GOING HOME THE LONG WAY

If going home doesn’t bring the warm and fuzzies, you need to review.

Are bad memories of a bad home town a problem? You should check your map for the best way to get there.

If current times are any measure, being homeward bound is not getting any easier.

I know a sixty-seven year old who went home and came away with a broken heart.

My readers know this person, too.

(Spoiler: it’s me.)

We had a family gathering for my step-dad’s memorial at Sunset Beach. That’s the same place we met up for my mom’s memorial.

This time it felt like the end of an era.

That last time I saw Glenn was through a window screen in his surgery re-hab room. It was a day during covid lockdown a year ago last September 11, a day full of forest fire smoke and virus.

All of the stories of people saying goodbye to their loved ones in covid isolation became one story of people on one side of the window and people on the other side.

One day it was me outside the window telling Glenn I’d be back; the next day it was me and my two adult kids outside the window. We told him how much he meant to us.

On the drive from Portland to Eugene I asked the kids who they considered their #1 Grandpa. The candidates were my dad, my wife’s dad, her step-dad, or Glenn.

They said it was Glenn, and told me why.

That same night he had a medical event that signaled the end. My brother and sister in-law were heroic in his final days.

The Long Way Home

I think of Glenn while the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine plays out around the world.

And on BoomerPdx.

How many Ukrainians will never go home; how many Russian soldiers will need a new home?

I’ve got a feeling Putin could care less about either group. It takes a heart to care, and a broken heart if you care too much.

One person safe from caring too much is Donald Trump.

At his South Carolina rally one of the pundits said:

“President Trump’s approval ratings are higher today than any political leader in the history of South Carolina because true conservatives know him and trust him while the professional politicians get it wrong every time.”

Who has heard Trump’s special brand of shit-talk and asks for more?

Trump is the medical expert who predicted the end of covid where it would disappear like magic.

He believes in magic?

This is the man down-played the vaccine even after he got it.

The same man who cannot accept the the results of an election he lost promises to Save America again.

How can the former TV personality spin the same stink and find a willing audience to suck it up.

He also claimed that Democrats are to blame for empty store shelves, which they aren’t, of course, because store shelves aren’t empty. “This all came out of the stench of the Biden administration,” Trump said.

Finding A Better Way

The best way of going home is finding a credible guide, not a painted up fat man flying in, complaining about the South Carolina cold, and sharing his opinions on global warming.

He dismissed the idea that climate change is anything to worry about. “The oceans are going to rise 1/100th of an inch in the next 300 years and it’s going to kill everybody,” he said sarcastically. “It’s going create more oceanfront property, that’s what it’s going to do.”

A credible guide doesn’t have the same track record of a serial lying, serial cheating man with an understanding of short attention spans.

As a guide, Trump makes up the map, defines what makes a home, and why you should agree with him.

So let’s agree with a multi-married man who fathered a few dregs with each wife, a man with an equally loose relationship with scientific facts and general knowledge, and who panders to the lowest common denominator among us.

This is the best guide to going home?

If you stand with Trump, who stands with Putin, is that home, or just a weak syllogism?

Let’s ask Ukraine.