Consequences

By Our Readers • February 2021

In 1976 I had finished some business in Raleigh, North Carolina, and hitchhiked to Virginia, where my aunt Claire and two of my cousins lived. My intent was to celebrate the Fourth of July with them, then make the long journey home to San Diego.

I arrived and relaxed for a couple of days, and that weekend the four of us drove to Colonial Williamsburg. Several souvenir stands were displaying full-size Confederate flags for ten dollars. I was a naive twenty-one-year-old. To me that flag represented nothing more than generic rebellion. I bought one.

Our Readers

Correspondence

After a long-smoldering difference of opinion erupted into an argument with my wife, I left the house irritated. I stopped to pick up the mail and noticed that the February 2021 Sun had shown up. On another day I might have gone back inside to deliver my wife her favorite magazine, but I tossed it on the truck seat and let it sit there all day.

That night, after a few compulsory words with my wife, I grabbed The Sun and escaped to the bathtub. I read so long that the water became cold, so I added some hot. Cold again, add some hot. And again. The magazine was filled with one sad article after another: Depression, the loss of children, cancer, dysfunction, hospice. A Readers Write on “Consequences,” nearly all of them bad. Anxiety and the pandemic, just to round things out.

When I finally emerged, I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table and told her it was the best issue I’d ever read.

I would sign my name to this, but my wife, a fundamentally private Norwegian, would be enraged. Again.

Name Withheld

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