Responding to last week’s column, a Westphalia reader wrote: “Do you ever write about anything other than about yourself? Just wondering.”

I responded: “That’s a good question. I wonder about that myself.”

Schopenhauer said that no matter what we do — from doing the dishes to painting the barn; from writing a weekly column to making love — is a perfect reflection of who we are. I could write about economics or religion or the boundary lands between nation-states and physics and metaphysics, but would I really only be writing about myself?

Would I?

I wasn’t sure.

I picked up the phone and called Eric up in rural Wisconsin – Eric Chaet, the writer, philosopher… the whatever. He calls himself “the turnaround artist.” We first met on the road almost 50 years ago.

I asked him: “Do we ever write about anything other than about ourselves? Just wondering.”

Eric thinks and speaks in a kind of code of his own creation that you sort of have to circle around from above to get the gist of what he's saying.

He said an economist might write an academic paper for a peer reviewed journal describing an elegant economic system that would work perfectly and efficiently if only there were no people in the world. Was the economist actually just writing about him/herself, revealing, perhaps, a personality disorder? Probably, he said.

A couple days later, I received an unexpected Facebook Messenger text from a young lady in Gaza. I recognized the name. She’s a journalist. I’d seen some of her work on Al-Jazeera. She’d seen me on Facebook and noticed that we had several friends in common and decided to send me a hello, how-are-you message.

That was last Sunday, March 16, the day I was born in Milwaukee, 77 years ago.

I told her it was my birthday. She responded with a happy birthday emoji.

I responded: “How are you?”

Although some sort of cease-fire agreement had been reached, delivery of the basic needs of life — food, water, energy — had been stopped.

She responded: “Our lives have been completely shattered — we’ve lost our home, my job… myself and the little kids urgently need to find a safe place to escape to…”

Like we want to tell the kids when they come home with a skinned knee or bruised feelings — that everything is going to be all right — I told her that I was hopeful the ceasefire would last; that the supply routes would be reopened; that a transoceanic shipping canal would be constructed across the Negev and that Gaza would become once again the pivotal gateway between East and West and North and South like it was a thousand years ago along the old Silk Road — a jewel on the Mediterranean, grander even than what Trump could imagine.

Texting back and forth across a vast distance, we talked about how we’d come to connect with the people we knew in common.

I told her about Westphalia and that I was a journalist, too — an exiled reporter. I told her that I’d like to set up a Google Meet interview with her and run the video in Thursday’s Columns. I was sure she could easily fill 20-minutes with gripping descriptions of what she sees with her eyes wide open every day in the moment, like an entire Hollywood production of nothing but gruesome special effects. She has seen beneath the rubble. She’s hungry. Like a wounded animal in the woods, she hunts for food. She wants the world to know the reality of it… so then, maybe, the world will act.

I recalled what Eric had said and texted back to my new friend: “If we do the interview, I’ll want to know YOU, you — the stories you were told and sometimes questioned as a little girl, walking to school, a special present, growing up into a woman in a neighborhood in a city along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean; the secrets you shared with your very best friends beyond the hearing of an occupying authority. I want to know YOU, you.”

Dozens of journalists have been killed in Gaza. Different organizations keep track of the numbers. Over the course of the war, I’ve only taken an observer’s notice of the numbers. But if I had known one of them… “When the world knows you,” I texted, “the world will act.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “We’ll keep in touch.”

That night, because it was my birthday, me and the head of Westphalia’s language department, Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist, had Chinese delivered.

The next night, Monday, March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day — we warmed up the leftovers and then we decided to watch something on our new television, which has lots of stuff for free if you’re into old television shows like Andy Griffith, Perry Mason, Leave it to Beaver… Gunsmoke. I get a kick out of Culley Jane’s reaction. She never saw those shows growing up. Her family read books, instead.

First, though, I wanted to catch some news, like when I was a kid and we all watched Cronkite after dinner.

I like foreign news sources, Euro News, India Today, China Business — Al Jazeera. Was there any progress to report in the ongoing Mideast peace talks?

I clicked on Al Jazeera.

A screaming black-on-red banner headline appeared across the bottom of the screen, beneath a newsroom scene with a talking head.

The headline read: 43 DEAD. I merely blinked and then it said: 57 DEAD. In the minute it took me to grasp what was going on, there was suddenly 74 DEAD. The news was live. Breaking. Israel had just unleashed a massive attack… 94,113, 153, 189…

I sent a text to my new friend in Gaza: “Are you ok?”

A message with an ugly red X popped up on my iPhone screen: “MESSAGE UNDELIVERABLE.” I tried again. “MESSAGE UNDELIVERABLE.” By the time I went to bed to try to sleep, the numbers were over 200 DEAD. It was 435 DEAD when I woke in the morning with untold thousands injured or beneath the new piles of steaming rubble.

I tried again. MESSAGE UNDELIVERABLE.

When the world knows her, the world will act.

And, so: Do I ever write about anything other than about myself?

Probably not.