Prove All the Pessimists Wrong

“Did you hear the news?" a stocky man with white hair said to me on my way into the bank the other day.“No,” I said, dreading some fresh collapse, attack, or act of God.“They’re doing a recount in Ohio! And if they do it there, they’ll do it everywhere. This Obama: he doesn’t have a mandate!”I saw him  again five minutes later at the dry cleaners and ten minutes after that in the liquor store. He was saying the same thing to everyone he encountered and spoke with such earnest hopefulness it was all I could do not to hug him.Lots of people have been inspiring this sentiment in me over the last few days.There's high feeling out there. It could just be the remnants of Election Day fever.It could be the fact that we can all feel the suffering of those folks in the New York still without power, even if the feeling is coming to us only subliminally. Here are the rest of us buying snow shovels and joshing about this early snow that blew in over the last 48 hours but we’re all cozy in our warm kitchens at the end of the day. Those people are not.They are cold and in the dark and why isn’t there more coverage about their plight in the national media? Is it really because the girl star of the Twilight movies has recently been seen keeping company with someone other than her co-star boyfriend? Did I really hear Matt Lauer talking about that on the Today show yesterday morning as if it mattered?Sometimes you want to throw up your hands.Rush Limbaugh wants to throw up his.The day after the election he said “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.”And they say women are prone to over-reaction (though not the people who actually know any real women.)I like what Joe Klein said at the end of his piece in Time this week. He said "There are some things I can just about guarantee, no matter who wins this election. The fiscal cliff will prove a mirage. There will be a budget deal. Taxes won't be lowered on individuals, but revenues will be raised as deductions and entitlements are severely curtailed for the wealthy. There will be a deal on immigration reform, as the Republican Party will have to embrace our glorious demographics sooner rather than later. We will not become Greece, as Romney suggests. We will struggle along, secure in our freedom, and eventually prosper. That is the American way: we make fools of pessimists.”I love that . Let’s go forward now and live into this American way he speaks of. Let’s get busy and prove all the pessimists wrong.

Smoke 'em If You Got 'em

I shouldn’t be so hard on Newsweek. If it weren’t for Newsweek and TIME I would not only be unaware of who Snookie was I also wouldn’t know that the entire population of the US – 300 million people – is the same as the number of smokers in China. Think of it! That one fact alone! And here we are bitching about the smokers outside Applebee’s wanly dragging on their cigarettes.In fact I remember the night two summers ago when I was killing time outside a Chili’s with two little people no taller than the doorknobs. We were racing up and down the straight grey carpet of sidewalk alongside the place when the larger of the doorknob children stopped in his tracks and stared, open-mouthed: There on the lone bench outside the front door sat two old women squinting through smoke and puffing like steam engines.“What’s HE looking at?” demanded one of them.       “I think he’s just maybe noticing your beautiful blue eyes!” I said - her eyes were really blue - but she just snorted. She knew why he was staring really. She gets that all the time I bet.Well, we all have our weak moments when we make a bad decision and Newsweek’s troubling Diana's quiet grave is just one example. My sister getting caught dragging on a butt in the biggest armchair in our living room at age nine is another. We all do it. But hey it’s the weekend; it's no time to be focusing on the negative. Let’s end instead with this funny video from ONN the Onion’s spoofy news station, poking its own dry kind of fun at another ‘news magazine lite’, Henry Luce’s former baby TIME.

Harness Undone

Last Friday I got to step out of my harness a while when, out in my car and hell-bent on errands, I made a left-hand turn and felt something give.  One minute I could brake and steer  fine; the next I could do neither, and my tame little house cat of a car was screeching like a Tasmanian devil.“Excuse me! Am I … dragging something?” I called to the pedestrian striding along beside me. “No,” he called back, “but it sounds like your belt is loose! I’d get to the closest service station if I were you!”Lucky for me I spotted one not 1,000 yards away. By the time I reached it I was practically braking like Fred Flintstone, two feet on the asphalt. The kid pumping gas went and white at the sight of me and disappeared inside. Seconds later out popped the mechanic on duty.“Some noise!” he said, with cheerful demeanor. “I could hear you behind two closed doors.”   We opened the hood and I looked on, as with the soft inquisitive touch of an old-time family doctor, he began checking this and that.“Tell you what, I have a little time this morning,” he said finally. “If you want to sit over in McDonald’s for 30 minutes I can get up under her and see what’s what.”So I went there, first pausing to text the news to David, possibly the most easy-going person in the galaxy. Then I ordered coffee and the Snack Size Fruit and Walnut Salad and settled myself in a booth. I pulled out the Time Magazine that’s been riding around in my gym bag since last year and fell to reading This is fascinating!" I kept thinking as I read article after article – about Burma and the economy and robotic surgery.After a pleasantly indeterminate drift of time, I looked up and saw the mechanic shouldering past a line of parked cars to find me."It's just the idler pulley," he said. "I can walk over to the dealership across the street there and get one and have you on your way in no time at all."And so it happened. I more coffee, read a few more essays in Time, including one by Joe Klein, author of the novel-made-into-a-film Primary Colors that so accurately captured the nature of a certain 1992 presidential candidate from Little Rock.Then suddenly here came David, who works just close enough so he could sneak away, and together we ate a big old bunch of burgers, mine bunless with the cheese scraped off.Then we crossed the parking lot to get to the service station. There I paid the man  and thanked him and was indeed on my way, just as he'd promised, back in harness and grateful for the small vacation.