This is just funny, because that’s how my sense of humor works: I signed off “social media” when a breathless and unknown someone needed to know what’s in the blue box Melania handed to Michelle  (none of this hoity-toity Mrs this or that you understand, we’re all on a first-name basis here, just folks hanging out in the VIP  section  at the Inauguration of the United States of America’s forty-fifth President). I open the shutters in far-away France, and this is the view outside my window this morning. As you can see, the crowds stretch out beyond the horizon (the rain makes the view a bit blurry but if you concentrate and focus, you can see them, pressing up to the window and reaching way beyond the green tarp covering someone’s roof top in the distance.) They are ecstatic. They wave. I wave back. We commune in universal peace and understanding. We sing  and sway to the birds twittering We Are the World. It’s lovely beyond belief.

Oh, what what what did Melania give Michelle? A blue box. From Tiffany’s. Has to be Tiffany’s. A silver charm bracelet. That’s it. I say it’s a silver charm bracelet. I say she shopped for it personally. What do you say? I say the box is too big for a bracelet. Must be a necklace. Has to be a necklace. Silver, yeah, because gold is reserved for Melania’s gifts to Donald. Ok but what kind of necklace?

And so on.

I open the yellowed pages of my copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned* to one of the many pages marked off with a slip of paper. I read:

“Nowhere else, I believe, were people so much deafened as they were here by the din of life, the furious drumfire of the demands and aspirations of the moment. The noise was such that it drowned out everything else in the world. One after another poets fell silent because they could no longer hear their own voices. The noise drowned out thought and, in the case of millions, conscience as well.”

Ulysses was on his way home when the boat sailed toward the Straight of Messina and the enchanting voices of the sirens. He had to hear them, so he had the men lash him to the mast and told them to plug their ears with wax. The sirens called and their bewitching voices tore at his senses, while the boat  crossed safely between Scylla and Charybdis,

and the blue box from Tiffany’s fell through the waters, unopened.

***

*Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned, A Memoir translated by Max Hayward, Penguin Books ©1974