Coastal Empire Update
Editor’s Note: Marlow was stimulated by a rumination on movement here in the Piedmont. There is some of that at Refuge Farm, mostly concerned with re-allocating assorted junk from one storage location in a pleasant urban area to another pleasant one in a setting more rural and benign. There is plenty to talk about this week, but the stage is set for further emotional discussion. The House on Capitol Hill is out for a purported seven-week Recess. Why they should need that now is unknown, though obviously things are a little complex along the Potomac and naturally beyond the understanding of normal citizens.
To set the stage, our Representatives are currently taking a seven week break due to crisis fatigue. They are scheduled to come back sometime in September to deal with an assorted grab-bag of legislative actions that amounts to the equivalent of the ‘normal’ gargantuan Federal Budget, which also has some loose ends. That was an amount of money so big we used to argue about it for an entire legislative year. Now, there is a trillion-dollar bill about ‘infrastructure,’ a term we used to understand, and another bill we don’t estimated at $3.5 trillion. Both are incomplete, but Members will be expected to have actually read them by the time they come back. Or not. The alternative, as has been mentioned, is a full or partial shut-down of the Government. The Staff at Socotra House LLC has chosen to take Marlow’s approach to the current crop of transitory thinking: You can see the Writer’s Section enjoying the local watering hole, Rockwater Park:
Rockwater Park, only a twenty-minute drive to town.
Note to Self: Write a courteous (but stern) note to the grandkids and ask how the heck they intend to pay for all this.
-Vic
Author’s Note: Vic, Local kids are headed this week back to in-person school here. Your line about moving boxes of crap from your Chatham source waters started me on the trail of this piece.
-Marlow
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A Frontier Border Tribe
We aging Cold War dogs are now frontier border tribe shepherds — not group, ward, or clan leaders just mere herd minders keeping our sustenance sources safe from the callous predators du jour. As our Empire day’s end shadows pass over W’s impressionistic garden, neighborhood children run about the sidewalks and tree lawns, smiling, laughing, and children-ing as their schools and playgrounds are finally reopening.
Some on kick scooters overtake the scamperers, hurtling ahead at a breakneck pace. As the scooter riders pump their fists in the air, we onlookers smile at each other — these daily homecomings never get old. It’s a terrestrial version of an unscripted Blue Angels air show.’
Several show moist school clothes which mean they took a detour to wander through Forsyth Park’s water feature for an afternoon cool down.
Like them, we remain cool and refuse to be radicalized unless threatened.
We smile, knowing this scene is being repeated along at least a thousand other blocks all over the city.
Our little kings and queens are home. No face paint, trumpets, or drums just surreal maskless laughing and chitterings.
Our little slice of the Empire kingdom is safe and secure, having got its groove back. We are no longer in the wilderness. Even our little metropolis’s elaborate veins of public transportation have restarted running through its neighborhoods and commercial centers, making workers and customers more available to reopening small businesses.
We elders, now ghost miners, are slowly filing away with our worn-down spear edges at the great memory mound that an Asian-born meteorite hit, creating a cliff-face on one side and a large, steeply sloping hill on the other. Its chaos and deathliness are fading behind us.
Our now ill-fitting, war dog clothes and tools remain closeted in dusty, scuffed moving boxes whose contents haven’t seen the light of day in decades. God willing, they shall remain so.
Copyright © 2021 From My Isle Seat
August 2, 2021
Marlow: Life & Island Times
