This pottery rendition of an ocean wave was conceived and constructed by my daughter sometime in the 1980s when she was a small child. Recently a friend was trying to remind me of the peculiar horrors of Reagan-era America, when all the Sixties hopes for social progress in this country were definitively squashed. And I had to reply that I had hardly registered the grotesque disappointments of the 1980s on the political front when I was living through that period because I was completely preoccupied with my own private fatherly elation.