I sometimes wonder where my wonder’s gone.

My custom, after a strengthening stretch of sleep, is to loll in the pre-dawn dark, fingering topics like a finicky shopper. This one’s too similar, another too trivial, another too grim. This one makes me look fat (or a fathead). This one’s so yesterday, another too esoteric. My lazy-easy deliberations recall a mountain stream trickling downhill, discovering its channel. Sometimes they gush in an irresistible direction – on my birthday, say, or Henry’s, or our anniversary, or Christmas Eve. Other mornings the choice is tortuous. My goal is always the same – to make the most of our time – to brighten your day – if not by the substance of what I say, by its style. I believe prose should be fun to read no matter its matter. Let me inveigh, if I must, invitingly.

Having settled on an opening sentence, my words discover their direction, like Saint Francis’ feet. Sometimes I can predict where I’m heading, at other times my destination startles. Written words cross-examine their speaker: Is this what you really think? I describe my progress as logical – as it must be – grammar insists on it – but in practice it’s as casual as a trek in an unmarked wood. Sometimes Henry leads, as he does during our daily strolls. He sniffs or chases a deer – and I follow.

I must concentrate to keep my words flowing plausibly toward their close. On a good day I feel borne by a tide or dandled like a feather by the breeze. The rare day I’m not enjoying our outing, I quit – better luck next time.

These days, more and more, I’m stalked, spooked. You know by whom. I needn’t even name the Nameless One for he preys on us all. I have vowed not to think of him, banished him from my brain, and there he is in his oleaginous blobbiness, mocking my efforts to evict. No stranger ever trespassed my consciousness this way. I lock my door, tape the windows and in he seeps like a noxious fume.

His arrival commences yet another wrangle, too often concluding in a rant. I don’t want to be talking about him, he’s the worst and deserves the worst, case closed. I can’t even look at the houses he occupies, charging millions to dine with him, lucky souls.

More than political, my revulsion is visceral. He alone did not orchestrate the circumstances of his ascendance: global trends and local mistakes plopped him where he sits. He’s an accident, like the rest of us. But this accident so nauseates I can’t yank away my attention, like Henry nosing a fetid rabbit. He stands against everything I stand for. He repudiates my dream of mankind and eviscerates my hopes for our future. He makes me hate the voters who elected him, whom I’d much rather love. I can neither look at him nor look away. Help!

I indulge in these dirges partly from weakness – I can’t help myself – but also, perhaps, to console you, that you are not alone. Hamlet faced a similar problem in Elsinore. This nightmare in the form of his father kept invading his ease, wrecking his concentration, making him a nervous wreck. Could this ghost be speaking true, that his country was corrupt from head to toe -- and that it was up to him, a jolly college kid, to “set things right”? He investigated the matter, devised a test, and having convinced himself the ghost wasn’t kidding, made the necessary repairs. Yes, at the cost of his life, but don’t we remember him with reverence?

Take heart.