5 June 2026

Feeling anxious and untethered, Dear Reader?  You are not alone; daily experience is not what it used to be.  In our PC (Post Colbert) era, so much that was customary is no more, and adapting to the ongoing speed and breadth of change a constant challenge.  I loved hearing the legendarily innovative Sir Paul McCartney, a surprise guest on Colbert’s last Late Show, complain about updates on his iPhone:  he bought it, he learned how to use it, why should he have to keep learning how to use it all over again?  Me, I continue to struggle with my new car AND my new phone; the two do not always play nicely together.  Last Friday I was pretty sure I had figured out, definitively, how to get both to communicate.  Android Auto came on as it should, as did the radio station I’d programmed; hurrah for me.  Then, before I could pull out of my parking space, a pop-up appeared on the car screen, obscuring the map that had been there moments before.  I touched it to make it go away, and that turned off the radio.

Exasperated, I exclaimed, “Oh, f*** me!”  To which my CAR replied:  “I don’t respond to harsh language.”  What the hell?  I bought this car, and now it’s chiding me for responding to its maddening technical gotchas with profanity?  Maybe I should be grateful it didn’t take my “request” literally.  Welcome to the robot apocalypse.

With the 250^th Fourth of July approaching, and a series of personal anniversaries involving Memorial Days past continually conjuring and then usurping attempts to stay in the present moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about why we cling to these life markers, metaphorical hash marks on the door jambs we passed through long ago, and strategies to keep the less-than-tonic aspects of nostalgia at bay.  One answer was a dinner party to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of our move into our then brand-new home over Memorial Day weekend 2001, the planning, cooking, and good company distracting from the sadness of my darling husband’s not being at table to join the toast.  David departed this dimension around midnight on 31 May 2019. Exactly seven years later, I went to the ballet.

Pausing before a display in the Citizens Bank Opera House, originally the B. F. Keith Memorial Theatre, theatre architect Thomas W. Lamb’s 1928 masterpiece, I felt grateful for the $38-million dollar restoration that brought so magnificent a building back to life in 2004.  One explanatory sentence glossed the principle behind the restoration:  “The gold leafing was purposefully applied to appear less bright, as if the theatre and all its ornamentation had simply aged, gracefully, over three quarters of a century.” 

Contrast that with what The Guardian (31 Aug 2025) called the “extreme goldening of the Oval Office.”

Oh, I thought, best to head for my seat and avoid that particular rabbit hole of distress.

That was the right move.  A chatty young lady named Leah seated next to me provided pre-show and entr’acte entertainment, speaking Russian to her mom and English to me, detailing her affection for ballet (she’d seen Swan Lake and The Nutcracker before), her stellar performance on a recent math exam (“I’m proud of my A+!”), and the excellence of our orchestra seats (“I’ve never been this close before!).  The lushness of both production and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score kept me, like Leah, raptly focused, enchanted by consummate artists at work on stage, backstage, and in the pit.

I’ve been moved to tears at the ballet before, but the gorgeous mutual adoration of Aurora and her Prince, so exquisitely rendered in dance by Ji Young Chae and Jeffrey Cirio, had a special poignancy for me on the seventh anniversary of my own Prince’s departure.  As the orchestra began Tchaikovsky’s “Grand valse villageoise,” the lyrics from the animated 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty came immediately and unbidden to mind:

I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream
I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam
And I know it’s true that visions are seldom all they seem
But if I know you, I know what you’ll do
You’ll love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream.

Yeah.  That’s pretty much the way it was.  Never underestimate the influence of romance on a young girl.

A gentle rain had begun by the performance’s end, but umbrella in hand, I decided to stroll the Common to collect myself and allow the parking garage traffic to clear.

I was happy to realize it wasn’t just lyrics heard as a seven-year-old that I remembered:  I wanted to revisit the Shaw Memorial, and recalled just where it was, directly across from Charles Bulfinch’s State House.

This, of course, evoked more memories of the first time David brought me there, as well as our visit to Saint-Gaudens’s studio in Cornish, NH.  But what the sculpture memorializes—the courage of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of African American soldiers, so many of whom gave the last full measure of devotion to the Union—diverted my nostalgia in another sad direction.

With the 250^th Fourth of July celebrations only a month away, the Felon-in-Chief (FIC) proposes celebrating with a cage match, the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) Freedom 250, on the south lawn of the White House (!) on 14 June, the FIC’s 80^th birthday (!!).  And his MAGA minions have proposed his portrait on a $250-dollar bill (!!!).  Celebrating the felon who would be king—what could be further from what the Founders envisioned on that July fourth in 1776?

I was back down the rabbit hole.  Time to go home.  Heading back to the parking garage, I passed The Embrace memorial to Coretta Scott King and MLK, Jr., who met in Boston in 1952.  The Embrace, according to an adjacent sign in the Freedom Plaza, “reflects the power of collective action, the role of women in the freedom movement, and the forging of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability.”

Designed by Hank Willis Thomas, the sculpture depicts the couple’s intertwined arms and commemorates the famous hug they shared after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  Right there in American’s oldest public park, Ladies and Gentlemen!  A monument to empathy and self-sacrifice.  Whatever you think of the sculpture (I’m not a fan), it’s pretty much the opposite of a cage match on the Felon-in-Chief’s birthday.

Back in the garage, I was luckily diverted from my return to the rabbit hole by a new problem to solve:  my small VW GTI was pinned in a corner spot with a large truck to my left, a supporting pillar to my right, and an even bigger truck with a long bed parked perpendicular to my space.  If I backed straight out, I would hit it.  Attention must be paid!  Getting my car out of that space took about 15 sweaty minutes, inching forward, backward, forward, backward, adjusting the exit angle ever so slightly with each maneuver.  Finally, with side mirrors folded in and a prayer, I eased out of the spot with nary a scratch.  And there were no more problems exiting Boston.  But when I returned home, I saw that for the second time in three weeks, a bear had deconstructed my elaborate bird feeder system.

Strangely, I didn’t feel all that bad.  Somehow my sad gloom had dissipated.  And then I remembered our late Dean Palmer’s answer when I asked him how he managed to carry on after losing first his wife and then his only child, all the while suffering increasingly debilitating Parkinson’s.  The answer (from a man who navigated bombers over Germany in WW2):  “Life is all problems.  The trick is to stay interested in solving the problems.”

Right.  The next day, 1 June, the seventh anniversary of David’s departure from our home for the final time and the sixth anniversary of my retirement from 43 years as a professor, I had a lovely walk on a new-to-me trail with good friends.

I then went out and bought new support poles for the bird feeders, and booked tickets online for me and another friend to see The Producers at the Ogunquit Playhouse come August.  The day after, I installed the new poles, went to yoga class, got a haircut, and made plans to meet up with another old friend in New York City to see the Raphael show at the Met before it closes.  And I mowed the lawn. Staying interested in solving problems.

So, Dear Reader, here’s to hope and happy anniversaries, the past in the present.