It starts at 4:30 am with today’s morning names: George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Gershwin was in my head because when I woke my Apple Music had just finished playing an album of Gershwin songs. Gershwin immediately triggered Berlin, that’s an obvious leap — and also led to Porgy and Bess and the complexity of the relationships between American Jews and Blacks. And Berlin’s name triggered his “God Bless America” (from World War I), an uncomfortably sentimental patriotic anthem that I’ve always disliked, but on the other hand it’s a displaced person’s outpouring of love for the country that found a place for him, and then I was filled with dread, and the fear that my country had no place for me, that the troopers would come and drag me away to a concentration camp.
This is by no means an irrational fear, especially today.
But I pulled myself together and started the day, almost immediately returning to my regimen of video therapy (even before breakfast, and then during breakfast).
