Just imagine for a minute that you wake up one morning to learn that someone has stolen the arm off of the Statue of Liberty. And with it, her torch. No more will she "lift my lamp beside the golden door." Instead, her great lamp is already shredded; it's on a slow boat to China as we speak.

To be followed, soon after, by the Verrazano Bridge.

Farfetched? Maybe today. Maybe not tomorrow.

Earlier in the week, I toured a scrap metal business in the Northeast Kingdom.

In a startling way, the price of scrap metal has risen so high that people are selling everything they can get their hands on. Suddenly, that old washer and dryer in the side yard, the ones with the vines growing through them, are valuable. So are those old tire rims.

In the Roaring Twenties my grandfather, Diamond Ben, was a flashy guy. He had a taste for Cadillacs. He owned a tux and a diamond stickpin. He had a big house by the beach, and two garages on Broadway. He hung out with celebrities.

But my grandfather lost the house and the two garages and the flashy life in the early Thirties, and my mother's family was forced to move into a tenement apartment in the Bronx.

Diamond Ben turned out to be a standup guy. First he tried to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door, but the doors were mostly slammed in his face. Who could afford a new appliance?

He ended up in the basement of a bakery. Above, in the retail shop, when crumbs of bread and cake fell onto the floor, they were swept down into a hole. The hole had a funnel attached to it. My grandfather stood under it, catching and bagging the crumbs for resale. He was the crumbcatcher.

He had Special Forces written all over him - a big beefy guy with a hard body and a military haircut. He was wearing a t-shirt with a big peace sign on it made out of weapons. What didn’t jibe was the gold around his neck and the heavy gold watch on his wrist. So maybe Blackwater. I noticed him because he was playing air guitar, mouthing silent words and shaking his body to a heavy metal tune that no one else could hear.

He was sitting across from me in the waiting room at Pennsylvania Station in New York City last week. He was too scary to be crazy, I figured, so I knew the music he was twitching to wasn’t come through the ether. Anyway, the PA system was playing Bach. When I checked again, I saw a jack in his ear. He was still dancing as his train was called and he walked away.

Lately I've been wondering what might have happened if President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had just told the truth.

Not so much about 9/11, although it would have helped if they'd offered a few reasons why they thought Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. America has its share of enemies, so a little hard proof would have gone a long way.

And it would have helped if Bush had clearly explained our "special relationship" with the Saudis, and how for more than 60 years we've been shoring up a dictatorship in exchange for some control over our oil supplies. In the light of the fact that 15 hijackers came from there, I mean.

From the beginning of the long nightmare that has been the presidency of George W. Bush, I have wondered how - or if - it might end.

Remember those light-in-a-tunnel jokes that started in the Vietnam era? The light in the tunnel is probably another train. The light in the tunnel is a flashlight held by a 800-pound gorilla. And she's hungry. The light at the end of the tunnel is a fuse. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. That's how I felt.

Even before the first presidential election, I thought I knew (didn't you?) - by reading the sainted Molly Ivins, by understanding the S&L scandal, from cringing at Dick Cheney's demented pit-bull machismo and Karl Rove's Texas machinations, and by thinking things through - just how bad things could get if Bush and Cheney got into office.

Under a bright blue Vermont sky, this year's foliage is extravagantly beautiful.

A friend worries about a proposal she's been asked to write for a large non-profit organization.

The Dummerston Congregational Church's annual fund-raiser, the Apple Pie Festival, sold 1,500 apple pies on Sunday.

I talk to a new editor about writing some stories.

We follow the latest political scandals.

We keep a baleful eye on the price of gas.

There is some question about Joe Torre's relationship with George Steinbrenner.

I'm nervous about an upcoming colonoscopy.

Randy gets his second flat tire in three weeks and decides to put on his snow tires early.

Watching the wealth of our nation - as well as the blood and body parts of our soldiers - poured down a rat hole in Iraq is not the only thing that grieves me.

It's that we hardly notice as the world passes us by.

We are led by reactionaries who see the world is as it was in 1949, when America was the last nation standing. Or maybe as it was a century before that, during the time of the robber barons. Who knows what they really see?

Meanwhile, the Euro has surpassed the dollar in value; it's been this way almost from the day it was founded. China, which holds the paper on America, is now the world's fastest-growing economy. India's is the second-fastest.