Stopping Rules

The Mormons knew when to stop. Between the great salt lake and the Wasatch mountains is a place of incredible beauty and a good place to stop. My son John and his wife Missy, after some consideration decided to linger here, so the travelers stopped, pausing for two nights, stopping.The mountains here rear up abruptly from the planes and, especially in winter, define Utah for many of us from elsewhere.Salt Lake City is a blue dot in a red sea and an interactive map in today’s New York Times reminds us how starkly politics , like wealth mark the rural – urban divide across the nation. How to narrow those divides that undermine social cohesion and threaten democracy?

As Phillip Stevens writes today in the FT, populism thrives on nostalgia for an imagined past, a time, ironically, when politicians used to picture a better future. In the great sweeping emptiness that we’ve passed through, how to convey respect, open minds and improve economies?

To us resuscitated investment in public schools and universities, much more comprehensive and faster free internet, high speed rail connections, more windmills and yes, lots of those first generation industrious migrants ( like us) would be a beginning. There’s plenty of room.

Meantime we arrived chez Missy and John bearing gifts.

They have gut renovated their house and turned it into a spacious, light filled delight. Missy converted a pot full of what looked like a bubble bath into a delicious pasta dish catering for Blair’s dietary proclivities – he doesn’t eat things that walk, only things that swim.We were joined by Ivey and (so long) Marianne, her teacher Mom. Ivey, Missy’s buddy, moved from DC to the SLC biotech sector and has a promising stem cell approach to wound healing.

Zoe is a bundle of creative energy, athletic snowbunny and a recent convert from pink to turquoise ( bedroom undergoing a slow shift: jammies a sign of what’s coming.

Zoe’s friends Madeline and Emelia joined us for the formal celebration with the birthday boy. Missy gave him a present he might have written.