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My computer screen went all magenta last Friday and is being (hopefully) repaired. Maybe by the weekend—they said maybe earlier, but I think it may have died at a mere six months and two days, an infant laptop still under warranty. It has been flakey since I first opened it, and one son shrugs and laughs, they other tells me that the last good Macs were from a few years ago when an owner could change the battery without driving all the way to Portland because everything is now glued in place. Fortunately, I had backed-up my computer just hours before. (I am working here on a borrowed computer.)

By good fortune, I was reading Dreyer’s English, which is the most entertaining writing style guide I have every read. (There are plenty of funny ones—none so funny as this.) I needed a laugh.

This morning I read a Goodreads review of a book about Chernobyl:

“Chernobyl was not a single event but was instead a point on a continuum; the radioactive contamination of Polesia lasted more than three decades. Chernobyl territory was already saturated with radioactive isotopes from atomic bomb tests before architects drew up plans for the nuclear power plant. And, after Chernobyl as before Chernobyl, the drumbeat of nuclear accidents continued at two dozen other Ukrainian nuclear power installations and missile sites. Sixty-six nuclear accidents occurred in Ukraine alone in the year after Chernobyl blew. More nuclear mishaps transpired after the Soviet Union collapsed, including the fires in the Red Forest in 2017.

“Calling Chernobyl an “accident” is a broom that sweeps away the larger story. Conceiving of the events that contaminated the Pripyat Marshes as discrete occurrences blur the fact that they are connected. Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might be better conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies, and politics.”

Students have frequently horrified me with their eagerness to embrace nuclear power as perfectly “clean” and the best solution to our energy needs. They did not have duck–and–cover drills (yes, now I not only know how to use an en dash but how to make them), and they never watched the based–on–reality Silkwood (1983) or spookily–prescient The China Syndrome (1979). Those real life accidents at Five Mile Island (1979) Chernobyl (1986) and even Fukushima (2011) are just too long ago in the minds of teenagers.

When I was a teenager myself, my father was confident that we would solve the problems of storing nuclear waste with fusion plants—that was fifty years ago. I have never felt so confident that technology and science would solve the problems at the pace they created them. So tell me: How are those fusion plants coming along? And do you have any idea how long nuclear waste remains toxic? Go look it up.

Some days it seems everything is eager to explode.

On an entirely different note, I walked through a department store while waiting for my computer appointment. In the children’s department there were two adorable items, and only two, with huge monograms: a sleeping bag and coverlet. I wish I’d had my camera. It was astonishing to find LOGAN on my right, to make a half-turn, and find RUBY. The first names of our two oldest grandchildren.