Mary McCarthy Steinberg once said, following a trip to California where she'd been effortlessly warmed by a gas fireplace, "I am not worthy." It's a sentiment that I, in the midst of a stay at my wife's cousin's house in Palm Springs, am inclined to echo, at least within the house's confines, which includes a pool and hot tub, whose jets manipulate the bones and muscles of one's body wondrously. All is effortless, all is serene, all is bliss at Major Tom's.
Terror, however, lies not far away — in the form of the Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway that leads to Palm Desert, where our daughter, Johnna, lives with her husband, Wally, and their two water babies, Mary and Lucy, and where the Courtyard Marriott-Desert Springs tennis clinics that I like are. The other day, on the way to one, I found myself driving into an almost blinding white sandstorm nearing the Date Palm entrance to Highway 10.
I am not used to vast spaces, to vastness of any kind, really. I've been sheltered for so long by trees and cute streets and creeks that I yearn, contrary to what Gene Autry sang, to be fenced in. There is a road here named after him, by the way, that leads to the hellish highway.
Make a wrong turn here, and you're practically cast into outer space. We almost gave up hope of getting to Johnna and Wally's yesterday, but finally made it. Which was a good thing, for we rarely see them and the kids, one of whom, Lucy, 7, wants to be a boxer when she grows up. Her 8-year-old sister, Mary, is leaning toward paleontology. I think I can almost say that I've become a human being, a goal I remember setting for myself when in the Army, not quite realizing at the time that it's not the body, but one's thoughts and actions that count, one's spirit.
"I am stirred by the community of feeling that binds me to them," Saint-Exupery said of his flight group near the end of "Flight to Arras," one of the books I took with me to read. The body, he said, was an old crock, it was only relationships that mattered.
I am likewise stirred by the community of feeling that binds me to Bonac, and soon we'll be home.
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All things considered, I found Uri Berliner's recent essay in which he declared that NPR was no longer considering all things in the open-minded way its staff had in the past, to be a thoughtful and measured critique.
It's not as if he, a longtime business editor at NPR, kept his "lack of viewpoint diversity" concerns to himself — he has brought them up at staff meetings in recent years, and has been questioning NPR's coverage since Trump was elected in 2016. He said he was eager to discuss his concerns with the former chief executive, only to be put on interminable hold. And now there is a new head, whom he said he's rooting for, and who was reported in The New York Times's April 17 business section as having said that "in America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen."
Why, then, was he suspended for five days for exercising that right? NPR apparently threatened to fire Uri — with whom I once shared the cost of a rented house on East Hampton's Floyd Street when he worked at The Star — if he did not in the future clear his "work for outside outlets." (He has since resigned.)
I say "shared the cost of a rented house," which is true, but he was never there. Effectively, he helped me rise to the surface after a depressing divorce. It was a most generous act. I cannot think of him as a spiteful person, only as a thoughtful, friendly one who happens to be a thorough-going reporter and editor. I cannot imagine him doing an ill-considered thing.