Tuesday – Beverly Hills

Just back from a week in Sandpoint in far North Idaho. We were in our home on Lake Pend Oreille. Night after night we could see an immense moon bearing down on us as we lay in our immense bed in our immense nation.

For the entire week we were there, we did not hear one siren. We did not hear one car horn. Nor did we see any police. We did not hear anyone speaking harshly to anyone else.

Four nights ago, my nurse (badly hurt knee and acute spells of nausea when I turned on my TV to CNN by mistake) and I drove to Hill’s Resort on Priest Lake, in even farther north Idaho. The boat slips were empty, but the lake was filled with water of a nacreous, peaceful color. On almost every front yard near the lake was an imposing blue and white TRUMP/PENCE sign.

Almost every person I passed on the sidewalk greeted me by name.

Every night I went to a 24-hour diner and bought huckleberry milkshakes for my wife and our nurses and ate them while staring at the BNSF trains of our friend Mr. Buffett roaring by and feeling the reassuring vibration of the building.

This morning I awakened at our house in Beverly Hills and was greeted by a stack of bills that would bankrupt a sheikhdom, and I could hear a steady stream of police and ambulance sirens all through the day until now, when it is almost midnight.