IT’S THURSDAY, and I went to my volunteer job at MOPA… and on the walk from the car to the museum, I passed the area that was a nudist colony when the park opened (I think it was in 1915).  It’s a lovely place in the garden, and my imagination runs wild when I think about what it was a hundred years ago.  I was contented to get a photo of some interesting eucalyptus leaves and a pair of ducks.  The ducks, female and male, were nude.

Earlier in the day I opened my copy of Harper’s magazine which came yesterday and I read the Editor’s Notebook “Mourning in America” by James Marcus.  Marcus says what I’ve been thinking.  His is perhaps the best analysis of what we are going through in this country after the November election that has shocked more than half of us and left some of us in a state of mourning.  “Mourning in America” is worth the price of the December copy of the magazine.  I particularly like the cover.  Also in this issue there is a reprint of Gerald W. Johnson’s essay from 1931, “A Peculiar Virtue.”  Besides the Marcus notebook piece, there is another essay about the same subject, “The Monument Wars, by Rebecca Solnit.  Wow!