There was I, those many years ago, young, naïve, inexperienced, who felt I had never been anywhere beyond Riverside, with my gorgeous wife I was lucky enough to have married who was cosmopolitan because when she was a little girl her mother put her on a train to Iowa to meet some of the rest of the family and her mean cousins played a joke on her and said at the dinner table, “How did you like the fried chicken?” and she said, “It was good,” and they laughed and pointed and said, “It was squirrel! You ate squirrel!” and she one-upped them and said, “It was good.”

I couldn’t compete with stories like that!

I grew up in suburban Monterey Park, and Alhambra and San Gabriel and Los Angeles were foreign exotic.

I read a lot and pronounced my words, and people said, “Are you from Europe?”

I said, “Not yet.”

Then we saved up our money and went to Europe and saw a lot. It’s all over my blog.

One thing I noticed everywhere were the plague columns. They were usually downtown in the square, prominent columns of twisted bodies piled up with faces in agony.

I thought it was strange, or weird, or bizarre, that people would celebrate painful death so openly, and pay sculptors to make ugly.

Then I saw the same attitude in paintings and murals where people were distorted and tortured on their way down to hell.

What is it with Europe?

Then I thought about it some more like right now. Europe has a long history but no monopoly, there were wars and plagues, and people mostly couldn’t read, so they had to be told and shown graphically what life is all about and everybody dies.

My country America has a comparatively short history.

Even so, we have our own wars and plagues, even recently, like right now.

I imagined plague columns to covid, and I felt very tired.

Then I looked around at the world and my country and felt even more tired.

Then I thought, “Wait! That isn’t me! I’m not like that, all gloomy and negative. I like things better, friendly, especially food, which I think about too often, and eat too much.”

So I forgive Europe for its plague columns.

They’re trying, just like me.

So I got back to work and wrote another blog, which you just read thus right now.