Wednesday, February 12: Today I staggered two miles in a north wind through a snowstorm to a walk-in “urgent care” facility, to be told that the coughing cold I’ve had for almost two weeks will likely last another two or three. I walked back out into the snow relieved that I didn’t have anything bad.

Encore for this Chicago woman, who has appeared here many times over many winters … and who I recently discovered was actually a friend of a friend of mine.

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“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness,” said novelist Tom Robbins, who died Sunday. “One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”

He also said once: “From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.”

I was seven during the Bicentennial Year of 1976, and I suppose there was even more talk in that second-grade class than in the usual one, about the meaning of America. 

“Freedom,” the teachers kept talking about.

That was confusing, for a kid.

After recess periods spent running around in the heat, the boys lined up desperately at the water fountain and Mrs. Jollitz stood over us saying, “One, two, you’re through.” For a Saturday snack, alls my sister and I got was a small Dixie cup of potato chips and a can of TAB to split. We had to go to bed before The Rockford Files.

I got into 1960s bands I was into as a teenager. They were always talking and singing about freedom, man. Freedom to do what? The movie The Breakfast Club seemed to me to be all about freedom—freedom to be who you are, not how your classmates define you or what your parents want you to be. Which I left that theater angrily and excitedly determined to do. Except, who was I?

I found a green felt hat with a feather in it in the back of my father’s closet, and wore it to school. If you couldn’t be free to be who you were, I figured, at least you could be free to be weird.

I always wondered what we were free to do in America that people weren’t free to do in other places? As I began to travel internationally, I always felt more freedom when I was outside the U.S. I once bought a bag of marijuana off a nun in Lijiang, China. Ziplined over a deep gorge in Baños, Ecuador without signing a legal waiver. A pal and I were in Foxford, Ireland in a pub that was supposed to have closed at 11:30 on a Sunday night. At 2:30, we were still drinking when the local Guarda pounded angrily on the door, threw it open and shouted as we all stared down into our beer like schoolchildren, “It’s time to go home!” We were silent for a couple of minutes after he left, and then we all ordered new beers and stayed for another hour.

Franklin Roosevelt declared that the people of the world should have “four essential human freedoms”:

The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

Now in a squeezy bottle.

But we’re proud to be Americans, where at least we know we’re free! Except, you want to be free to carry a gun on an airplane and I want to be free to ride an airplane without guns in it. Well, hell.

Jeep took a crack at freedom during a Super Bowl commercial Sunday. Harrison Ford formed his wizened lips to rasp out these clarifying words on freedom: “Freedom is yes. Or no. Or maybe. Freedom is for everybody. But it isn’t free. … Freedom is the roar of one man’s engine. And the silence of another’s. Freedom is the ability to inspire. The most sacred thing in life isn’t the path. It’s the freedom to choose it …”

Maybe freedom is best understood in its absence. And maybe we’re about to understand it better sooner than later.

Meanwhile,

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