To your heart from mine and pray to keep us safe

My father talks occasionally, obliquely, about having come of sexual age before AIDS and how much he hates that just about the first thing my generation had to learn about sex was that it could kill you. (It was not strictly true of me, but I take his point.) It has crossed my mind more than once lately that I may feel similarly about the children of my friends and their sense of physical community. I am hoping that is depression more than science talking. I may have had to know a world with AIDS, but I didn't have to know a world with smallpox. I suppose we'd have to start funding the World Health Organization again, though. Vote in November and vote these murderers out. The way I feel about the current administration has almost certainly exceeded operating tolerances of witchcraft.

Anyway, I wish to register a formal complaint that on top of missing the freedom of my city and very possibly my city as I knew it for thirty-eight years of my life, I appear to be badly missing New York. I had nothing on the calendar this spring that I had to cancel, but reasons had a habit of turning up. It was never my city, but it was my family's. I have walked it on and off since childhood. It always made me feel at home.

(I am afraid I never spent enough time walking D.C. to miss it as a city, I just miss some people in the metropolitan area intensely. Portland has been curiously distant since the deaths of my grandparents, although I do not like the feeling that their graves right now are off-limits to me. I am attached to Providence, but not yet in ways that have cohered into a map. I have ghosts of New Haven more than I miss it.)