The Australian morning TV host called me darlin’. We’d never met, but she opened with: ‘Good to have you on, darlin’. Be with you in a moment.’ Then the picture went black. When the live show returned to my Zoom screen, I was just another viewer, watching the three hosts seated on a couch half a world away chatting about the charity walk one of them had done over the weekend and the toll this had taken on his feet, which led – in a surprise twist – to a brief discussion of the strange internet hunger for images of feet. Somehow, the fetish conversation segued into a video montage with images of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and me from FBI days. Then I was live from my Virginia home, smiling in my fiction-writer sweater and wondering if they wanted to talk about the montage. Happily, they did not.
Two days later, our annual 4 July family reading of the Declaration of Independence was in person, for the second year now.
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