Bewilderment

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WE HIT THE ROAD BY DAWN. Robbie was at his best as the sun came up. He got that from his mother, who could solve dozens of not-for-profit crises before breakfast. That morning, he was willing to treat even banishment as an adventure.

The country had been so volatile when we left, and days of spotty reception left me anxious about what was waiting for us back out here. I waited until we got out of Tennessee to tune in the news. Two headlines in, I regretted it. Hurricane Trent’s hundred-mile-an-hour winds returned a good stretch of the South Fork of Long Island to the sea. U.S. and Chinese fleets were playing nuclear cat-and-mouse off Hainan Island. An eighteen-deck cruise ship named Beauty of the Seas exploded off St. John’s, Antigua, killing scores of passengers and wounding hundreds more. Several groups claimed responsibility. In Philadelphia, stoked by social media flame wars, True America militias attacked a HUE demonstration and three people were dead.

I tried to change the station, but Robbie wouldn’t let me. We have to know, Dad. It’s good citizenship.

Maybe it was. Maybe it was even good parenting. Or maybe it was a colossal error in judgment, to let him go on listening.

Following the fires that had taken out three thousand homes across the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His executive order called for two hundred thousand acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California.

Holy crap, my son shouted. I didn’t bother with a language check. Can he do that?

The news announcer answered for me. In the name of national security, the President could do pretty much anything.

The President is a dung beetle.

“Don’t say that, bud.”

He is.

“Robin, listen to me. You can’t talk like that.”

Why not?

“Because they can put you in jail, now. Remember when we talked about it, last month?”

He fell back in his seat, having second thoughts about good citizenship.

Well, he is. A you-know-what. He’s wrecking everything.

“I know. But we can’t say so out loud. Besides. You’re being totally unfair.”

He looked at me, baffled. Two beats later, he broke into a spectacular grin. You’re right! Dung beetles are pretty amazing.

“Did you know that they navigate by mental maps of the Milky Way?”

He looked at me, mouth agape. The fact seemed too weird to be invented. He pulled out his pocket notebook and made a note to fact-check me when we got home.