Odysseus slaying the suitors open his return to Penelope, in Book 22 of The Odyssey.

Maybe because, according to AI’s shallow water, deep dive, we cannot read enough, write enough or ramble on long enough these days about America’s wider-than-the-Grand Canyon partisan divide, the July 17th premier of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will be, worldwide, more welcomed than our 2026 Summer of Love when it begins November 3rd.

Don’t take it from me, but Nolan’s 70 mm I Max retelling of Homer’s epic The Odyssey will be more appreciated by plebs like us than our hosting of the 23rd FIFA World Cup and measurably more memorable than the gladiator games Emperor Narcissus hosted on the south lawn of his palace, previously known as The People’s House and The White House.

Why will folks around the world flock to The Odyssey like legions of Greek warriors who, three thousand years ago, stormed Troy for Helen, the Taylor Swift of her time?

Without double-checking with AI, I’d be, may the god Google forgive me for saying this, “spit balling” because for the last decade or so we’ve become used to hectoring each other rather than conversing with each other.

As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Joseph Campbell, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Georgia O’Keeffe or Nina Samone, if they were still above ground, might have observed: 21st century America is more ravenous for the fast food of pontification than for the home cooking of storytelling.

Remember the last time your heart tasted a story someone, looking you in the eye, told you?

You do?

You remember that person-to-person, usually spoken, sometimes written, kind of communication that for millennia enabled us to harvest and bequeath to future generations our personal and collective histories, hopes and dreams?

Then please, King Midas-Musk, help us understand why so many folks today pawn the “we” of sharing our stories for the “ME!” of our non-stop social networking that bites the hands that feed it.     

Help us understand, your demi-godship, how our spending 83 of 165 days a year gawking at our cell phone screens negatively affects your post-November 3rd plans to relocate the most patriotic, God-fearing among us to Mars.

No matter. You betcha, as tomorrow’s trillionaires, we know you’ve got more pressing cud to chew than posits about our need to get back to listening to and taking to heart each other’s stories the way we take to heart the stories we genuflect to, sing to and pray to when we gather in our houses of worship. 

Using poetic license, in an ear-catching, ancient Greek, blind poet’s kind of way that goes against the Polymarket’s odds, maybe we’ll find hope, as in Emily Dickinson’s “Hope,” that, in the quietude of our riotous minds, we can survive these “Ice men cometh,” mid-summer days, by “keeping the faith” long enough to resuscitate storytelling between us.     

In other words, with further ado, allow me to share with you a recent, traumatic event: I thought I had lost someone who’s been looking out for me for as long as I can remember.

Come on! I beg you! Hear me out about my horrifying experience for one, lousy minute, or two.
Thank you! You are a saint! Well, O.K., a saint you ain’t, but you are up there with our top-ranked gladiators.

Regardless, you’re right. I shouldn’t worry about her. She’ll be alright taking a break from hovering over me. It’s just that, until this morning, when I was gulping my second cup of coffee and looking through my binocs to see if there were still nine trumpeter swans oh-HO . . . oh-HO, calling at the south end of the lake, she was still sipping her first cup of breakfast tea, that she mistakenly keeps calling Celestial Tea, so s . . . l . . . o . . . w . . . l . . . y . . . you’d think she was nursing a hangover with a “whiskey neat,” she never told me before that she needed to take off a while from hanging with me.

“No worries. Go ahead,” I heard myself tell her, “take off as long as you want to. Don’t worry about me. Really! No worries!”

You’re probably right. She’s alright somewhere. Still, now, hours and hours since I saw her at breakfast, maybe while I’m turning on the yard light or hunting around the cabin for some long, long poem by Longfellow or some heaven-sent few lines from Ferlinghetti to nod off to, I’m trying to convince myself she won’t be gone much longer.

Go figure! Where is she?

We both see how the Man in the Moon is calling it a night by climbing down the top branches of the white pines on the east side of the lake. The whippoorwills have stopped calling to each other. Coyote pups, that started yelping after stars birdshot the sky above their field, have stopped.

Yet, for some reason, she still isn’t home.

Think she got lost? Got “turned around” down some lost, logging road and she’s down on her knees praying to St. Christopher to help her find her way back here?

For God’s sake! It’s way after midnight! All the after hours, backwoods bars have closed to partiers from Soup Town and Duluth.

Still, quiet as a feather falling through an owl’s dream, she’s not come back here to her side of the cribbage board where she likes to play chess online after I’ve gone to bed.

This reminds me of some mornings when the sun’s just started thinking about getting out of bed, and I catch her sneaking some grinning guy in here, some lost soul who later on, while we’re all single file wobbling down the wooden steps to the dock, she introduces me to as her “new friend” and tells me, by flashing me a certain look, “You know, Billy boy, one of the best things about my friend here is he sings Willie Nelson’s songs and ‘The Benedictus’ like an angel!” - as if I hadn’t heard that line before about another dude who stumbled in and brought her back down to earth for a while.

Think I’m overthinking things? You might be right.

She probably just needed some time to herself, time to not think about reminding me that at my age it no longer pays for me, before the snow flies, to crawl up my extension ladder and shuffle sideways across my shingled, slanted roof to blow leaves out of the gutters, time to not think about reminding me to not get out my chainsaw and cut down “widow makers” when nobody’s around, time to not think about reminding me to not dodge logging trucks and deer on the blind curve by the fish hatchery, time to not think about mentally suggesting to me not to stop by the Y-Go-By for a nightcap, or time to not think about reminding me to stop fooling myself into thinking I can move forward by looking at life in my rearview mirror.

Anyway, just because you and I are again listening to the morning birds singing, and the bass are starting to feed topwater again, and she’s still not back doesn’t mean yesterday or last night she got herself into some kind of trouble.

Trouble like, at one of the watering holes around here, she, without moving her lips during Happy Hour, maybe started piping up about how the Vikings or the Bears will sweep the Packers next season or, maybe, flying down an abandoned ATV trail, she gets lost praying prayers of petition for old farts like me so we won’t give in to our lesser angels by pretending we can’t read the writing on the wall anymore or by beginning to believe the biggest lie on earth: Nobody watches out for anybody.

Go figure!

Faster than the lightening bugs flashing on and off down by the beach, something in the fog on the lake tells me, “She’s back! She’s back!”

“What? You came back because you got bored looking out from the fire tower without me?” I kid her.
Can you hear how her silence says nothing, says everything? You just catch that wink of hers?

That’s how she plays coy when she wants to remind me that I might know how to catch fish and play cribbage but I don’t know shit about guardian angels.