We are somewhere skyward over Scotland, headed home. We finished off our trip in London, where we saw two shows – Shadowlands and Dracula. If that feels a bit bipolar just mark it up to that’s the state of our reality as Americans these days.

As we waited about Heathrow this morning, another creature of kindness took a seat near us. “I like your pins,” she said, remarking upon the two political buttons I pinned to my scarf this morning. One is a gift from a dear friend Sally. It reads: Not Today Maga The other I bought shortly before heading out on this trip. It reads: Dear World: We hate him, too.

“You don’t have to worry about running into any MAGA in an airport,” the kind lady said in her British brogue. “They don’t travel.” We’ve heard this for years and noticed it ourselves and believe it to be true.

The cult members who support Trump do not travel. They believe in the myth that they live in the greatest country on earth. Having rarely if ever traveled beyond the US border, with the exception maybe of a time share in Mexico where brown-skin people wait on them hand and foot at resorts, they are easily convinced of their own ethnic superiority. Thus, they fear most other cultures and they are not intellectually curious enough to question if perhaps their worldview is flawed. Besides, they have long adhered to a faith of Certainosity, absolutely convinced that their way of life and faith practices are the only right way, the White Jesus way of life.

Not that I mind so much when I travel. I never run into red hat people in the UK. Instead I run into people like Vicky, the kind lady at Heathrow. A former librarian in San Francisco, we had much to chat about besides the sad state of affairs in America under this Republican administration. I don’t know if you heard but last night the Green Party won in Manchester, one of England’s major cities and a previous stronghold for the Labour Party. The Green Party in England is akin to a Mamdani/AOC party in the US.

As we’ve traveled to the UK over the past couple of years we’ve seen as the very same corrupt powerbrokers, chiefly Musk and Thiel and Vance and Suckaburger and Bannon and Miller, are trying to disrupt politics in the UK and EU the way they have in the US. But they are meeting with stronger push back than they anticipated because Europeans pay attention to world affairs in ways that Americans failed to do prior to Trump.

As the kind Vicky and I chatted on we discovered one had one other thing in common besides our love of a good story – Fairhope, Alabama. Vicky’s ex-husband is from Fairhope, so she was surprised to learn that I had been a writer-in-residence in Fairhope. We swapped stories about Alabama, about Rick Bragg, about Winston Groom, about Mobile Bay, about Republicans and about the beauty of Fairhope.

“Nature can be such a healing thing,” I said, explaining that when I wrote A Silence of Mockingbirds I was working on a book about a murder in Corvallis, Oregon. Vicky has friends in Corvallis. I told her that I would spend the day with that dark story and then walk down to the pier and watch the sunset over Mobile Bay and that helped heal the trauma of writing such a troubling tale. Often I would call David, Karly’s dad, and we would chat about the book, about Karly.

I can tell you never once did it occur to me that one day in the future I’d be sitting in Heathrow talking to a Brit about Karly, about David, about Fairhope. Life is such poetry sometimes.

Speaking of which, Tim said he had the same sort of woo-woo experience watching Hugh Bonneville in Shadowlands. Tim is the son of missionaries and it was while they were in the mission field in Ecuador that Tim was gifted a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. He would read them under the covers at night with a flashlight because the only electricity at the camp came from a generator which was only usuable for short spurts, not for nighttime reading. As a young boy he could never have imagined that one day he’d be sitting in a theater in London watching as Bonneville inhabited Lewis and brought him to life on the stage. Poetry.

I felt some of the same last night while watching a scene from Chloé Zhao’s production of Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet. There’s this moment when Paul Mescal, as Shakespeare, contemplates jumping into the River Thames after the death of his beloved boy. That scene took me back to my own childhood in a hotbox trailer in West Georgia. I had picked up a copy of Oliver Twist from the Bookmobile. It was my first encounter reading a book set in London. That young girl that was me could never have imagined that one day I’d be sitting in a theater in London remembering the young girl me. Poetry is all about us.

“That Bookmobile saved me,” I said to Vicky. It gave me an escape from the heat – it was air conditioned – and an escape from the trauma that was life in those years.

Libraries. Bookmobiles. Stories. Poetry. Nature. Beauty. And yes, Jesus but not the white one, can all save us in one form or another. Some of us need all the saving we can get so we need all of that and then some.

While in Waterstones the other night I picked up a copy of a G. K. Chesterton book. I recalled that Lewis enjoyed reading Chesterton. The book – The Napoleon of Notting Hill – is as prophetic a read today as it was when Chesterton wrote it in 1904. I leave you with his words:

“In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.”

A poet and a prophet that Chesterton.