On the Saturday before the election the server at the sushi restaurant handed each of us a beaded bracelet, the candidate’s name spelled out in alphabet letters like a baby bracelet from generations past, the kind we would never put on an infant’s wrist today, all those beads, each one a danger, we know better now.

I once asked a friend how she would vote if she knew we could end some great catastrophe by electing the candidate we all abhored: a famine, a genocide, global warming. Don’t ask me how, I said; magic doesn’t work that way. Just think of the butterflies. And of course she wouldn’t answer, the premise was absurd.

The Taoist tale has come across my screen at least six times since Tuesday, and I have to remember because I’m old and do forget that there are those who haven’t heard it, don’t know of the magic contained in the maybe, magic being out of favor, a danger as real as beads on a string. Of course my premise was absurd. So?