A June morning, assessing the situation

The Column: 06.06.25

June is here, the sun shines, the birds sing, and I feel the mood lift probably because we’re spending a week in rural Connecticut with no Times landing at the front door every morning. Ecclesiastes says, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” and that certainly has been true of the Times front page this year. With a very active adolescent president, it’s good to take a break to restore one’s belief in human progress.

Of course the country is deeply divided. The Supreme Court recently declined to take up Maryland and Rhode Island’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which are legal in most states. I don’t know anybody who owns one and if a friend of mine showed me his AR-15 I’d feel funny about him, same as if he showed me his collection of photographs of corpses.

I am old enough to remember riding in the front seat of my dad’s car, standing on the seat beside him as he drove at high speed on twisty roads. Exciting to me at the time but now I can imagine my violent death at the age of six and I am grateful for the seat belt. It was accomplished over the objections of libertarians who felt the government had no right to require restraints, but the restraints were required and though there may be Shakers in rural Maine who claim the religious right to fasten them behind their backs, not around their fronts, they’ve been accepted by 99% of us.

Tampering with smoke detectors in airliner lavatories is now illegal. It didn’t used to be. You used to board a plane and run the risk of a chain-smoker sitting beside you. Now smokers are lonely outlaws rejected by society same as cat stranglers or monument molesters. I don’t know any smokers myself. I was a two-pack-a-day man, addicted to the trinity of a cup of coffee, a typewriter, and a pack of Luckies, and I quit in 1982 by the simple method of not doing it anymore, thereby earning an extra decade, maybe more. An outstanding example of rationalism in my life.

But now I worry about the invasions of technology changing what it’s like to be young. I grew up near the Mississippi River, which my mother warned me not to go near, especially after my cousin Roger drowned, but she couldn’t enforce the ban, having five other children as she did, and I was a good liar, so it was easy to slip away down a dirt road and through the trees and across a ravine and there it was, the magnificent river, flowing down the middle of America, and me, wading into the rapids, thinking of maybe building a raft like Huck Finn’s, and floating toward Iowa, Missouri, and what we used to call the Gulf of Mexico.

Nowadays a boy would have a smartphone in his pocket and his mother could track him and she’d punish him by seizing the phone and the magnificence of the river would not compensate him for the loss of texting and he’d accept his loss of freedom.

I loved the river. Texting is all small talk, Whassup? Where you? I sat on a big rock, bare feet in the water, contemplating great questions: What is it like to be twenty-one or even thirty? And death — what’s that like? What would you do if communists made you choose between renouncing God and drinking a pitcher of warm spit? What would it be like to put your arms around a girl? I’d seen it done by older kids but never tried it myself. What would it feel like? Would we talk? Would I kiss her or should I wait for her to kiss me?

These great riverfront questions are what leads a person to take up writing as a means of self-discovery, and now I worry about chatbot applications giving a kid a quick shortcut to creating stories. Give the bot access to your email and tell it to make you a superhero worshipped by the girls in your class and out come 4,000 words in an accomplished format with dozens of personal references.

As I ponder this, my love has come in the house with her phone and a picture she took of a turtle in the yard. She has used Google Turtle Search to identify it as a snapping turtle. This knowledge causes me no sorrow at all but I do wonder what it’d be like to put my arms around her and so I do. And then I let go so I can write this last sentence.

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