other’s sentences about what they really did: pay attention to their checklists. They had no time to think in the moment. They carried out their tasks in a diligent way not unlike what Prince Philip does as a representative of the British Crown. The wonder and excitement was mostly for the earthbound.

The space explorers became even more animated when they were granted questions of their own for the would-be King of England. They gushed about the number of rooms and the immensity of the palace. A schoolboy buzz of excitement rose as they questioned the questioner about his fantastical existence.

Just before they started their royal gushing, Prince Philip’s face showed what he as a thoughtful middle-aged man understood that they did not: his age and thoughtfulness had allowed him to distill the essence of their out-of-this world tour that their younger selves had not come to realize.

His maturity allowed him wisdom that their younger years were a decade or more away from. He had an epiphany based on the old saw “youth is wasted on the young.” Wasted is not quite right; unobserved in the moment is better.

As portrayed in the program, from that time on Prince Philip was more at ease with himself. He was old enough to understand something that gives him contentment: action is just that and largely separate from examination and understanding in the moment.

What I like about his seeing into wonder of space exploration is key to my own contentment with who and where I am in my life. Out of the tumult of the action of my younger more active life, I am old enough to observe myself in time. I know myself.

I, too, still crave action but I know that understanding comes later through the work of active reflection.

The earliest carnival ride known as the Octopus was built by Lee Eyerly of Eyerly Aircraft Company in Salem, Oregon. It had eight arms with one car per arm that rose up and down, rotated, and spun. It spread across America in the 1930s (Wikipedia).

Esther Takei Nishio used to help her dad with his carnival games. Mr. Takei was a Japanese immigrant who had started with little and built a suite of businesses that included fishing boats, rental property, and a farm. He began with round rings and a few bottles in Venice, California, hosting games of chance and showing off his near perfect English.

He loved Venice and walked around proudly in a dark blue double-breasted suit. His daughter Esther was a successful high school student in 1942 when a notice came that her dad was to be taken away for interrogation and she and her mother were to be sent the Granda War Relocation Camp in Eastern Colorado. They left Venice with the suitcases they could tote.

Long story short Esther died recently and the story of her father and her time in Venice was little known even among the members of her own Presbyterian church.

She became one of the first imprisoned Japanese-American citizens to be released in a test case that paralleled what happened to Rosa Parks. Her experiences from the camp and the period of re-integration were her own private story that Joe Mozingo of The Los Angeles Times uncovered.

I keep circling back to the Octopus and her father. When he was allowed to go home at the end of WWII, all of his equipment and businesses were gone. He had to start over as a gardener. His Octopus had been stolen along with his boats, tractors, and fishing nets.

(data from Column One: She was a test case for resettling detainees of Japanese descent from The Los Angeles Times November 30, 2019, by Joe Mozingo)

Bertha Mae Bevers is 90 and still alive. As a child she immigrated to California’s Central Valley in the Dust Bowl era to work on truck farms. She and her fellow African-Americans lived in Teriston on the edge of the desert in tents. She remembers two houses but a tent was her house. Teriston’s water was irregular and often fowl in the all-black colony .

She looks back on childhood in a town that was beyond where the Okies lived and not as nice. The place was logically uninhabitable.

(data from How Racism Ripples through Rural California Pipes by Jose A. Del Real from The New York Times, November 30, 2019)

The tent part, like the Octopus ride, sticks with me because it has been my luck to be able drive around America tent camping in 47 states including multiple stops in California.

As a child I thought myself brave for riding the Octopus at the state fair. Back from my trip to in the sky, I had something to brag about to my friends and think about for weeks.

Esther and Bertha Mae’s stories are from two of the articles I read in newspapers on Saturday, November 30. Each day I read The Herald (Rock Hill), The Charlotte Observer, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

I like merging my mind with what is happening in the world as a whole. I like understanding what is known about events objectively and finding stories about people I have never heard of. I feel elevated a bit and bigger after reading.

Most people around me think I am odd. They seem to be happy with news feeds via Facebook or Twitter or what spinners posing as journalists say on Fox News. Many think the news is something to be avoided.

Maybe it’s my love of writing that compels me to read what journalists find out about us. Everyone has a story and somehow their stories become part of my story through my daily newspaper reading. My mind often leaps to something I know personally and connects as in the tent and the Octopus.

I like to think I am a better human being for my reading and I seek the grace to endure what life brings in the way Esther did and Bertha Mae continues to do. Our interior stories are mostly silent and unknown. Jose A. Del Real and Joe Mozingo do us a service of incalculable importance in bringing them to our attention.