Last things

It's Thursday night and I'm here at Rockville High School for the annual cluster concert. Old jokes being the best jokes, I will tell you that the cluster concert is a cluster in more ways than one. When they tell you that motherhood is sacrifice, they were talking about the cluster concert. 

The cluster concert is a performance of all of the music ensembles at Rockville and its feeder schools, known collectively as the cluster. This is my first cluster concert since my older son's senior year, in 2019. The concerts were cancelled in 2020 and 2021, and I missed it in 2022.

Well I didn't really miss it if you know what I mean. 

The concert is different this year. In past years, the elementary school band played, followed by the middle school bands, and then the high schoolers would take the stage, resplendent in concert dress. Their entrance always brought the house down, partly because they look so nice, and partly because their arrival is a visible reminder that no one will have to listen to an elementary school band for another year. 

This year, the ensembles are combined. Symphonic Band, Orchestra, and Jazz Band, each with musicians from all of the schools. It's just as well. No one who isn't closely related to the elementary school kids should have to listen to them playing musical instruments. 

I'm just keeping it real. 

*****

It's intermission now. The Symphonic Band played very well and now we await the orchestra. This new format is less cluster and more concert and I'm all for it. As always I chose my parking spot carefully and I have already planned my exit strategy. I'm not a senior parent for nothing. 

But that's why I'm writing about this silly thing to begin with. It's because I am a senior parent, and everything is the last thing. It's the last cluster concert. Saturday morning will be the last regular season swim meet before the championship season begins. The last team dinner, the last baseball game, the last spring concert - 8 years as a Rockville High School parent, all coming to an end, and the year is passing with breakneck speed. I'm not ready but I'll have to get ready. 

*****

It's Friday now, and we're doing a college visit today. The swim coach at a small Catholic college that my son never even considered invited him to come for a tour and breakfast with the team so here we are. I think he was just flattered to be recruited at first, but after a full court press visit that included breakfast with the team (waffles are very convincing) and a 1:1 meeting with the coach, who made clear that he wants my son on his team, I think that this small college is now his first choice. It’s not as prestigious as Villanova and Virginia Tech, but prestige is not all it’s cracked up to be. Ted Cruz and Jared Kushner went to Harvard, know what I mean?

*****

And back to last things. It's Saturday morning now and I'm sitting on a bleacher at the Germantown Indoor Swim Center, waiting for the officials briefing to begin. I'm a stroke and turn judge to today, not the referee, so I just have to attend the briefing. I don't have to conduct it. 

It's the last regular season meet of the year and my last regular season meet ever. More importantly, it's senior day, and there will be a little senior send-off during the break. All three schools competing today will be recognizing their seniors so it could go on for a few minutes. 

*****

And that's a wrap. The meet was a blur of splashy starts and fast races and screaming kids, and the senior send-off went by so quickly that I almost missed it. Names were called, senior swimmers shook hands with their coaches, and the seniors, balloons in hand, lined up for photos. I didn't get a good shot. I hope that someone else did. A few minutes later, I saw my son on deck. He held up his arm to show me the curly black and orange ribbons wrapped around his wrist. “My balloon broke,” he said, shrugging. 

Feudal

Did you know that it’s possible to write a whole darn thing and then forget completely about it? Yesterday, for example, I started compiling my 2022 book list, and I started writing about Cloud Cuckoo Land, thinking to myself that it was one of the few books that I had read and not written about. And then as I started to write about it, I remembered that I actually HAD written about it. 

Did you also know that Google Docs will allow you to give two different documents the very same name? That doesn’t seem wise. 

Anyway, here is what I wrote about Cloud Cuckoo Land, the book; by way of “Heartburn,” the movie, just about a year ago. There’s a connection, however tenuous, I promise. 

*****

Last week on the very cold MLK Day holiday, I watched “Heartburn” on Hulu. I wrote about the Nora Ephron book upon which this movie is based right here. I don’t think that the movie was particularly popular or well-received when it was released in 1986, but it’s a good movie, as 80s movies go. Or maybe it’s not so much a good movie as a movie worth watching because of the great acting and the amazing scenery and sets and costumes: upper middle class homes and gardens, and spot-on bourgeois bohemian fashion, and mid-80s Washington and NY street and restaurant scenes. So I enjoyed watching “Heartburn,” but of course, it doesn’t hold up in a lot of ways. Few 80s movies do. 

*****

In the first act wedding scene, which takes place in Rachel’s father’s dream of an Upper West Side pre-war apartment, I noticed a Black guest. The actress who played her looked like Anna Maria Horsford (and I later looked her up on IMDB, and she was Anna Maria Horsford, thus explaining the resemblance). I thought that maybe Mike Nichols, who directed "Heartburn," thought that representation was important, and that’s why he made sure that his wealthy and artsy but powerful characters had Black friends who would naturally be invited to their weddings. 

LOL, no. Eventually we learn that Horsford’s character is not a wedding guest at all. She is Rachel’s father’s housekeeper, Della. There’s a scene in which we see poor Della minding her own business, doing her job, when Meryl Streep's Rachel (who has just left her philandering husband, played by Jack Nicholson) blows into the apartment like a hurricane, hugely pregnant, all wild hair and maternity sack dress and oversized big-shouldered jacket, with a toddler in one hand, and a Kenyan sisal tote bag* slung over the opposite shoulder. She takes up a lot of space. In five seconds, the large room is filled with nothing but Rachel. 

She flings her jacket and her bags and her personal belongings all over the apartment that Della is trying to clean, and immediately asks Della to babysit so that she can run right back out the door to do New York writer things. There is no mention of any additional compensation for the extra work, which is exactly what you would expect from Rachel and her ilk, now and then. What makes the scene typical of the 80s is that there is no real acknowledgement that for the housekeeper, caring for a toddler IS extra work in the first place. Spoiler alert: Della agrees to take care of the baby, of course, because what choice does she have? 

*****

In some ways, the whole movie is like that, all about the pretty much feudal relationships between upper class Washingtonians and New Yorkers and the people who clean their houses and care for their children and deliver their groceries. We don’t know if Rachel’s own nanny, Juanita (played by the same actress who played the housekeepers in “Clueless” and “Regarding Henry”) receives vacation pay or Social Security or any of the formal acknowledgements of the dignity and worth of her work that Rachel and Mark take for granted, but it’s safe to assume that she doesn’t. It was widely accepted then (as it is now) that only certain occupations are worthy of respect and therefore worthy of fair compensation, job security, dignified working conditions and treatment, and benefits. 

Still, working class people were better off then, in a lot of ways. Even if Juanita doesn’t receive benefits, she at least knows who her employers are. They interact with her daily. They pay her directly, cash in hand, not through a third party and certainly not through a mobile app. The grocery delivery man receives a tip from Catherine O’Hara, but he also gets a paycheck from the grocery store. He’s not subject to the vagaries of a five-star rating system designed by software developers whom he will never meet and who will never have a clue about any aspect of his job. 

*****

Wait, did you not come here for Soviet social realist film criticism? Yes, sorry, that took a bit of a turn. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is that I was an adult–a barely formed adult, but still an adult–when that movie came out, and the world that it depicts is almost completely gone. And in some ways, good riddance, obviously. But the gap between the working class and the well off, though it was wide enough at the time, still seemed bridgeable. Now that gap is more of a chasm, vast and ever widening; and the system of work and compensation has been so disrupted by the high tech industry (and not for the better) that it feels like the rich and powerful will continue to get richer and more powerful and the rest of us will be ever more subject to their whims until in 30 years or so we become a 5G feudal state. 

*****

I thought that maybe I had made up the phrase “5G feudal state” but I Googled it and found that of course somebody else got to it first. Did I say thirty years? Make it ten.

*****

Sometimes after I watch a movie, I’ll read the book upon which it is based but I have already read Heartburn and as we have already established, the book doesn’t hold up any better than the movie. It’s not Nora’s best. I like her essays better than her fiction. 

Instead, I read Cloud Cuckoo Land. I started this book with absolutely zero knowledge of the plot or the characters or the themes or anything at all. A friend whose taste I share recommended it and so I just opened it and started reading. My friend was not wrong - it’s a great book. The plot bounces around in time and space, moving the reader back and forth between 20th and 21st century America and the (of course) post-apocalyptic future and 15th century Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul). 

I won’t reveal any plot details except that there’s a part that involves an infectious disease and a quarantine. I don’t know if Anthony Doerr started writing Cloud Cuckoo Land before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but I guess that he did because the research and plotting for a book this complex must have taken more than two years. Well, it would have taken me more than two years, anyway. 

*****

The Cloud Cuckoo Land plot line that involves the virulent disease takes place in the post-apocalyptic future and given the last two years of plague, you’d think that this would be the most compelling part of the book. But it’s the 15th century scenes that seem most modern and relevant to me right now, filled as they are with desperately poor vassals and slaves and indentured servants who are utterly powerless and subject entirely to the whims and demands of their wealthy and powerful overlords. I don’t think that it’s likely that a small remnant of humanity will end up on a spaceship on a decades-long journey to a possibly hospitable planet (OK, one spoiler) but I do think that it’s likely (very) that we will return to a late middle ages social and economic and political system. It’s already happening. The 5G feudal state is under construction. 

*****

Again, I wrote most of this about a year ago, when people still thought Elon Musk was a genius. Things change in a year. 

We just had a three-day weekend, so we drove back to Philadelphia where we had just been two weeks ago so that my high school senior could visit Villanova. My sister lives ten minutes away from Villanova and she is also an alumna. My son is interested in several schools but his aunt is pushing him toward Villanova. 

My children are quite different from one another in many ways, including politics. My older son is a Bernie Sanders and AOC fan, and very attracted to radical progressive ideals. My younger son hates Trump but has no other thoughts about or interest in politics. 

Older son is a student at the University of Maryland. He's opposed to private colleges and universities, on principle, but he's still on winter break so he tagged along for the trip. We stopped at the bookstore and I asked him jokingly if he wanted a Villanova sweatshirt. 

He scoffed. "No," he said. "And I also don’t want golf clubs or a sailboat or a Vineyard Vines belt with little whales on it.” 

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “If you’re out here wearing a Villanova hoodie, you can’t stick it to the man because you are the man.” We said the “because you are the man” part in unison. This is one of my favorite jokes, and my children know it well. 

*****

And so I’m still hopeful for the future. Young people aren’t going to knuckle under to high -tech feudalism, not without a fight. Yes, they're all scrolling TikTok all the livelong day, but they’re not stupid. They are immune to the charisma of genius tech bro disruptors. They are wise to the gig work sector’s false promises of “flexibility.” They are neither afraid of nor awed by the Internet. They are less materialistic than their parents and grandparents, less worried about the right house and the right car. They aren’t afraid to fight the power, whatever and wherever and whoever it is. They aren’t afraid to stick it to the man. 

*****

* I used to have one of those tote bags. I bought it in 1985 when I was a student at Temple University, after months of seeing them on the shoulders of the most stylish students on campus. Some things never change. 

The smell of snow

I remember when I first noticed that I could smell when snow was coming. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade and it was a school day in late December, just a day or so before the last day of school before Christmas vacation. My classmates and I were giddy with anticipation. We weren't allowed to run at recess because our schoolyard was nothing but a tiny cement quad surrounded by the school building, the enormous stone church, the parish hall, and the convent with its cemetery for a backyard. It sounds like 19th century Dublin but it was a parish Catholic school in 1970s Philadelphia. We weren't allowed to run because there was no room to run freely without crashing into other kids, and the cement wasn't kind to the bodies that landed on it. Arms got broken. Foreheads split open and bled like geysers. The nuns, who weren't always kind or reasonable, were entirely justified in enforcing the no running rule. But with vacation approaching, they threw up their hands. They knew and we knew and they knew that we knew that there was no stopping kids from running with Christmas on the immediate horizon.  

We didn't run during recess, we 6th and 7th and 8th grade girls. We didn't really even play anymore, although sometimes a girl would bring a Chinese jump rope to school and we'd jump rope, for old time's sake. But mostly, we stood around in little circles and talked. 

You couldn't just say anything. The bossy girls didn't let us talk about schoolwork or our families (except to complain about unfairly strict parents) or books or current events. You could complain about nuns and teachers, you could say mean things about other girls, you could talk about pop music (and only pop music) and movies and TV shows and clothes and hair and who was allowed to have pierced ears (not me) and who wasn’t. And of course, you could talk about boys. You definitely couldn't talk about the weather and so when I blurted out "It smells like snow," I braced myself for the inevitable scoffs. We were working class Irish Catholic Philadelphia school kids in the 1970s. We scoffed at everything, on principle. But no one scoffed. "It does," everyone squealed. "We're gonna get a white Christmas!" I don't remember if it actually snowed or not. I don't remember if we had a white Christmas. But I remember the relief of abandoning the cool soon-to-be-teenage girl facade for that minute or so, and just being little girls again, excited about Christmas. 

*****

That was a very long and roundabout way of telling you that it's Saturday morning, chilly and January gray, and I'm on my way to a high school swim meet. Rockville vs. Magruder. This is one of the last regular season meets of our last high school swim season. It's 8:45 AM and it smells like snow. 

More Mitfords

I started writing this on December 26, 2022, which was a holiday, but only because Christmas was on a Sunday. So we Americans got the Boxing Day holiday, just this one time.

I’m not really an Anglophile (well maybe a little bit), but I do think that the British get some things right, and Christmas is one of those things. Or at least it used to be. Maybe they don’t get any more time off than Americans any more. Down time is not profitable. It’s not efficient. It’s not hard core. The UK is just as capitalist as the US is now. Mrs. Thatcher made her mark. 

But since I was lucky enough to be on vacation at the end of the year, I had time to read, and to write about it, and Mary S. Lovell’s The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family was probably the most British thing I could have been reading on December 26, the most British of days, at least to an American. 

Last year, I read The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (edited by Charlotte Mosley, Diana’s daughter-in-law). The sisters documented their lives very thoroughly in their letters, so I was already familiar with the events detailed in the book, but I wanted to read about the family from a more detached perspective. But Ms. Lovell, though somewhat impartial, is far from detached. She generally avoids taking sides in the well-known disputes between and among the sisters, though she does seem to favor Jessica a bit. But she also repeatedly makes excuses for Diana, who was by all accounts beautiful and brilliant and generous but also an unrepentant Nazi and so clearly indefensible. Unity was an even more committed Nazi than Diana and far more overtly anti-Semitic and although she was obviously mentally unstable even before she shot herself, she knew right from wrong and still chose to follow Hitler and embrace Nazism. Nevertheless, the author defends both Diana and Unity. To be fair, though, she’s certainly not the only Diana and Unity apologist among Mitford fans and scholars. You’d think that the “Nazis are bad, period” school of thought would be the dominant one but this does not seem to be the case. 

But maybe it’s not fair to call Lovell an apologist. I can’t point to any specific example where she outright defends the sisters’ politics. However, as she points out the inconsistency of Decca's willingness to forgive Unity but not Diana, she also seems not to understand why anyone would really condemn either of them. Late in the book, Lovell acknowledges that Decca is right to criticize Diana for complaining about the miserable conditions at Holloway during her imprisonment, while failing to consider the far worse conditions in Hitler's concentration camps. However, during the passages that detail the Mosleys' detention, Lovell makes the very same error, asserting that prison conditions for the political prisoners at Holloway were unduly and gratuitously harsh, while failing to note that entirely innocent prisoners in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen suffered much worse punishment. 

Try as she does to come across as scholarly and reserved, Lovell is really just a Mitford fan girl. She loves the whole Mitford family, including the often-maligned Sydney (“Muv”) and David (“Farve’) also known as Lord and Lady Redesdale. She loves them personally and particularly, and she loves the English class system that produced them. And she expects that her readers share her understanding and admiration of that system. We’re meant to laugh along with the author when she shakes her head at Hitler’s ignorance of English titles (hearing Unity mention her father, “Lord Redesdale” Hitler seemed to mistakenly assume that Unity, with a different surname than her father, must be illegitimate, and he pities her). That Hitler - such a bumpkin! So provincial! So non-U!

*****

It was December 28 and I was on an airplane heading to Florida. This was unusual for us. We always go to Philadelphia for a few days at Christmas (and we did that, too) but we really never take a bona fide winter vacation. I felt like a jetsetter, sitting on that plane. I felt like a Mitford sister. 

My sisters and I had been texting each other the previous day.  My youngest sister sent us a link to the website for a place called Gatorland. She suggested that my middle sister, who was also going to Florida, and I should visit Gatorland. But then she told us not to even think about going to Gatorland without her. There was trash talk. There were funny gifs. The Florida-bound sisters sent cartoons and gifs of silly alligators. "Gatorland here we come!" The youngest sister sent angry faces and a gif of a lady maniacally waving both middle fingers. "Don't you fucking dare!"

I don't know if any of the Mitford sisters would have tossed around the F word as often as my sisters and I do, especially when we're texting. Maybe Decca would have, just to try to shock Diana. On the other hand, Diana spent almost two years in prison so I'm sure she was familiar with that word, and probably unshockable in general. 

*****

I wrote most of this and then I set it aside to work on something else and to think about why I keep reading about the Mitfords. Part of the answer to that question comes from Simon Pegg, an unlikely source. In a video that is making the social media rounds, Simon Pegg rants about Richi Sunak and his government. “Fuck the Tories,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. 

Fuck the Tories indeed. I don't like the Tories either (and I do hope that Mr. Sunak and his henchpeople lose their seats in Parliament assuming they ever allow a general election), and I don’t wish for a return of the early 20th century British class system that produced the Mitford sisters. But if it weren’t for the Tories and the aristocrats, there wouldn’t be a Labor party. There wouldn’t be punk rock or working class solidarity or Simon Pegg waving his middle finger at a video camera. Rebellion isn’t possible unless you have something to rebel against. 

I have lots of other books in my queue right now and it will be a while before I return to the Mitfords. But I will return eventually. Appalling politics aside, the sisters were endlessly interesting. They always make good reading, and good company. 

Clearwater

I never thought of myself as a Florida vacation in winter type of person if that is in fact a type but it might be time to rethink because I'm up to my eyeballs in Florida warmth and sunshine on December 30 and it is all that and a bag of chips. The good chips, too. The crispy kettle chips. 

This is a relatively short vacation - we came in on Wednesday and we’re out on Sunday. But it's enough. A few days of nothing planned and no deadlines and sand and water and palm trees is pulling me right out of a pretty bad episode of depression. Maybe the effects won't last but I will take it for now. 

*****

I've been to Florida several times but this is my first time on the Gulf Coast. Normally I take a little time to study the geography of a new place before I arrive, get the lay of the land. But I didn't have time. I've been zombie-walking my way through my days and when my husband told me that we were coming to Clearwater Beach, I said "OK," requested the vacation time, and packed a bag the night before we left, perfectly willing to go wherever he wanted to take me. I'm looking at the view from my hotel room balcony and I don't know if the causeways spanning what I think is Tampa Bay connect to the mainland or another island. Maybe one of each because I can see two different causeways. But who cares. I'll look at an atlas later. 

*****

Avalon, New Jersey has been my beach town for many years. We usually go there for a week in August, staying in a little rental house or condo; and we spend that week sitting on the beach, swimming in the ocean (and pool when we're lucky enough to have one), walking and bike riding and looking at boats and seabirds, and collecting shells. Well, my younger son and I collect shells. We have bowls and jars of shells collected over many years. I like looking at them. From a distance they're all white and beige but up close you can see delicate stripes of faint pink and blue and yellow and gray. It's always amazing to me that something so beautiful just washes up on the shore, free for the taking. I never tire of walking slowly along the water's edge and spotting a perfect tiny shell to scoop up into my collection. 

No offense to my beloved Jersey shore, but shell collecting in Gulf Coast Florida is next level, as they say on the Internet. You don’t have to hunt for them. You can stand still just as a little wave breaks on the beach, then bend over and scoop up a hundred perfect little clam and scallop shells in colors both pale and bright, varying shades and hues of pink and blue and coral and gold. I picked up in one short walk what it normally would take a week to collect in New Jersey. 

I collected these shells in 15 minutes. Really!

*****

I expected Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast as it is, to be a lot more Trumpy. Of course, we saw our share of Trumped-up Trumpity Trumpsters, including plenty of people sporting Let's go Brandon gear. Perhaps they don’t realize that even Joe Biden makes fun of that one now. But other than those few silly people, I didn’t get an overt Trumpy vibe from anyone else in Florida. The people on the streets and in the hotel and on the beaches seemed very cool and nice, regardless of what their politics might or might not be. And there were quite a few international visitors from various races and nations of origin. All of them seemed comfortable. All of them seemed to feel welcome in Florida. 

*****

It's New Year's Day now. We're in an Uber on our way to Tampa International Airport, where we will catch an 11:30 AM flight back to DCA. 

Our driver, in his cargo shorts and turquoise bar t-shirt, with long and unruly gray hair flowing from underneath his ball cap, looks like central casting’s idea of Florida Man. But he is actually from the Czech Republic. He and my husband are chatting about NHL hockey while the rest of us sit quietly in the back seat, gradually preparing for the transition back to reality. 

Mr. Czech Republic is our 4th Uber driver this week and they have all been lovely. A nice Black lady picked us up at the airport on Wednesday, and she gave us an overview of the area with cheerful and funny commentary about the good and bad of life on the Gulf Coast of Florida. A native of Michigan, she moved south to escape the cold. Our second driver, who carried us from Clearwater Beach to Amelie Arena for the Tampa Bay Lightning game, was an Air Force veteran who now works for the Navy in Newport News. He drives for Uber during his winter vacations at his little house in Clearwater. On our way home we rode with a full-time Uber and Lyft driver, who is also from somewhere in Eastern Europe if the accent was any indication. His SUV was brand-new and he proudly pointed out the panoramic sunroof, multi-zone climate control and Bose sound system. He is putting two children through college on what he earns as a full-time rideshare driver. He offered snacks and hand sanitizer and bottled water with an air of magnanimous hospitality. A delightful person and a very pleasant ride. 

I have issues with tech-driven service platforms that exploit workers with the promise of spurious "flexibility" and "independence." But all four of these drivers seemed happy and prosperous, likely in spite of and not because of their gig work lifestyle. In any case, we are good tippers. And we were happy to meet all of them. 

*****

In our one evening in Tampa, we learned that Florida is home to some serious hockey fans. The Lightning’s fan slogan is “Be the Thunder,” and these people absolutely were the thunder for their beloved Lightning. Amelie Arena is loud, I tell you what. We were happy to root along with them, since the Lightning were playing the New York Rangers. I still think it’s crazy that Florida has hockey teams (two of them!) but there’s no way that I’m going to root for the stupid Rangers. 

*****

We made the vacation last until the last minute. We flew to Florida direct from Washington National to Tampa International but there were no affordable direct flights home so we had to connect through Charlotte. Our flight from Tampa to Charlotte was quick and easy - in fact, both flights were shorter than our 2.5 hour layover in Charlotte. But it was a nice day in the airport. Charlotte has a decent airport, and we ate lunch in one of its restaurants. After a stroll through the terminal, we sat at our gate, reading and relaxing, watching planes land and take off in the clear post-fog sunshine. 

A young couple near us was wrangling twin baby boys, chubby and lively, about 8 months old. Baby number one was smiling and cooing, while baby number two had had it with the airport and was making his displeasure known. Their mother pulled a coffee shop muffin from a white paper bag, and both babies suddenly sat at attention in their twin stroller. Baby number one insisted on feeding himself, grabbing the little muffin pieces as his mother offered them and stuffing them flat-handed into his mouth, squealing with delight the entire time. Baby number two, placated by the snack, was no longer complaining. He was perfectly content to allow his mother to feed the muffin bits directly to him. He opened wide like a little bird as each morsel approached. I could have watched those silly babies all day long, but the boarding call put an end to the show. 

*****

It’s January 4 now and the party is well and truly over. I teleworked on my first day back to work and went into the office today. It was nice to be back. Work is not a problem at all. I like work in general, and I like my job in particular very much. 

But the funk was back. I could tell as soon as I woke up this morning. See, last week, I thought I had turned a corner. I felt as though someone had pushed a reset button somewhere on my person. But it was just the warmth and sunshine. It was all illusory. 

The day got better, though. I left work at 4:30 and even though I took a slight detour to drop a friend off at the Medical Center Metro, and even though Connecticut Avenue was its usual jerkface self, I still made it home just before darkness fell. For the last few minutes of the drive, the sky, still blue, was streaked with pink and gold. The whole palette was very Florida, very Gulf Coast retirement community. I pulled onto my street just as the very last daylight faded. 

And tomorrow I’ll have another minute or so of daylight. And the days will just keep getting a little longer each day. The sun will return. It won’t be cold and dark forever.