BROCCOLI

     We are not crazy. Things really are catastrophically bad. Jesus lies down daily with a cool compress on His head. My friends and I await the rain of frogs. Of course we experience hopelessness in the face of the murder in Minneapolis, the oil for blood in Venezuela, ICE and the National Guard, the possible military takeover of Greenland and the ensuing dissolution of NATO, and all the ways Trump is trying to avoid the full release of the Epstein files.

     What gives me hope most days is We, the people, and the huge peaceful rallies.

     PS, the Epstein files will be released. Think J.Edgar Hoover and Clyde. On Easter, we remember that you can bury the truth in the ground, but you can’t keep it there. My deepest hope is that the files will be released before Mr. Trump dispatches a nuclear bomb, and that he gives up—and gives himself an award for stopping nuclear war.

     What is happening is beyond most of our ability to capture in words, but I had an event this week that fell on my tiny acre that offered a microcosm of what we are experiencing as a nation—pain, terror, grief.

     The backstory begins three weeks ago when Neal and I were at the movies and I realized I had an unpopped kernel in my mouth. Everything in me said to spit it out—they are basically buttery salty ball bearings—but I ignored my inner voice and bit into it.

     No one better expressed listening to one’s intuition than Mel Brooks in  the 2000 Year Old Man, when he said, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” I wrote a whole chapter on this in my first writing book, Bird by Bird, and mentioned it in my upcoming writing book with Neal, Good Writing. When you are stuck in your work, listen to your broccoli. Your intuition can be trusted.

      Ignoring my broccoli, I bit into the kernel, and split my bridge, a bridge that was only two and a half years old. A bridge is three crowns, so costs about $6000. In other words, not ideal.

      I made an appointment with the new dentist who has taken over my dental practice, where I have felt safe and even secure for thirty-one years. And this is what happened with the first shot of my first visit with the new dentist: She hit the nerve with her needle.

      Did any of you see the movie Marathon Man?

      I’m pretty sure I experienced a full body electrocution, beginning in my gum and traveling the length of my body. I screamed, thrashed, whacking both the dentist and the assistant with my fists, and I cried out, “What have you done?” The dentist and her assistant proceeded to do everything calming and compassionate they could think of, while I cried. I mommied myself, loved on me, and told terrified me that whatever we needed to do was fine. We could stay or go. I listened to my broccoli. It said that I was there, partially numb, and needed the crown. So I stayed, and let the dentist proceed.

      Two hours later, when I told Neal, he was flooded with grief, with rage and despair that this had been done to me. He couldn’t shake his sorrow for me. After stating his plan for revenge, along the lines of Trump’s threat to Minnesota of reckoning and revenge, he did what was possible: Advil, tea, my blanket and the cat. He held me.

       This was all, as I said at the beginning of this little piece, microscopic, but between the betrayal, the shock of electrocution, the tears, and Neal’s pain at what had been done to me, I saw America.

   I saw how more than half of us feel half the time under the reign of Stephen Miller—hurting, terrified, gobsmacked, standing by helplessly as we watch our brothers and sisters being crushed.

     But we have a plan filled with calm and compassion, and that plan is America. The plan is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation. That plan is peaceful civil disobedience—we start with joining Minnesota’s General Strike this coming Friday, by not spending a cent anywhere but at our local, family-owed stores. Those of us who can stand meet at intersections with our No Kings signs, and ones that say, “ICE melts under resistance.”

     Our nation, our family is suffering, and we need to meet that with peace and compassion. My brilliant priest friend, the late Father Terry Richie, always told us, when we felt beyond hope, “Do the next sensible thing for a person in your shape.” That’s the plan. That’s all I need to remember.