Sunday morning, I make breakfast: scones, eggs and bacon omelets, coffee — regular for Geoff, decaf for me — no milk, black and strong and from somewhere in Colombia.

We chat and sip from sturdy Polish pottery mugs, gulping vitamins, this prescription and that. Quiet, focused on our plates, flipping through the Sunday Magazine, Arts & Leisure, Travel and Sunday Style sections of the New York Times, we studiously avoid the front page. 

Stuffed, we shuffle to the sofa in bathrobes and slippers, slurping steaming coffee. I grab the remote, and we click on Meet the Press. Speaker of this, representative from that, foreign correspondents over there, partisan political advisors, spin doctors, newly elected enemies and allies, queens, kings, despots, potentates, generals going and generals coming back.

I watch. I rant. I rave. I ponder. I reach for the tissues. It’s my country, and I’ll cry if I want to. God knows, this is my one constitutional right that’s not threatened yet.