Good morning.

            America is worrying itself sick. Me too. I wake tense. Terror slashes sleep. Maybe a poem, say I. Only poems are written from stillness to stillness. No stillness here! Trump, Johnson, shutdown, Ukraine, Gaza, climate, what’s my dread du jour? In what closet can I crouch, hands on ears, breath held, till the burglars find their way out?

            Worrying is unhealthful. Science validates this but we know it in our gut. We grow irritable, dyspeptic, suspicious, prone to mistakes. Tasty isn’t as tasty as it was. We drop a dish, it shatters, “Dammit!” we shout, dispersing our displeasure. Fear is viral. What’s wrong with Carll, fellow inmates murmur. What does he know that I don’t?

            The other day I stopped by our library’s used book sale. Volunteers organize these monthly in our local library’s basement. I browse the shelves with lugubrious joy. A buck a book, who can go wrong, one Starbuck latte equals three books. Hot titles of yesterday cool embarrassingly, like bygone fads: How could I ever have liked this! Juvenile and Young Adult sections brim bountifully. I load up for the grandkids. Who knows which they haven’t read? If I bat fifty-fifty with my selection, I’m way ahead of the game at a buck a book.

            I check on the classics section, naturally enough. I smile at classifications (James Michener a classic?!). A few tattered refugees from multi-volume sets by Dickens, Mark Twain. Little I haven’t read, nothing I can’t place. This is where I’ve nestled all these years, in the classics section. (Bulwer-Lytton, anyone?) Nothing here I can’t find on my own shelves in better condition.

            But look, a paperback of Trollope’s Orley Farm, yellowed but unread. I wondered who’d purchased this less celebrated Trollope novel ten, twenty years ago and why. No Orley Farm movie I recall, or BBC series. For some reason I’ve never read Orley Farm – you can never read all of Trollope. Was it on my shelf back home? Maybe, but why not a backup – for a buck a book!

            It stares at me now. Decades unread on one shelf (was its original owner still alive?), will it spend another on mine, till dispatched – to the used book sale – by my heirs? Orley Farm I rank among the books I ought to have read. Trollope, the book jacket reminds me, deemed it his favorite fiction (of fifty!); Orwell commended it. I will read it – when I “get around to it” – but, oh, it’s long, more than eight hundred pages – and who can sink into yesteryear with the world banging at one’s door? Our brains are unicameral: one impression at a time. Trump trumps Orley Farm because he’s incredible, preposterous, dangerous. The incalculable cost of worry is what we’re not thinking about, where our brain isn’t ambling.

            I resent the theft of my peace. All those noisemakers – in politics and the press – stirring up trouble to snag my attention, which they then convert into funds or fame! Trump, as he’s often chortled, sells newspapers – the press would miss him if he were gone. I’ve lavished on Trump ten dozen Orley Farm’s worth of attention – but what choice did I have? No one chooses to panic.

            I fantasize a hushed cool afternoon among bookshelves, no electronics, no combustion engines, raindrops plinking onto flagstones, maybe a fire crackling. I can hear the faint siss as I turn a page. My book is thick on my lap, but never thick enough for all these hours. I yawn. My mind meanders from the page into wondering, pondering. You can feel the peace in my prose.