To the golfer who doesn't like unions

"There's no breakfast at O Club because of the unions," the golfer said yesterday, distastefully.

He couldn't name the union that deprived him of his breakfast, only that The O Club was required by law to hire union restaurant workers and had decided against it in the case of breakfast, already employing union workers for lunch and dinner.

This was the same golfer who said on more than one occasion how well The Club was run, and how much money it had in reserve.

This morning I took my breakfast on the patio, having served myself a ripe tangerine and a cup of black coffee. The sun, what little there was of it, felt good.

Two skunks were out playing in my backyard, looking like the little old men they are, like they didn't care if I was there or wasn't there.

I've named one of them Dershowitz and the other McConnell. Dershowitz looked like he was waiting for an Uber, one of those people who talks to himself as he waits; McConnell was walking up and down the patio steps with the aid of a walker, pausing at the planter in which Lea Ann had planted lettuce to nose around, not actually eating the lettuce but trying to bury the young plants, presumably so that he could have them all to himself at some later date when they'd risen to their full height.

There were no dung beetles in sight--it was just me, Dershowitz and McConnell.

I'd brought the morning paper out with me, wedged between my right arm and my stomach as I was already holding the tangerine and the coffee in my left hand. Chemicals from the damp newsprint released themselves onto my right forearm. This is interesting I thought as I tried to find a dry place to sit: it's as if I'd been shooting up the headlines from the daily newspaper. There they were, scrolling across the screen of my lilly white forearm--the impeachment trial, Joe Biden's war chest, Brexit, a photo of Chinese people lined up to buy face masks to protect themselves from the coronavirus...all this stuff was going right into my veins!

The sun rose in a non-partisan fashion, warming up the backyard. I found a place to sit, ate my tangerine and sipped my coffee. Dershowitz had disappeared, leaving only the faintest whiff of his odiferous being, and McConnell moved on, waddling down the steps to nose around in the cameilla bushes.

It occured to me then, sitting alone in the morning sun, that more people, many, many more people, disliked labor unions than liked them, and that my friend at the golf course was one of them, firmly in the majority as I was firmly in the minority. He was ensconced in his ideology of unbridled free enterprise and I was ensconced in my study of the last 100 years of American political history, which wasn't exactly what I thought it had been when I first started my study.

In the meantime, on the golf course, we could agree that we both hoped to live long enough to see how the future would play out.

A skunk-eyed view of my backyard, January 31, 2020, 10:32 a.m. Photo by author.