As Jane rolls off to church, I roll out the door on this, my regular Sunday morning shopping expedition. And there is something in the air. Something watery, vis-à-vis rain, or perhaps drizzle. The effect is unnerving. I haven’t felt real rain on my face for two months in this, the supposedly rainy season in San Francisco. And my reaction? First, I try not to get too buoyant, hoping that this represents the first of many other droplets. The forecast is bleak. Drought. With a chance of more drought. Followed by intermittent drought. With drought appearing late nights and early mornings.

Rolling down the hill toward Canyon Market, the morning feels unusually gray and tenuous. I remember, while still overwhelmed by the oddity, that we are back on daylight savings time. We lost an hour last night. Which sounds like carelessness. No one loses an hour. Hours are more or less nailed down, attached as they are, to the clock. But anyway this particular hour has escaped, and that’s how it is.

Inside the market, everything feels new in a queasy sort of way. I recognize everyone. They recognize me. But nothing is recognizable. Must be the time of day. But it feels like the day of time. I secure all the required goods. We are having friends over for the first time in, well, sometime last year. Remember when the pandemic was ending? I don’t. But my estimate is that in the autumn or late summer, we did have friends over for dinner. And we are doing this sort of thing now. Because once again the pandemic is ending. I don’t trust endings. And I fear them.

I do a strange thing on this particular morning. Despite the drizzly and uninviting weather, I order an avocado toast at the coffee counter in Canyon Market, then head outside to the tiny and very uninviting chairs and tables. I am, of course, alone. No one wants to sit outside on a day like this. But I do anyway, still convinced that no good can come of this. Or to be more precise, something very bad will come out of this. For example, that I will suddenly have to pee. Hardly an unprecedented exigency, but unlikely now. It doesn’t matter, everything being suffused with a sense of dread.

Being addicted to political and socio-political commentators, I was struck by one of the many recent analyses of America’s freak right wing. Well, the pundit was saying in his grim saga of neo-Nazis on the rise, don’t underestimate the pandemic. The plague has unsettled everything. And it has shaken loose the endemic paranoia of the American people. Something about this felt reassuring. COVID-19 won’t go on forever. And the nation may not always be at its worst.

When I wandered into the market this morning, Jerry greeted me in Produce. Like everyone in San Francisco, he is an artist, part of a husband-and-wife musical act. Currently on a hiatus, epidemiological concerns being what they are. He gave me the usual greeting then asked if I was OK. He had spotted something, my momentary drift. Interiority had taken over, zeitgeist manifesting. I told him, yes, probably thinking of the news.

And that’s the other thing. Ukraine. My generation has escaped war. And my nation as escaped the destruction of war, or thinks it has. The chronic level of disturbance in this country, the simmering violence just under the surface, the fascination with guns, all of this came from somewhere. The Civil War being one of our own internal, historical sources. But we’ve been importing the shadow of military violence for a long time. It enters the country with the checked baggage of those returning from the many battles we have fought overseas. We try to keep it out, the way agricultural inspectors screen for fruit flies. But it’s undetectable, unstoppable, and part of our collective shadow. Some of this is doubtless unavoidable. Bringing it to consciousness does help. And we now officially recognize the post traumatic experience. That’s something.

Ukraine. It even brings back the 1950s, the era of hiding under desks, foolishly ducking and covering to escape the neutron blast of nuclear bombs. But much of Ukraine is brought to us, face to face, scene by scene. Social media. Smart phones. And the global economy. Among the poignant pictures billions of people have seen this week, the family in their parkas lying face down in death, still haunts me. The father, lethal wounds in his neck clearly visible, worked for a Silicon Valley company. People around here knew him. They knew him anyway, we all did, we all do, and there are good solid reasons for feeling disquieted.

And I have to remember that Ukrainians look like people I know. And so what? Lots of people don’t, and they get bombed and die in anonymity. And a year from now, if I am so extraordinarily lucky to be aboard Queen Mary 2 and approaching the famously beautiful coast of Vietnam, I will be prepared to acknowledge, honor and atone for The American War. It wasn’t my war, but it was our war, and this is our planet, now being warmed as though in preparation for some ghoulish, intergalactic meal. And like it or not, I will have a place at the table. Onward.