I’m still in Pluto, but living in a kind of suburb called Mind—a holding area where people wait and decide where they want to go next, or where the gods want them to go. I believe in the gods completely. It was a sad day for many of us in the West when two thousand plus years ago the gods were all collected up and called Jesus. If anyone reverently mentions Jesus to me, I tell them he had his good days and bad days like the rest of us. I was lying in a Lafuma lounge chair on one of my good days out on the so-called patio here, feet celestially off the ground looking straight up beyond two levels of stone walls at the thick trunk of a simply stunningly high maple tree rising maybe 70 or 80 feet, transformed from a mess of sticks into a Spring cathedral overflowing with green things called leaves. I shaded my eyes to find the top. I wanted to stay there a long time. I was having an experience. On a mixed day, i.e. good and bad, I was driving with Ingrid toward a far town to see the film The Visitor for a second viewing—(this holding area brings in a few films from the World)—when we saw blinking headlights of two cars coming towards us. Ingrid said they were warning us about cops lurking up ahead, but soon we arrived dead against a fair-sized tree lying straight across the road. So here was another kind of tree. Ceci n’est pas une arbre however. I am only saying it was. Segueing to artist Rene Magritte’s famous title, “Ceci…une pipe,” by which he denied that his illustration of a pipe under his title was a pipe. It was only an illustration, a drawing, not a (real) pipe, or peep. In my own title for this column, see above, appropriating and “misusing” the Magritte, I have obviously something similar in mind for cloche—the word for bell in French. Such cloches or bells are illustrated copiously through photographs in my new book, called England’s Child, with a subtitle that does have the word “bells” in it, i.e., The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells. And clearly these photographs too, are only illustrations. And I was only writing about them. Writing itself is a substitute for words. But words: Where do they come from? From God, as the testament that precedes the four Jesus stories tells us— “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.” And God we must add is a mystery. As was my father Cyril Johnston—a man I never actually met, but who figures heavily in the book, England’s Child. On a good day, I received an email letter from a Vicar in England, David Cawley, one of two men who vetted my manuscript, explaining a review of the book in his country as being more about my father, a “heroic figure,” than my own story as “England’s Child.” “You are,” wrote David immortally and peerlessly, “forever England’s Child in orbit around Cyril’s sun.” I love that. I linger on it the way I did the maple tree when lying outside on a Lafuma lounge chair. It’s hard to move on. It seems such a beautiful ending. Yet distractions are ever at hand. While basking in the maple that day, I was diverted by a crow perched high in a neighboring tree on a branch sadly without leaves. Crow was an ancestral name of my mother’s on her father’s side. Her father Frederick added an “e” to Crow to obviate any bad luck associated with the bird, or so I assume since for one outstanding thing his own father Chauncey Crow committed suicide by gunfire to his head. I had my eye on this crow, forgetting my majestic tree, and it kept on perching up there, making me wonder where it was going to go next. I decided to keep my eye on it until it flew away. Then I looked down for just a second, and when I looked back up, it was gone. I’ll never know where it went. Its most important asset was the fact of its existence. Ceci n’est pas d’existence. On all kinds of days, good bad or mixed, people are dying everywhere. I had an apocalyptic dream: pointy towers, very high ones like the Chrysler and Empire in New York, some distance away, were falling in a frightful stew of debris and humans. The scene grew closer and closer to me until I woke up—impressed by my imagination, scared for myself and civilization. Don’t think I am not one of the millions who see Obama as our savior. Gender? Race? Is anyone kidding? Just listen to him. His words come from God. You can tell by how he delivers them. It’s too bad he needed Jesus to run for president. In Europe, as Ingrid stresses, you can be a candidate for head of state without belonging to a house of Jesus. In America, our godless country, a literal God, a singular figure, was kept from olden Europe to atone for our craziness. I have, notwithstanding how I may sound, nothing against Jesus, whose worst day was probably a lot worse than any or most of us can expect. And besides, he had an interesting virgin birth. I was immaculate myself, and Obama has credentials along those lines, having met his Kenyan father only briefly when he was ten. He is in any event a Woman’s Man, while his opponent for the democratic nomination is a Man’s Woman—a type I cannot, to my downfall, always identify, but any of whom definitely I do not want representing me. I never see a woman like myself running for office. There may be one or two or even more, but if so they are well