There. A sex scene my mother will love.

All our frustrations, our fears and our anger, our shades of loneliness and sadness, all of it got released in great bursts of passion until we had nothing left inside. If we had been in a 1950s Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, the director would cut first to a steaming teapot, followed by a nuclear explosion. And then we lay there, Jenny nestled under my right arm, and in those vulnerable moments we openly discussed our feelings—about politics.

That was the second language we spoke. Both of us loved the complexities, the challenges, and the possibilities of politics. We loved trying to decipher the swirling currents and predict the eddies. Jenny working on the inside, me in an aisle seat. So after sex we had some hard-core politics to catch up on. “There’s a lot of confusion,” she said, brushing back several strands of hair.

“No kidding,” agreed Mr. Cynic. “Everybody’s trying to figure out how to squeeze something out of this.”

She shook her head. “Not everybody. Not Martha, that’s for sure. We’re already trying to schedule hearings to find out why we were so unprepared.”

“Good luck on that. You know that’s not gonna happen,” I predicted. “The last thing Wrightman wants is somebody suggesting he had some responsibility for this.” I kissed her on the top of her head. “Well…” and we said together, “at least he’s not Trump.” Then we laughed, a knowing innocent laughter. She snuggled closer, laying her leg over my groin and settling her breast into my chest. A typically casual, entirely intentional Jenny move.

“So? What?” she wondered, tilting her head and looking up at me through wide-open green eyes.

“The usual,” I admitted. “All of recorded history.”

“Oh, that.” She waved it away.

“Well, you see what’s going on.”

She lifted the sheet and looked down at my resting passion. “Not much,” she reported. Then she said softly, lovingly, “Okay, go ahead and tell me again so everyone reading this book will know that we were in the middle of a crisis that threatened our democracy.” So maybe she didn’t say that, not exactly. What she did do is kiss me and complain, “Your timing is exquisite.” Then she took me in her hand and said seductively, “Hello, little friend.”

Rather than going into details of what then transpired (once again), let me cover those few minutes by explaining what Jenny was referring to; and no, I’m not writing this in hindsight. This was the gist of our conversation: I believed completely in the great American experiment. The concept that people of all races and creeds and religions could be bound together in some degree of harmony by a system of laws. That belief was one of several reasons that I had volunteered to fight for this country. It was worth fighting for.

But I also believed that our uniquely American version of democracy had been in decline for decades. That we were slowly morphing into what we had been fighting. This was a discussion that Jenny and I had had several times. (This was us: a small candlelit table at an out-of-the-way family Italian restaurant, a subtle wine, and a lively discussion about the philosophy of George F. Kennan.)