Point of View: Slouching Toward D.C.

Wouldn’t you know it. No sooner do I write a column about how inveterately optimistic and cheery I am than this happens. 

Of course I’m talking about the Steelers, who’ve been losing, losing, losing. When are they going to become great again? 

Their gradual decline, I think, is traceable to those clownish uniforms, the ones dating to 1934. That was a Depression year, right? Depression as in depressing. 

And, as if the Steelers’ swoon weren’t enough, we’ve now got the rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward D.C. to be born. 

Surely some revelation is at hand. . . . It’s mourning in America . . . well, in East Hampton at least.

But mordancy is not my strong suit. I told Mary, who kept vigil until 2:30 a.m., long after I had gone to bed (staying up even longer than I had for the seventh game of the World Series), that I would go take it out on tennis balls in that morning’s stroke-of-the-week clinic. Her last words to me were, “But play with grace.” 

The clinic, with Brian Rubenstein, was just what I needed. I left with my forehand rejuvenated, thanks to his tips, feeling good about myself and ready again to contemplate sui . . . no, no, ready again to contemplate the fall colors.

I must get over it, I must. Life goes on, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony in the fact that I’d (for the most part, for the most part . . . I can’t at this late date make any ironclad guarantees) given up drinking a few days before election night, which I managed to endure in a state of stark, raving sobriety. 

If truth be told, I did think of voting more than once, for the first time that I can recall. Perhaps my late mother-in-law’s name was still on the rolls in Amagansett. . . . Mary said she still had her driver’s license . . . I would buy a wig. . . . It’s the kind of fantasizing that inevitably floats to the surface in phantasmagoric, funhouse mirror times.

One still wonders what the underlying rationale of the seething legions was: A puffed-up billionaire says he will save you, that you should just trust him, and nobody — at least to my knowledge — in the middle class demands that he flesh out the particulars. Will their faith be rewarded by the groper in chief? We’ll see.

But enough. Robin says that rather than mire ourselves in cynicism we must set an example, that that’s the only way. Amen to that.