I feel like I’m being held captive by a dragon. Not a magic dragon, but a malevolent, unpredictable one who seems bent on stomping through fields in order to burn all the flowers. One who enjoys dimming the light and celebrating the darkness. One who seems determined to upend things held sacred for the sake of chest-thumping. One who takes schadenfreude to a whole other level. I suppose many of you know who this dragon represents.

Now, more than ever, I appreciate anything I come across that helps to right the boat, and I am happy to share a few of those kinds of things with you today:

Last night, my sweetheart Bob and I had dinner at King Doh, a Chinese restaurant here in St. Louis. (Bob has a house in St. Louis and I have one outside of Chicago, and we go back-and-forth.) The people next to us at the restaurant were eating something that looked good, and we asked what it was and if they liked it. It was crispy beef, the older man who had ordered it said, and yes, indeed, it was so good that he got it every time he came there. Then he laughed and laughed; he was a very jolly man. There was a giggly waitress at their table who had just corrected his pronunciation of Tsing Dao and she affirmed what he had said: It’s true, she said, he order crispy beef every time! Bob and I ordered something else, but we were gifted by a sample of crispy beef served on a tiny silver platter (I think at the urging of the older man) and then we were very sorry that we had not ordered it. We told that to the man who HAD ordered it. He nodded, smiling, and said, next time. NEXT time, I said, we should sit TOGETHER at one of those tables with a lazy SUSAN! Then we all laughed, even though it wasn’t really that funny. I guess it just felt good to laugh.