Pictures

I caught a quick glimpse of an old--well, not so very old, fairly recent, really--video shot of you on the television news this morning, Bush. It looked like it must have been shot just a few moments after you originally introduced your Roberts as a Supreme Court Justice nominee: he was making his little gratitude speech and you were standing there beside him, a little behind, a little to one side, and you looked so small, so timid, so little-boy robot-like, Pinocchio, (not a bad analogy when you think of it, Bush! Remember the nose?) erect, hands to your sides, eyes shifting uncomfortably as they do... You had that famous deer-in-the-headlights look about you, and for a second I had that sense once again that you must be feeling totally out of your depth, totally lost beside this big-boy nominee, this Roberts, all confident and smart. I felt almost sorry for you, standing there...

And then this morning also, a forwaded (and doctored, naturally!) picture from a friend and sometime reader of these pages that we write together, you and I: a picture of you and your dad, Bush Senior, fishing merrily in the floodwaters of the city of New Orleans. You have just caught a big one, and your grin suggests you're right at home with your fishing rod and your dad there at your shoulder, beaming with fatherly approval. Behind you both, the ruined city, to which you're clearly both oblivious. Not very nice, Bush. But the picture had some pathetic truth to it.

Speaking of pictures, we have a zillion of them here in our old house. I spent the early hours of the morning sorting through some of them with Ellie: what to keep, what to try to sell, what to put in the garage sale, what to junk... Images. Such powerful stuff, in the hands of artists. Ah well, we started this whole moving process with the desire to scale back on all the stuff we've accumulated, so a lot of it has to go. The work involved in clearing out thirty-five years of living with art and artifacts is simply huge. All of which means, Bush, that our efforts here in the diaries might get a little spotty for a while. I'm surprised, in fact, that I found the time today... And glad to have produced at least a couple of thoughts for you to mull.