...and the horse you rode in on.

Unlikely friendship, the focus of our attention, and turning away from evil

Past

My wife Kerrie and I were both managers for bakeries when we lived in Philadelphia. I was the store manager for the flagship of Metropolitan Bakery, lovechild of Wendy Smith Born and James Barrett. Their sourdough breads, croissants, and housemade sandwiches are on par with a better neighborhood bakery in any Parisian arrondissement. Kerrie worked for Fresh Fields, which was still a newcomer to the Philly scene, and while competent, produced baked goods which were more comparable to what you would get in a Parisian supermarket. I.e. still very good, but not memorable.

Working at Metropolitan, under General Manager Don Garton, with a small team of other retail sales managers, was a good training ground for my later life in health care. I knew the names of 500 customers by heart— the good, the bad and the ugly. We were located just south of Rittenhouse Square on 19th St in Center City Philadelphia, and there was a wide spectrum of patrons who passed through our doors.

Two of my favorite customers were the Woods. Dr Wood was a veterinarian and a graduate of Cornell University. Gloria Wood was, well, difficult. Years ago she had throat cancer and the radiation treatment had altered her sense of taste. We kept a sample plate going by the register and she always tried what we were offering, even though it rarely pleased her.

Mrs Wood, as I called her during that time, was what my Slovak Baba would have described as hoity-toity. It wasn’t put on; it was just the way she talked and moved in the world. She had a way of tilting her head forward and looking at you over the rims of her glasses, literally down her nose. Her husband was a mensch, and as abrasive as Gloria could be, he was not. He was always ready with a smile, and had a rich baritone voice. I loved to hear my name come out of his mouth, because I knew we were going to have an enjoyable conversation. With Gloria, it was as likely to be a prolonged negotiation over the bread pudding and baguettes.

The Woods would often buy a bag full of breads to bring to their son Jonathon, who was the Tompkins County Attorney and lived in Ithaca, NY. Several years later, when Kerrie and I moved to Ithaca, Jonathon and I had a brief friendship, meeting together for lunches at The Moosewood Cafe. We parted ways after he divorced his wife at the time and began dating an insufferable woman in some version of a mid-life crisis.

In the week before Kerrie and I left Philadelphia for our new home in Ithaca, Gloria took us out for lunch to one of the swankiest restaurants in the city. It was because of this invitation I realized that over the course of heated negotiations and many small conversations, we had become friends. What had originally been my apprehension at seeing Gloria walking through the doors of the store, had been transformed into the pleasure of seeing someone whose repartee I enjoyed. During one of my visits back to Philadelphia, I paid her a visit at UPenn hospital when she was admitted for reasons that weren’t clear to me. I brought her a precious orchid floating in a bowl of water from the Thai flower shop next to the bakery (no longer there).

It was with great sadness that I later learned Gloria had committed suicide by jumping off the balcony (tenth floor?) of their apartment building on Rittenhouse Square. The world lost a kind soul that day, and I never knew what suffering she was experiencing which drove her to that decision. I still miss her.

Past, Present and Future

This Substack evolved organically. The title kept presenting itself, the story of an unlikely friendship followed, and today I find myself on a flight back home, pulling together the threads of inspiration. The passenger sitting next to me has been watching Goodfellas on his seatback video monitor, and as much as I’d like to avert my gaze, the violent tale of of a teenager who became a mafia don keeps intruding into my periphery. It’s not irrelevant. It is yet another reminder that one of the very few decisions we have power over is where we focus our attention.

While identifying as a Christian and a Quaker, I am open to learning from other walks of faith in the world. One of my favorite movies is The Life of Pi, which superficially is the fantastical tale of a young boy shipwrecked with a Bengal tiger, floating together across the ocean on a lifeboat. More deeply, the movie is about an exploration of faith, and the compatibility or contradiction of believing in different ways.

While we have learned not to have faith in politics or politicians, Kerrie and I have been intently watching what we can of RFK’s journey through committee to the floor of the senate for a confirmation vote on his nomination to head HHS. The YouTube based Two-Way with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine has been our daily tour guide to the hearings and the fast-paced first weeks of President Trump’s second administration.

Although it is a sideshow, the twists and turns of decision makng re: the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci have garnered our attention as well. Former President Biden (or the faceless unelected decision makers who pulled the strings for a puppet far along the road to dementia) pardoned Fauci on the way out. The pardon covers an unprecedented sweeping time frame going back to before Fauci’s illegal continuation of gain-of-function research, which helped deliver the bioweapons of Wuhan. Trump’s team cut off Fauci’s taxpayer-funded Secret Service security coverage. Media talking heads asked President Trump “If something happens to Dr Fauci, will you feel responsible?” His answer was no, and that Fauci has made so much money in his decades of federal employment, that he should be able to pay for security out of his own pocket. Senator Ron Paul was quoted as saying that he wished no harm to Fauci, but didn’t think that taxpayers needed to foot the bill for his security detail.

Do I wish harm upon Fauci? There is a small part of me, and not the noblest part, which cheered when Trump cut off his security detail. I believe that Fauci has directly orchestrated the injury and deaths of millions of people. But then there’s Karma, that Buddhist idea which can give pause to the most faithful Christian. My deepest, wisest self knows that wishing harm upon anyone never comes to any good. It’s like pointing one finger in blame, and having four fingers pointing back at yourself.

I struggle with this, and have tried to deliver myself from evil, including the sin of blood lust. “Let him hang!” we might say. The sharp pitchforks of the peasantry may deliver too kind an end to his life; think of Mussolini’s end. These are troubling thoughts, but please remember that I have been providing treatment to thousands of people injured by the spike protein, several of whom have died, and some of whom have chosen assisted suicide rather than perpetuate their agony. In my work at the Leading Edge Clinic, I have had a front row seat to this slow motion death machine.

It’s possible that eventually, society as a whole will judge Fauci to be the killer I think he is, and decide that the most appropriate punishment is capital. Anyone who has watched the movie Zone of Interest which focuses on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, would probably agree that death by hanging was a fitting end given his crimes against humanity. This despite that fact that yes, he was another human being, not a mythical monster.

Point 0.0 is that we need to stop Fauci from killing any more people. I’m not going to bother writing my elected representatives. Nor am I going to stand in the town square with a sign of protest. These words that you read are my response. I’m going to write, using the 2025 digital equivalent of a pen as my sword. I pray that you find this message worth of sharing, amplifying, and reshaping with your own words.

This may read like an exercise of pointless mental gymnastics. You, me, we...will not be directly deciding the fate of Fauci. The power is not ours. Yet I believe that it matters what we think and feel about his fate. Many American don’t yet understand the extent of evil which has been perpetrated upon us over the last four years. (A dear friend stopped by the house today, and left abruptly when he learned that while he thinks Donald Trump is evil, I believe that Anthony Fauci is evil.) I expect that much will be revealed over the next several weeks, and I don’t envy them or the tumult they may go through. Then there are those of us who not only understand that we have been duped, but have also lost our own health, and the health, even the lives of people we love to the plandemic.

I believe that if I, you, and we wish harm upon the evil doers, then they have won by debasing our spirits and reducing our shared humanity. Practically speaking, it is hard to think clearly when we are angry, or railing for retribution. What is called for is the modern day version of shunning. We need not listen to them any more. We need not tune into the legacy media which helped prop up war criminals like Fauci. Rather than harvest the grapes of wrath, we might better leave them on the vine to wither into raisins under the bright sunlight of exposure and inquiry.

On the street where we lived in Philadelphia, there was a vacant lot with tall weeds. A skinny black stray cat made its home there, subsisting on mice it could hunt. One day a young hoodlum with a pit bull was walking by the lot, and thought it would be entertaining to unleash his dog on the cat. The outcome was not what he expected. The dog, and the human, brought the fight to the cat, and the cat, having no choice, fought for its life. The cat deftly jumped onto the dogs back, where it inflicted a fair amount of damage from behind its neck and powerful jaws. By the time the human pulled away his dog, one eye was swollen shut, its lower lip was hanging loose, ragged and bloody, there were actively bleeding slashes on it’s back, and the dog was whimpering. I don’t blame the dog for its owners sadism and stupidity, but I was heartened to see that cat come out on top, literally. In another world where cats and dogs don’t have people problems, those two could have been forever friends.

I’m not a tough guy, but with the help of my wife and many others, I made my way through a decade of inner city living in Philadelphia at the height of the crack epidemic. There were drive by shootings on our doorstep, my workplace (not Metropolitan, but a small grocery store on the border of a poor and a gentrified neighborhood) was robbed at gunpoint, I was shot at by children (real gun or toy, I’ll never know), Kerrie was mugged, and we interrupted a rape. If you haven’t lived in daily fear for your life, having to always be on guard and aware of your surroundings, it’s hard to empathize with the toll this takes on a person. The last four years of the pandemic have had echoes of this experience, although the sometimes silent violence was enacted on a monumental scale, with the active collusion of most social institutions. It sometimes happens that despite your best efforts to prevent and avoid violence, a fight finds you. I don’t care if you’re a Quaker or not, but eventually, you have to be ready to fight for your life. One thing the streets of Philadelphia taught me, is that if you are drawn into a fight, you need to be certain that the attacker is going down, and staying down, before you turn your attention to other matters.

I think that Fauci is going down, but we need be certain that he, his cohorts, and their institutional tools will not get back up again. This is the quintessence of the matter, which deserves our focused attention. Fauci, you’re not welcome in our home, our neighborhood, our town, our country, our minds or our bodies. Turn your horse around and ‘git.