Thursday

Yes, it’s Thanksgiving again, and I am totally terrified. All of my sources of livelihood are either obsolete or closed down. Gov. Newsom has shut down movie and TV production, not entirely, but enough. Commercials are rarely shooting. I am writing a history book and it’s on a subject I like a lot, but it pays modestly, at best.

So I draw down my savings and I sell my real estate. But that hurts, and it scares me terribly. I try to live one day at a time to avoid despair.

This morning I awakened to my usual bad thoughts and then went back to sleep. I got into my pool, which was way too cold. But I needed a change of thoughts, so I swam anyway. It worked, and I awakened refreshed. I had an egg for brunch and then went to visit my Korean friend, K., whom I was helping with a term paper. She is staying at the ritzy condo of a boyfriend. We talked for a long time, and then I took a nap in her guest bedroom. Outside, a dog barked nonstop. I dreamed that the dog’s owner asked if I had a reliable dentist. What could that mean?

Then, off to Gelson’s, world’s most expensive grocery store, to find nothing I could afford.

I came home and watched the news. The MSM is certainly acting as if Biden has already won. How did that happen?

Then, magic. I went over to my Korean friend’s bedroom. She was all dressed up for dinner in a gauzy white dress with beautiful Tiffany rings on her delicate fingers. Her hair was a soft blonde color.

We went to the dining room of our club. She wore a huge mink coat she had borrowed from my wife. Her teeth were white and childlike. She sat down at the bench of the Steinway piano in our club dance room adjoining the dining room. “I haven’t played since I was eight or nine,” she said, but in her case that was only about 11 years ago. She rolled back her mink sleeves and a lovely, pure mountain stream of Schumann piano concertos rolled, like a slow motion beneficial tsunami out through the clubhouse, out past the terraces and fountains and onto the golf course and into the night sky where the lilting notes attached themselves to a perfect Fall half-moon.

The night was filled with the possibilities of America. My great-grandparents had come here as small businessmen, and my grandparents had fought in our colonial wars. My father was a high adviser to Republican presidents. Now I sit in a ballroom of a desert country club feeling the music lift me to the moon.

This is still America.

Please follow Ben Stein on Twitter @BenStein1944 or on Parler.