Warm and Rainy Sunday

December 28

My new toy: two pounds and it takes pictures:

A nice long walk in the windy, rainy-but-not-yet-raining sixties. Color is leached out, and it is dark enough in this Sunday mid-afternoon, for lights to be on in people's houses, and that wonderful transparency into windowed golden lives of other people. Families out for walks, kids on Daddy’s back, golden retrievers, boys with action figures on the floor of their porch.

Today’s Times Magazine has articles about people we lost this year, and I was especially touched by Mildred Loving, a long time widow and church woman in rural Virginia whose marriage to a white man back more than forty years became the suit that struck down miscegenation laws in the US. And especially touching, that she came out for gay marriage after long refusing interviews and public life at all.

Whether or not we want to live in public-- whether we hide from it, as she did, or want it, as I do, we are all about the same size.

At Ethical today: a discussion on health care, and I finally got straight the difference between socialized medicine (govt. owns hospitals, pays doctors– like the VA system) versus single payer (govt pays but money goes to various place: private or public). Duh.