Remembrance Sunday

Yesterday I took a photo walk in Wimbledon and Richmond, in southwest London. My goal was to see Richmond Park, where I'd never been, and I'd intended to travel directly to Richmond on the District Line tube. But the first District Line train went to Wimbledon instead, so I thought, "Well, I'll just go there and walk to Richmond."

It turned out to be a fortuitous decision, because I found myself inadvertently attending Wimbledon's Remembrance Sunday services. I was walking down the high street when I saw a military procession about to begin (above).

So I shot some pictures and followed the procession to the war memorial, at the edge of Wimbledon Common.

There, crowds had gathered to pay respects and remember the war dead.

There were prayers and messages from local clergy, emphasizing the need to care for others without seeing in that action the diminution of ourselves and our countries. One spoke about the Biblical assurance that the meek shall inherit the Earth -- meek in the sense that they put others before themselves -- rather than those who bluster and win "popularity contests."

Someone even brought a Remembrance Sheep, decorated with poppies, flags and what looked like a toy airplane on its back. A small band played, including a very capable bugler, and hymns were sung.

I didn't stay for the entire service, because I had a long way to walk, but it was an interesting, somber yet positive and hopeful experience.

Brain Fatigue

I don't have much to say today. I'm doing my best to stay off Facebook -- at least where political content is concerned -- and just give my brain a rest. The students in my French class yesterday seemed completely unsurprised that the USA elected Trump. I guess after Brexit, they felt like it was inevitable. Apparently only we Trump-opposing Americans were fooling ourselves.

Our garden is in serious need of some routine maintenance, and the dog needs a trip to Hampstead Heath, and I would love to get out and take some photos. So that's likely to be my day.

Did I tell you our dog-sitter cancelled on us for Christmas break? It's not her fault; she got a job in Abu Dhabi. She's still going to stay with Olga for Thanksgiving but we need to find someone else for the two weeks we'll be away in December -- and since our previous dog boarder is also out of the picture, we'll have to find someone new. I have one option but the choices seem to be allowing Olga to go stay with her (expensive) or having her come to stay in our house (crazy expensive). So stay tuned.

(Photo: Mushrooms on Hampstead Heath a few weeks ago.)

Every Day, in Every Way

Do you remember, in "The Return of the Pink Panther," how Chief Inspector Dreyfus keeps repeating Emile Coué's mantra "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better"? That's exactly how I feel. I'm a little unhinged, but I keep telling myself that things will be OK. American democracy is resilient. It's built to contain the power of any one individual. I may be babbling and emotionally unstable at the moment, but every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.

(Of course, in the movie, Dreyfus becomes progressively more insane as the mantra fails him. Hopefully I won't slide down that slippery slope.)

I'm saddened by the remarks I see on Facebook about people cancelling Thanksgiving with family members who voted for Trump, and that kind of thing. One of my coworkers was talking about the need for parts of the United States to secede. That's just not productive thinking. Americans have more similarities than differences. As Michael Moore said this week on Morning Joe, we want the same things for our kids. We just disagree about the best way to attain them. It sucks to be on the losing end of a vote -- and I maintain that part of what makes this vote particularly sucky is the media's complete failure to adequately anticipate a Trump presidency -- but these people are still our family members, and we all have to learn to communicate past this disaster.

Admittedly, I may have trouble talking about the election results with them -- at least without slipping into Dreyfus-like twitching -- but I'm not cancelling family holidays.

It will be interesting to see if physical conflicts, such as family disturbance calls to the police, rise during Thanksgiving and Christmas. I always joke that it's not a family holiday in Florida until there's a fistfight in the front yard -- this comes from my days as a reporter, when I heard plenty of that kind of action on the police scanner -- but I have a feeling that most of the people who would be fistfighting probably voted the Trump side of the ballot.

(Yes, I know. I'm generalizing.)

What really helped me yesterday was seeing this picture of Hillary, hiking in New York the day after conceding. I'm glad to see she's OK, and not curled up in some dark closet. I mean, she's a tough woman. She's been through a lot. I knew she would emerge from this, just as she has from all her past difficulties, but it made me happy to see photographic evidence.

(Photo: A trompe l'oeil delivery van in Cricklewood, last weekend.)

Oh, Lighten Up

I really am experiencing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief. I think I'm somewhere in the depression/acceptance range, though every once in a while I revert to anger. Yesterday I wrote a letter to the public editor at The New York Times, expressing my frustration at the massive fail in their news coverage. I have never taken an election so hard.

But I can't just sit around here numb with depression. We have to move on. Right? So let's talk about something else...

...like our hydroponic lettuce, which has grown quite a bit since my last picture. It's still not enough for a decent salad, unless you're Barbie, but I'm not sure how big we can reasonably expect it to get. I'm impressed it's lasted this long.

Or how about my annual shipment of candy corn, sent by my brother in Florida? This is his idea of birthday humor, because we both loved candy corn as kids and used to eat it by the bag. I'm sure I could buy it in England, if I wanted it, but he insists on mailing it to me as a reminder of our childhoods.

It's so sweet that, as an adult, I can only eat about one piece a day. It's amazing how much sugar kids can consume.

Finally, this is the time of year when we in the UK wear paper poppies on our jackets to honor veterans. Today is Remembrance Day -- the counterpart of Veterans Day in America -- and this Sunday, ceremonies will be held in Whitehall and all across Britain. The two world wars still resonate deeply in British culture as events that transformed the country.

The cold weather has continued to linger and I think it may be here for the duration of the season. We've only hit freezing once, as far as I know, but we're not far above it at night. A few nights ago I brought our plants in from outside, and a huge earthworm was huddled beneath one of the pots, apparently seeking warmth. So I put him in the pot and brought him in too. An earthworm vacation in a balmy locale! I'm sure he was thrilled -- or would have been, if he had a cerebrum.

Thinking Through the Trump Juggernaut

Yesterday was a day of coping, of processing -- not just for me but for a lot of Americans who thought Hillary had it in the bag. News outlets in particular were trying to figure out how they got it so wrong. There were questions about the reporting, polling and statistics that led The New York Times, for example, to put Hillary's chances at better than 90 percent at times. I am frankly quite angry with my trusted news sources, and people like David Brooks, who a month ago confidently called Nov. 9 "the day after Trump loses."

Was Hillary derailed by outright misogyny? Well, perhaps partly. I kept thinking about remarks made by Bishop Gene Robinson back when I met him in 2008, about the fury of the subsiding male patriarchy, and the link between that anger and homophobia. It's not surprising that the same angry patriarchy would resist a woman -- and yet a lot of women voted for Trump, too. As Dave pointed out to me, women can also be sexist, believing they should follow their husband's lead -- or their church's -- at the ballot box. But clearly that doesn't explain everything.

People are just desperate. That's the bottom line. And Hillary admittedly wasn't the strongest candidate with a lot of Americans, who believe her to be somehow duplicitous and self-serving. I don't see it, but that's just me.

I was in a mood of mourning for most of the day -- stunned, sickened disbelief. Of course, I come from the same New York bubble that so confidently predicted her victory. I move within those circles even now, here in London. So it's no surprise that to me, the whole thing seemed like a bolt out of the blue.

I posted a lament on Facebook, linking Trump and Brexit and the growing rise of nationalism. One of my friends replied, "Maybe globalization has been good to you, Steve. Evidently to many it has not." This just pissed me off a little bit. My entire career got torpedoed by a round of job cuts in 2009 -- admittedly linked more to the changing media climate than globalization, but it's all part of the same march toward modernity. I'm now in a job where I make a fraction of what I used to make. Am I better off than some people? Maybe -- I don't have kids to educate or a mortgage to pay. But I've designed my life that way. It wasn't accidental.

I would say I survived globalization. I'm not sure I've prospered, but I've coped. I certainly don't see how supporting Trump addresses the ills of the changing economy.

Anyway, it makes me sad to think we now have that poisonous man -- and his poisonous pals, like Rudy Giuliani -- in the White House, role models for our kids. It makes me sad to think how hard Hillary worked, for years and years, for the presidency, how prepared she was, and how we will no longer benefit from her knowledge and experience. It makes me sad that we missed an opportunity to show, rather than merely tell, our daughters that women can be president, too.

But now I have to move on, as do we all. We have to learn to live with this. (Friends in the U.S. keep saying to me, "Well, at least you live overseas!" And that's true -- adapting may be a bit easier for me. But Trump is still the leader of the free world. He'll be in my face just as much as he'll be in yours.)

Yesterday, as Dave left for work, I said to him, "Thank God you're not a Trump supporter."

He replied, "That would be grounds for divorce!"

(Photos: Sidewalk debris I found while walking Olga on Sunday.)

Dark Days

Holy shit.

I've been up all night, and that's pretty much all I can say. America has had its Brexit.

Do you ever think you might be completely insane? I've been telling people for months that this could not happen. Given all of Donald Trump's vulgarity -- legendary vulgarity that has been the subject of ridicule for decades -- he couldn't possibly win a popular election in a country full of polite, God-fearing voters. Right?!

And yet, apparently he has. (We're still waiting for the official decision, but it certainly looks that way.)

Obviously I'm not the only one who was wrong. The polls were all way off. The New York Times has been telling us for months that Hillary had a better than 90 percent chance of winning -- only slipping into the 80s within the last week or two after the FBI kerfuffle. HOW COULD THE FREAKING NEW YORK TIMES BE SO WRONG?!

This is where my insanity comes in. I've long assumed that people on the right in American politics -- the viewers of Fox News, the readers of Breitbart -- were wallowing in some self-created alternate reality that didn't reflect real life. Because I was reading real life, real facts, in the pages of the publications that I so respect -- The New York Times, The New Yorker -- and seeing those facts reflected in the comments and opinions of my friends.

But maybe I'm the one in the alternate reality. Because that right-wing reality is now REAL.

Clearly many voters were either lying to or not talking to the pollsters -- the same phenomenon we saw in the UK with Brexit.  Probably for the same reasons -- embarrassment at taking a position that is seen as intolerant, inappropriate, un-progressive. (That's my read on the situation, anyway.)

But who knows. All this will be dissected in the coming weeks and months. For now, I'm just shellshocked, and sorry that we as Americans didn't seize an amazing opportunity to make history, and wondering how I'm going to get through a full workday today.

(Photo: Frost-covered leaves in our back garden yesterday morning.)

Today's the Day

Supposedly we got some frost last night. It's still too dark out to tell how the plants fared, but we brought our geraniums indoors. I can definitely see ice on the cars in the street, glistening under the streetlights.

So this is finally it -- election day in the USA! I hope it's the day we put all this Trumpery behind us. If we get a Democratic Senate, all the better. But I have a sinking feeling that even if the predictions are borne out and Hillary wins, we'll be entering a period of unprecedented partisan conflict. Some conservatives hate Hillary so much it's pathological. Her path will not be easy.

Dave and I are thinking we might stay up and watch the election results. I haven't done that in years and years -- it could be fun. I'm not sure how we'll do it -- I guess we could stream one of the American networks here in the UK, or we could watch the BBC. We'll figure something out.

Let's hope voters choose "a hopeful, inclusive, big-hearted America," as Hillary put it, over Trump's dark dystopia.

(Photo: Outside a community center in Cricklewood, on Sunday.)