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Thursday morning, not yet six o’clock, I was nearby when my wife cried out with a single sharp syllable. “Aaaa!” she said, as if perceiving danger.
I rushed forth and acted with brave determination. A creature, seemingly big as a mouse, had scurried across our bathroom floor and was still scurrying when I arrived, but I, with two quick taps of a flip-flop, took all the scurry out of it. I identified a Wisconsin centipede, nearly as venomous as its larger cousins that I sometimes had encountered, and once was bitten by, in Hawaii.
When I returned to bed, however, I found on my phone a New York Times headline with implications infinitely more frightening than the intruder in our bathroom:
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Supposedly that was good news, but I decided I would not invest six minutes in reading the article just then. Instead, I would wait till Friday to find out if in fact it was time for sober celebration.
When Friday came, alas, the Times displayed headlines about other American weapons of war, cluster bombs, tits for tats, news that, in my estimation, represented horror and dishonor of a magnitude I had not previously imagined.
Where, I wondered, where and when does this all end?
♦
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