Shortcut
I live in the city and often walk to my preferred destinations. Sometimes my walks include shortcuts when going to familiar places. One common shortcut was an alley which contained rats.
While the rats were disturbing and seemingly everywhere, I continued using my shortcut. At some point an intervention occurred – poison. I began to experience the mixed blessing of dying rats instead of living rats. While I hesitated to look at the dead and decaying rats, they were in my path and I couldn’t ignore them. In time, the living rats disappeared. But at the end of my alley shortcut, “my inner rats” remained alive in the office of my psychoanalyst.
Closings
At a funeral, I read Tennyson’s poem, “Crossing the Bar,” written when he was 80. He requested this poem be printed at the end of future publications of his work. He was closing his life’s work knowing he soon would be “crossing the bar.”
Seeing Red
Many countries that have colonized indigenous populations have issued subsequent apologies for earlier atrocities. Since 1999, Denmark has issued three apologies to Greenland, the most recent in 2025, when, in an emotional speech, Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen apologized to the Inuit population for the 1960s forced contraception of thousands of indigenous girls, many as young as 12, denying them the right to decide to have children or not.