Worser

 I had a shudder a couple of nights ago. While I was preparing to send an email, the helpful gremlins inside Yahoo Mail wondered if I didn't want to send this message along to my mother as well. At that moment, a goose walked over my grave. Actually I don't know exactly how the goose came to be walking over my grave when it is my mother who is now interred. I get the gooseflesh thing, but I suppose that it has something to do with a future grave and sending a chill of anticipation. 

Nonetheless, I was taken slightly aback. Those kind of shudders have become more infrequent. Still, my mother's passing continues to haunt me in weird and significant ways.

Like the way I react to the ongoing Three Card Monte game being played in the Rose Garden at the White House just about every day. Follow the red lady calls out the confidence man as he abruptly shuffles the cards face down. These are the crises of the day. Will it be immigration? Will it be the stock market? Will it be the war in Ukraine? 

Or something new? 

As Ferris Bueller once suggested, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That assessment was given back in 1986. The year I graduated from high school. My mother was still alive. 

It was some time after that when my mother and I were discussing current events and she came up with a refrain that continues to rattle about in my skull decades later. She was reflecting on her own time on the planet, during which she watched the world go to war, and come back again. Then she witnessed the fight within our own borders for Civil Rights. And the search of hidden communists. And the election of a criminal to the highest office in our land. 

Nixon. Don't get ahead of us.

During the Reagan and Bush years, she would repeat her mantra: "Things can always get worse." Not exactly the airy aphorism Ferris brought us, but it turns out she wasn't far off.

Another Bush helped to lower our expectations, and all that Hope generated by Barack Obama wasn't enough to keep us from sinking as low as we might ever have imagined. Not satisfied with being fleeced by the confidence man in his first four years, we doubled down and brought him back for a repeat performance. What fresh torment will be on the menu today? It's anyone's guess, because that's all we can do. 

Guess. Where's the red lady? 

Shudder.