Point of View: A Good Omen?

“What is truth,” Lisa’s father asked me at East magazine’s party at the Golden Eagle the other day.

“Beauty,” I said.

“And?”

“Ugliness too. Truth’s beauty and ugliness, I’m afraid.”

“And what is the ugliest thing that you can think of?”

“At this moment? Trump?”

“That’s it!”

I had passed the test. We spoke after that of our fathers and lamented wars and tyranny and dark, ego-enslaved psyches from which, it appears, little in the way of enlightenment can come.

I might have gone so far as to liken our new regime to an eclipse, but was happy I hadn’t, for the eclipse a few days on was to prove to be quite the opposite — a phenomenon through which people were united rather than divided, blown away, as it were, by such a rare and wonderful natural occurrence, rather than blown apart by benighted fanatics.

Earlier in the day, I joked that if no one were willing to share eclipse glasses — the library’s supply having been doled out by the time I arrived at its front desk — I would chide them for denying me the chance to realize how insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things. 

But people were quite willing to share. 

“It looks like a croissant,” I said of that part of the sun that was over the moon. 

We were all over the moon in fact. Paul held a colander through whose celestial holes the sun’s light shone onto a slab of white cardboard. We passed the pair of special glasses among us and thought how we might have thought thousands of years ago that two wolves were chasing the sun and the moon.

“If celestial bodies can align, why can’t humans?” Mary asked. 

Maybe it was a good omen. I saw the president look. Did all of the other world leaders? Did they feel like nobody too? I pray they did.