Defeated. That was the word that came to mind when Jane and I finally made it home. Our trip had been a spectacular one. Or spectacularly adventurous. But at that moment the adventure seemed foolish. Not to mention empty. I knew this was partly a function of mood. We had some bad luck at the end of our trip. Let me go there first. Queen Mary 2 has a way of stopping periodically to helicopter a passenger ashore. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider our fairly recent experience. In March 2023 off the coast of Brisbane, Australia, this happened twice…once near the Great Barrier Reef and once closer to Sydney. The experience is dramatic. Passengers are told to remain in their cabins. Don’t take pictures. And then amid much noise, a helicopter lands at the small platform that is deck 14. Well, you say, so what? Time. That’s so what. We were only a few hours out of Southampton and slightly diverted so that the helicopter from Plymouth could rendezvous with the ship. Which put us off course and off schedule. Which would not be any big deal…if there wasn’t a strange bump in the night a couple of days later, followed by an announcement on our stateroom TV screen that the ship had stopped for “electrical reset.” Yes. I kid you not. This ocean liner with about 5000 human beings aboard stopped and drifted for quite a number of hours. And it is these combined events, the helicoptering and the stoppage, that made us five hours late. Which meant that hundreds of passengers who had planned to get off in Brooklyn and head for various airports all missed their flights. Including us. As for the trip, it should be noted that we spent a wonderful week in Dorset with about 25 members of our respective families, not to mention long-term friends. Plus marvelous time in London. But still the memory lingers of our two encounters with the British medical establishment. First, NHS Dorchester, then the ship’s infirmary, both to change a catheter. Which is a relatively minor procedure, except that this is connected through a sort of Dada neurology to my blood pressure. In this, my every declining neuromuscular system, a full bladder signals the start of a blood pressure festival. My blood just cannot get enough of itself, attempts to burst it channels and banks, vìs-à-vìs stroke or heart attack…and there you are. And where am I now? About to have lunch. So there. I’m going to condense, do a certain amount of tap dancing, then exit the literary world for the briefest of times. But before doing so, worth mentioning that I am back in San Francisco and happily so. And to update this very day, this Wednesday, I have been up and out and down to Mission Street for a very worthwhile orthotics appointment. Which involved two Muni buses and a brief inspection of the inner Mission District. All of which were infused with something that looks an awful lot like optimism. San Francisco keeps being a troubled city. But I keep looking for signs of an upswing in our economic and socioeconomic malaise. And although one didn’t appear at the time, in retrospect, just the fact that an orthotics professional was doing business in a small rented space in a modern building – without a locked front door – right on Mission Street…well, that’s promising. Even more promising is the fact that my book is back from the first editor, soon destined for the second, and I’m still feeling good about the process. In fact, I’m feeling so good that I can even see an end to the process. That is, a sense of resignation/acceptance now suffuses the manuscript. Let us not worry about publishers. Let us not imagine our words bound and printed on a commercial basis, by a non-vanity press. Let us imagine Substack. And let us say amen.