If you are like me and missing the NBA playoffs that would have begun about now, I recommend watching,”The Last Dance.” It is the final year of the Bulls championship run. It features Michael Jordan, as you would expect, but there is much more too.  You won’t be disappointed.

Nearly 75 and decided to write my first poem

Life crashes in
Leaves us stranded
Unexpectedly, with no warning
The future fades
Friends die
Hopes wither
Dreams dim
Forever, but hopefully not
The future is still to be written
Each of us can be an author
If we break the fever
If we only try
Take one step.
Just one
And then another
Toward each other
And that distant star
Even if it’s dim
Flickering capriciously in the night sky
Testing our resolve
Our love for self and each other
Our belief in the King’s Beloved Community
Specks of light may be all we see
For now anyway
But who knows
Life surprises
As do people, you and me

“It may be too much to hope that Biden,” Michelle Goldberg wrote, “could equal the achievements of Roosevelt or Johnson. But should he become president, he will, like both of them, inherit a country deep in crisis, where once inconceivable political interventions suddenly appear possible. We can’t know whether he will rise to the opportunity — only that presidencies are shaped by far more than the ideology of the person who achieves the office.” How true!

And yet, the go to position of too many people is to evaluate Biden statically and disconnected from the flow and flux of everyday life, the exigencies of interlocking crises, and the larger political shifts crisscrossing and shaping our politics and culture. Neither Biden nor any politician for that matter live a hermetic existence. They reflect and absorb the wider environment in different and contradictory ways.