Life after prison often felt like one step forward, four back. In the desert years, what made Carole Alden’s life meaningful was trying to make conditions better for her animals. While the world struggled with wars, political, economic, and social chaos, she was grateful for qualified solitude.
Might this be a way of coming to terms with feeling so unmoored from my birth country: journeying on a cultural tugboat up the largely English comedy river in search of the TV shows and comedians that had once influenced and shaped me? If I dipped my toe in the dimly remembered comedies of my childhood and youth, would I discover who I once had been?
This was what my relatives went through, this is what Ukrainians experienced every day: fear of the skies, of anonymous violence delivered imperiously from above, whether from planes, missiles, or drones, this overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of the unknown hand determined to smite you down.