I was trying to see if Colorado had had the good sense to kick out their Rep who failed her GED exam multiple times and who gave guided tours of the lower-floor hallways to some of the Jan. 6ers the day before the attack on the Capitol.

I keep waiting for the justice system to hold all the insurrectionists ineligible for public office per Amendment 14 of this thing we call the Constitution. Only one has been so far–but it’s a start.

She’s down by 64 votes with 1% left to count.

But what that search led me to that I hadn’t heard about was that Colorado had a ballot measure (with a 10 point lead tonight) to tax the richest to pay for school lunches for all kids. Across the board. So that getting a free lunch wouldn’t be a stigma to be avoided, so that kids wouldn’t go hungry for the sake of peer pressure, but instead they and everybody else would simply pick up their tray and go sit with their friends to eat. Food would just be food, and much of it would be locally produced, helping out Colorado farmers as well.

I remember how surprised I was in high school when a friend mentioned she had to be at school early. I asked why?

She didn’t want the word to get out, but, she was eligible for a free breakfast as well as lunch.

I didn’t even know they did breakfasts.

She never told me any details about the boats and the guns and the escape and the ones who didn’t make it and having to learn a new language in a place where only a few classmates looked like her. She simply showed up one day, along with a few others, studied hard and learned fast and was friends with everyone who showed the least bit of kindness, grateful to be welcomed and safe and out of the war.

I was so proud of Maryland for doing right by the most vulnerable.

California just voted down a tax on the richest to pay for wildfire protection and electric charging stations after the governor said the rich would just leave.

But wait. If all the states asked those who’ve benefited the most from our political system to contribute a more just share towards maintaining it, where exactly would they all go?

After all, (looking at Boebert) the US has some of the cheapest politicians campaign contributions can buy.

For now.

The politicians are playing musical chairs and racing around those last few unclaimed seats but the music’s about to stop.

And it looks for this moment like, welcome to the new Congress, pretty much the same as the old Congress.

There isn’t a word for relieved+exasperated, but there should be. Exasperieved?

Tuesday we the voters decide whom the faces of our states will be before the rest of the country:  whom we choose and thus who *we* are.

Destruction of the social good? Of the election process? Overt fascism like my father put his life on the line to fight against to the death if need be?

How many people cheering on those committed to ending Medicare and Social Security are thinking this through? Why do the grandmothers need to starve in the streets so that (name any oligarch) can become even more twisted in their substitution of money and power for human empathy and connection?

Why do women have to be afraid of pregnancy for fear that a miscarriage will land them in jail? This has already happened. But only to women who aren’t white.

Do we want a Beto O’Rourke who drove to every county in Texas to meet and listen to people he knew would never vote for him, but whose voices he wanted to hear in hopes that he could represent them well? Who tried to make the gravity of the power of the Senate a personal responsibility both for him and for those whom he met up with? Who made democracy feel real?

Or Herschel Walker, who held a gun to his ex-wife’s head and threatened to kill her? Who paid for his girlfriend’s abortion and tried to coerce a second but would throw you in jail if you had one? Is there anybody that thinks that man would put anybody else’s anything before himself?

More just. More united. More committed to the ideals of democracy. To supporting and cheering on one another as our fellow Americans. United we can stay standing.

The Ukrainians have gotten a taste of what it’s like to have people in power with integrity who care passionately about them and about their country, and they want to preserve that with everything they’ve got.

We should, too, and all we have to wield is a ballot.

We can do this.

VOTE.

I’d never heard him speak publicly about it before. For years they didn’t want to, understandably.

But announcements were made about the 35th anniversary of the annual creche exhibit our church puts on the first weekend every December.

And thus of their son’s accident.

John was twelve, and he and his little brother were on their skateboards crossing the busy street that runs just behind their house and on their way home when a drunk driver blew through her red light. The younger brother took a glancing blow; John took the full force.

I was at that creche exhibit when they suddenly interrupted the crowd to explain that they’d just gotten word: would everybody, of their faith or other faith or of no faith but willing to Think Good Thoughts, be willing to kneel together with them and join with them as they offered a prayer for John?

And so we did. The feeling of hundreds of hearts calling out together towards someone else’s child was a powerful experience never to be forgotten.

It did not look good. But he was still hanging in there.

The thing, though, is that what his dad did for a living as a neuroscientist was to try to help people recover from major brain injuries. His biggest fear as a parent had always been that such might happen to one of his children, and now here it had.

John was in a coma, and his dad knew that every day in that coma was a step away from future recovery.

Two weeks later, he did wake up. He had aphasia. Language, both giving and receiving, was scrambled.

And now here’s where part of my story sneaks a word in (though I didn’t interrupt his to say it.) I had a kid in kindergarten (edit: first grade) and two preschoolers and a friend in the ward had a two year old. Lisa thought we should go visit John at Children’s Hospital in Oakland (the one at Stanford not having been built yet.)

So we did. Once a week we piled in a car during school hours and drove an hour each way to go visit him, one at a time per the rules while the other entertained the littles in the lobby. We became very close during all this.

Lisa had been a cop in Hayward in a previous life so one day when a bad accident entirely shut down the freeway, the only day John’s mom was unable to go see her son, Lisa said, Turn off at that ramp I know all the back roads we can do this, and so John was not left alone that day after all. We made it through.

He spent six weeks in brain rehab and all in all it was I think three months before he was able to come home.

His dad said he went through special ed from there on out and it took him six years to graduate from college–but he did it. He’s married to a wonderful woman now and they have two little boys.

I remember the description of the entire middle school turning out to welcome him back, festooning his wheelchair with enough helium balloons to look like the house in the movie Up.

A year later I was diagnosed with lupus. I’m allergic to all NSAIDs and my arthritis was so severe I was eating with plastic utensils because I couldn’t lift the metal ones. I got told the best thing I could do for it was to start going to a warm indoor therapy pool nearby that was only open to those with a doctor’s prescription to get in.

I had two preschoolers. How on earth was I going to pay for a sitter every day?

Lisa took a deep breath and said, Tell you what: I’ll watch yours if you’ll watch mine right after while I work out in a gym.

She gave me the gift of her mornings Monday through Friday for two years. I could never ever have asked anybody that, but she offered and she did it and our boys grew up as brothers for that time. I expected to keep doing that for her as my youngest went off to kindergarten and she had two more children, but it was not to be; they moved to Michigan.

So. John’s dad told his story. His greatest fear had come true. The whole world had turned out in support in such amazing, inspiring, wonderful ways and his son was so happy being a dad and husband.

When he got done telling this, I asked for the mic.

And what I said was not all the stuff about me nor Lisa at all, but this: that about six years later, during the holiday season, I had been stuck in the backup of an Avoid the 13 sobriety checkpoint where they stopped every car on the main drag and made everyone wait to be checked out by the police to make sure they were driving sober.

The kicker is that they were holding it exactly where John and his brother had been hit, and that went deep for me.

Those checkpoints were deeply unpopular (and sued over) and I knew it.

So I found myself sitting down one day and writing a letter to the police department (by hand in those days!) to be a rare voice of support, telling them it was important to me that they did that.

I hadn’t planned on saying it when I sat down to write but it demanded that I add it, so I did: I explained that my friends’ 12-year-old son and his brother had been hit by a drunk, at that very intersection as a matter of fact, and John had not been expected to survive.

But he did, I said, thanking the first responders; I just wanted you to know he’s in college now.

I sent that off and thought, well, that’s that. Didn’t expect to hear anything back.

A heartfelt letter from the chief of police showed up in the mail.

That checkpoint had been set up where those boys had been hit specifically in John’s memory.

And he told me:

I was the cop who had to knock on that family’s door and tell them what had happened to their son. I never knew how it turned out for him. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

We did it. We delivered our ballots at City Hall. It felt so deeply satisfying to know we’d done our part. The rain let up for the time it took to walk from the car and back before setting in again as if cheering us on.

Now we wait.

I grew up next to a watershed preserve, a creek surrounded by park extending ten miles as it flowed down to the Potomac River.

So to my eyes it was the weirdest thing in the world to see creeks in California that in the 1950’s had been turned into concrete-lined, sharp-angled corridors. You, water! You go here, only, and yo, developers, build hereandhereandhereandhereandhere to your heart’s desire.

I found this article today: beavers were gone from this area since the Gold Rush, 160 years ago.

In the 1980’s, two of them were being considered a nuisance in the Central Valley.

California has a strict law re relocating wild animals: you can’t. If you trap one you can kill it mercifully if it’s not endangered in any way–or you can release it right there where you found it, after, y’know, giving it a good scolding about trespassing or something.

They didn’t quite say Fish and Game got permission or whether they’re the ones who grant the permission anyway so they just did what they wanted to or what (the article made it sound like the answer to the reporter was just don’t ask, guys), but, what they actually did in this one instance was to trap that pair where they weren’t wanted.

And then release them in the mountains above here near a large reservoir to see what they would do when they had the whole mountain to themselves. Either mountain lions or coyotes would get them or we would get to see what it’s like to have an actual beaver dam in operation. Because, science! Plus a chance to right a historical wrong.

Beavers looked at that concrete dam and chortled, Hey, let us show you how it’s done! Went right around it at some point.

The creek below there feeds into a river in San Jose, and it turns out they can manage the saltwater of the Bay just fine as a way to find their way up new creeks. Which, slowly, gradually, they’ve been doing.

San Jose Water Department went, Since when do we have beavers?! and wanted to get rid of them. They got told no, and that the beavers would do far more good than harm.

They are a keystone species. Where they’ve shown up, all kinds of things are making a comeback already.

But they don’t touch those concrete creeks. That would be slapping an Eat Me sign on their backs. Also, Starve Me. Which means that to expand further they have to find the one further north where the two counties couldn’t agree in the post-War era as to which one would have to pay for all that, with influential people fighting it anyway, and the officials threw up their hands and left the banks in their natural state.

We’re talking the richest part of town on the south side of that county line, with bigger house lots with great views of the creek and lots of trees near the water line that those beavers might find tasty and which might soon upset some people.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg could take up wildlife photography.

Work was still all hands on deck for him while I had an appointment to get the car damage appraised after waiting two weeks to get in, and given how booked they’ve been, standing them up on an hour or two’s notice would have been just too rude. And I had to return the at-home sleep-study equipment within 24 hours. Rescheduling that study (again) would have pushed it to January at the earliest.

So I drove him to work again.

I showed up at the body shop at 9:59, inwardly proud of myself for getting there on time, and the lady blinked. I was who? With an appointment for when? Not on their schedule. She called the nearest shop in their chain, nope, and turned back to me: Had I gotten a confirmation email?

No, I told her, and I thought that was strange because usually you do.

Which was the tip off that I had been here and they had done that car before. The other time Richard got hit on the freeway, as a matter of fact. Note that their nearest competitor was right across the driveway and I had in fact parked facing that company’s building because that’s where there was room to. I was a repeat customer, but I had options.

She got up and talked quietly to her boss in the next room.

He decided no harm done and came out and took pictures of the car to get things started for the insurance company.

I was not expecting him to ask, Have you had your catalytic converter stolen?

Yes, twice.

That down there where it’s bent away from the door–that isn’t from the accident, which is all up here: that’s where they jacked up the car to get at it. I’ve seen so so so many of these, I know what it is. The insurance won’t cover that.

He gave me a quote on the spot for fixing it and a scratch on the other side. I guess I looked skeptical because he almost immediately knocked a hundred bucks off.

Come back in two weeks for the actual work.

After that I got the wires and monitors and belt and questionnaire all back to the clinic, glad to be done with that. Hopefully.

But for the record: I think I’d recommend not having to wake up early-ish and driving ninety rush hour minutes right after a sleep study night. It worked out okay but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I woke up too tired.

Actually, I do know: I would have called both and bailed (and paid big bucks for hogging the medical equipment an extra day and messing up their schedule.) But I have no desire to do to another driver what was done to me years ago.

Okay, all that aside: it’s pretty ironic to be getting up early three days in a row right before the Fall Back time on the clock.

I’m just going to jump the gun a little early here and sleep in tomorrow.

Little cloudbursts today, somehow never while I was actually driving.

Which I was doing for three and a half rush hour hours, just like yesterday. How on earth do people who have to do this every day do this every day?

It’s been a very unusual week where he had to be in the office and I had waited months for those appointments. So we made it work. There was a cashere/merino/silk skein‘s worth of bridge tolls. (Rainbow came today. I’m going to steal their photo to show it off because my phone’s pretty dead after running Waze to dodge the worst of the traffic.) 

And yet.

It was like the good old days, when his commute was three miles and he got to decompress by having me come get him, with the two of us together on his way home with no other responsibilities in those few moments but to be focused on each other. We’d missed that.

He got lots and lots of decompression time.

(Links so I can find them later: California major reservoir levels  and 24 hour rainfall totals)

Somehow all that time at the wheel helped make me feel a need to knit and to finish an old project, so a plain black hat that had been boring my needles to death is now done and my circs freed up for something a whole lot more fun that was waiting when we walked in the door tonight. And I didn’t even expect it to arrive yet!

We’ve had so many rain forecasts these past three years that have sounded so promising and then have fizzled out to nothing, including last week. We were expecting today’s to do that too.

We got a strong cloudburst.

I had to drive to a doctor appointment up the freeway in the middle of that and never mind our grumbles about Californians who have no idea how to drive in a real storm because they’ve never experienced one–people were actually slowing down for it.

In the hidden noontime sun, the bright white sprays from the tires ahead against the darkened skies were creating rising car ghosts.