“We are happy to let you know your order #6589207 has shipped . . .” read the email from some company I’d never heard of. This is an instant alarm for me. My alarm level rose when I read what it was that I had not ordered, something called Z-Ammo. Oh wonderful. Now I’m on somebody’s gun list. I had an immediate flashback to the time, about six years ago, when I wrote a mildly pro-gun control article for True/Slant.com. It went viral. I immediately began getting vitriolic emails by the dozens from unknown non-admirers including one that ended, “We know exactly where you live in San Francisco ..” Some gun people you do not want to mess with.
My alarm level dropped back to normal when a little research uncovered the fact that Z-Ammo is a game. When in the world people find time to play all these games is utterly baffling to me, since I’ve never played the first one and I still never have enough time to finish what needs finishing in any given 24 hours. But this essay is not about the shortness of time; it’s about the scariness of these times. So my email address found its way to a toy game company and somebody affixed it to somebody else’s order? That should not result in a panic attack; but sadly the tenor of our times is such that panic is a reflex reaction.
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I am still in recovery from having left my wallet in the women’s restroom at the San Francisco airport late one recent Saturday night. Not an ideal time or place to lose one’s wallet (if indeed there is an ideal time or place for wallet-losing.) Never mind the scary horror of needing a quick replacement driver’s license (Hint: Get to the DMV before 7 AM opening time on a Monday morning. Piece of cake.) Or the endless hassle of cancelling credit cards, getting new library, Kaiser, museums, transportation, you-name-it other cards, tracking down the automatic withdrawals before their withdrawal is automatically rejected. That’s the fun part.
But here is the creepy part: the knowledge that somebody out there is walking around with your photo-ID driver’s license (cancelled though it quickly became,) your business card with all contact information, and your life-at-a-glance thanks to the multiplicity of cards, credit and otherwise, we are inclined to carry. As if random strangers don’t already know the most intimate details of our life, should they choose to search. You pick up a pair of shoes at Zappo’s? Suddenly your shoe interest is accosting you on Facebook, email and wherever in cyberspace you may wish to roam. Ordering via internet being so much handier than going on an all-day shopping trip, faceless (heartless, soulless) data collectors also by now have my lingerie sizes, including the fact I order mastectomy bras and thus have cancer in my history, protective eye wear and thus have macular degeneration – I don’t even want to consider what else Big Brother has on me.
I think this all would be less scary if we were not now in a national place where facts matter little and distortion of truth is accepted on a daily basis. A little paranoia is probably advisable. I am just holding my breath, though, that somebody doesn’t send me an AK-47. Charged to my VISA account.
“I thought I would have a life,” Sharon said to me. “My youngest is now in college, my husband is nearing retirement and we thought we would have a life. Instead, I am juggling time with my father – who’s in an independent living facility but is certainly not independent – and my mother who lives alone in the house she’s had for 40 years. My mother is, how do I put this?, needy. Suddenly she needs help with all sorts of things and I have been designated The Helper.”
That was when one 40-something said, “I wish my parents would consider moving to a place like this; they don’t want to leave their big, three-story house, and I’m afraid I’m going to be trying to take care of them there by the time I hit my fifties. And that’s when Sharon chimed in with the comment above: “Yeah, I thought I would have a life . . .” And Joan said, with a wry smile, “Welcome to the club.”
“Both are alone and needy now, in different, complementary ways,” Robert says. “If they could somehow bring themselves to talk to one another, perhaps they could begin to chisel away at the layers of resentment, hostility and blame that destroyed their relationship.” Apparently this won’t begin to happen any time soon, however, as Robert tells me they maintain no interest in communicating. His mother lives alone in a home she owns and craves companionship; his father has little money left and needs a roof over his head, a more secure one than the stranger’s home in which he’s been unhappily existing for more than two years now. Robert laments they are in a unique position to help each other, if they were open to it. As their only child, Robert sees this as the sensible alternative to driving him crazy. But he also admits they might not reflect upon or even begin to realize just how their current lives affect him.
Two of the latter have serious financial concerns put this way by one: “So I’m spending my retirement savings on my mom, and – considering my choice not to have children myself – wondering what’s going to happen to me.”
It might be a conversation worth having.
You don’t really have to be as old as I am to remember the 
But mostly we wandered the endlessly wandering streets. It was in Bruges that we perfected the phrase employed for so many years throughout so many other cities, from Chicago to Shanghai: “Let’s just walk.”
My experience of China was one two-week excursion with the Oakland Museum Art Guild, which clearly makes me an expert on all things Chinese including its cities. So. While I loved the bustle (and the leafy former French Concession) of Shanghai, and marveled at the frenetic pace of both Shanghai and Beijing, Dunhuang stole my heart. Maybe because it’s been around since – oh, 2,000 B.C., there was something casually settled about Dunhuang. Everyone seemed to move more slowly, wrapped in the desert air, smilingly unconcerned with invading tourists, of whom there were not so many as elsewhere. When I asked one colorfully-dressed woman, through several bungled words and a lot of stupid gestures, if I might take a picture of her adorable tiny daughter, she grinned, pulled me to her side and insisted in a flurry of rapid-fire instructions to a passerby that he take a picture of the three of us, the toddler nestled happily in my arms. How could I not love Dunhuang?
So I set out on my own, equipped with a map by which I planned to count bridges and a total ignorance of the Cyrillic alphabet. My secret weapon was the ability to approach perfect strangers, point to my map and say, “Dostoevsky Musee?” in my most beseeching Southern accent. Six or seven instructors in I wound up with a polite gentleman who suggested, in severe Slavic gestures, that it would be best if he lead me there. I would never otherwise have found the nondescript entry into the apartment where the great man himself lived his last months, a small but remarkable museum that leaves one feeling as if Fyodor just stepped out for a drink. I was mesmerized by St. Petersburg.
A discussion about New Yorkers could’ve been a discussion of city people anywhere. My New Yorker friend argued that his compatriots are rude and insensitive. I said, “I can stand at the top, or the bottom, of any flight of stairs anywhere with my carry-on bag, and within 30 seconds someone will appear and ask, ‘Would you like help with that, ma’am?’ Never fails. People are people, just more densely so in cities.
The envelope is lying right here on my left, now looking altogether spooky. It is even stamped and addressed; that’s how close I was to getting a note into the mail.
On August 15 (or perhaps the hours before August 15 dawned,) a 34-year-old man died in another state. A man who was on life support in a hospital because at some earlier point he had taken the generous step of signing organ donor forms. One of Gerry’s doctors flew to that hospital, examined the heart, confirmed it to be a very good match for Gerry, and boarded another jet plane back to Southern California. Gerry was already opened up, his original heart beating – with a lot of help from outside sources – outside his body.
Bones lay scattered almost as far as the eye could see. It was a deliberate, eloquent memorial to the walruses who once roamed this frozen shore – and were almost eradicated. In the late 19th century, hunters from several continents discovered the free-roaming hordes of these wonderful beasts, who were unfortunately highly prized, primarily for their tusks. One naturalist explained, on a recent expedition I was lucky to take into these Arctic wildernesses, that hunters would gun down a few dozen as they tried to reach the safety of the sea, creating a barrier for those behind them – who would then randomly be killed. 
It was tough and dangerous work – and initially not even all that lucrative. In a series of tragedies, while mining came and went over the next few decades, dozens of miners lost their lives.
Those pristine lands remain as Nature intended, inhabited by walruses, reindeer and polar bears, overflown by puffins and countless other beautiful birds of the air.
