A loss and a meal and a niece

It's been pouring brickbats all day. Early on it felt cozy, but, in concert with having fallen back with (the most horrible event foisted on us twice yearly) Daylight Savings and thus being plunged into darkness at approximately 3pm (legit, I offered Oliver dinner at 2:57p today AND felt as if I were doing so late), and some heartbreaking news this afternoon and the looming anniversary of election day 2017, well, it's been a grim evening. 

When I was very young -two years out of college- I moved to New York with a broken heart, big dreams, no money, and a job I'd talked my way into and was not remotely prepared for. You will not be surprised to know that the job didn't last, not least because my boss was an abusive alcoholic who enjoyed hitting on all of the waifish women he'd lured into the company.

Desperate, I reached out to a former University of Chicago colleague who now worked at Columbia. She put me in touch with the admissions director and long story short, I was offered a job. Bliss.

I moved into the lower level of 212 Hamilton Hall and became officemates with Terry. Next door, if I remember correctly, resided Peter.

Peter V. Johnson, a bespectacled man who always wore a suit, bow tie, and proper pocket square. Who laughed at my skim, no-whip gingerbread lattes, who offered me friendship and mentorship and made me fight, in the best and smartest ways, for the applicants I really thought warranted admission.

He'd attended Earlham, was married to a vibrant woman and had a vibrant daughter. He'd been at Columbia for years.

He called me Slim and I called him Peeves (an ellision of P. V. J.). I distinctly remember several colleagues saying, "Not sure he'd let anyone else call him that."

When we moved to temporary quarters because 212 Hamilton began its renovation, Peter and I shared an office. Never, before or since, have I enjoyed sharing office space quite that much. I can still hear Peter's raspy chuckle, can still recall the way we sat in stupor as we watched the Towers fall on 9/11.

Once we'd moved into our shiny new space, no one shared an office, but Peter's corner spot was a primary hangout. How many times did I sit for hours a day, six days a week, arguing for certain applicants, ordering another container of Strokos tuna salad, marking my docket, losing track of time in there?

Those hours are some of my fondest professional memories. And now Peter is gone. And my heart is so sad.

For all of these reasons, none of these reasons, reasons beyond today, I found myself nesting like a fool this evening. Ol was driving me batshit, Jack and his pal were doing just enough homework to stay within the limits of acceptable, and all I could think to do was cook and provide.

What was meant to be the ingredients for at least two days of meals turned into a one-night feast that will, hopefully, sustain us through the weekend. That said, the steak is gone. I am not yet buying enough to sate the appetites of growing boys. But there is a huge pot of soup (ribollita; absent leafy greens per a shopping mistake and freezer overestimation but alas), a vat of potatoes, half a round of the best cornbread ever, and there is love and thought and memory in it all.

red chili cornbread

flank steak tagliata a'sear

steak at rest

Five days ago, on my nephew's 3rd birthday, his little sister was born. A day later, she was named Virginia. She is such a darling beauty, and I can't wait to meet her.

Today, Virginia went blue (go Northam), and I have to think that in the cycle of loss and birth and life and death is, always, love. And hope. I know Peter would have been pleased with the gubernatorial outcomes of today, and I thank little Virginia for any part her happy birth played.

sweet Virginia, five days old

Disgrace

I’m no stranger to descriptive language or emotion, but the past two days have plunged me into a depth I’ve visited just several times since that horrible excuse for a human became “president.”

Certainly November 9 was wretched, as was Inauguration Day, Charlottesville, the complete theft of a Supreme Court seat, and repeated healthcare debacles.

But something about Evil Yam’s impotent responses to hurricanes Harvey and Irma followed by his vastly stupid and offensive Twitter tantrums against those athletes who chose to take a knee compounded by his appalling invalidation of the suffering of Americans in Puerto Rico and the USVI in the wake of Maria plus his asinine verbal cock-fight with “little Rocket Man” in which actual nuclear weapons are at play all topped off by the horrific and largely preventable massacre in Las Vegas has hellfired me down to the abyss.

That our idiot “leader” finally got his ass to Puerto Rico where he threw rolls of paper towels to desperate citizens like they were eager parade groupies during Mardi Gras, told everyone how minimal their damage was because “only sixteen” have died (arguable and not substantiated), accused Puerto Rico of fucking with our budget, and then said the few hours he spent on the island were “really, really lovely” as if he’d just gotten a goddamn mani-pedi at a slightly nicer-than-usual place is all stunningly deplorable.

So is the fact that he offered Las Vegas his “warmest condolences.” What does that even mean? Did Las Vegas’s guppy just die? Or did more than 500 people just get gunned down by a crazy guy with twenty assault rifles hiding like a coward psycho on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay?  

Its the latter, people. 

Plus, can you even imagine how different the “lone wolf” narrative would be if Paddock were black or Muslim? I cannot even. There are more white domestic terrorists in this country than any others. And guns are their primary weapon. Accept it. 

“Thoughts and prayers” without action are now officially offensive.  

Today I noted on Facebook that more Americans have died from guns since 1968 than in all wars in which America has fought. Ever.  

A relative of mine replied, “I don't know if these numbers are accurate but I personally will mow down with my AK-47 anyone who ever tries to take my guns.”

There are no words for how disgusted, furious, embarrassed, and stunned I was and continue to be by such coarse, tone-deaf, selfish, shameful machismo. I am mortified and grossed out and that guy isn’t a singular example of too many people in this country. 

We, the US, are in the direst of straits.  I am utterly stunned by how quickly trump’s poison has courses through the country’s vascular system. The weaknesses were there, no doubt, but wow.

Eight months in and we are ravaged.  

Oh, and did you hear the one about the Republicans trying to pass a bill to make silencers available to everyone? They’re dying to protect hunters’ ears but I could swear hunters already have easy access to ear protection. You know who doesn’t have protection? People being fired at by an asshole hiding 32 floors above them. Know how they were warned? Because of the fucking sound of the constant gun shots (oh, because that great white American also had access to a neat toy that turned his semi-automatic guns into fully automatic ones. Isn’t that swell? And then he killed himself like a pansy-ass coward so I guess the state of his ears didn’t much matter in the end.)

Oh, and did you also see that today the House passed a bill to ban all abortions after 20 weeks? Only victims of rape get an exemption and even that is a maybe. These guys making all these decisions about women’s bodies totally get it. I mean, they as strangers absolutely know how I might feel if raped or with an unplanned child. And being pro-gun, their pro-life decrees ring SO sincere.

I have almost no hope for this country. It is letting down almost all of its citizens and the world. It is a disgrace.

A national suture

I have six sutures snaking across my upper back. The stitches look to have been sewn with navy blue fishing line, pulled taut and tied off into a grimace atop a fleshy ridge. Tomorrow they’ll be removed. By all accounts the wound has been beautifully closed by skilled hands. But really, what does that mean? Does it mean it will heal well? Look pretty on the surface? Smooth and soft, demure like a slight smile?

So much of life is never what it appears to be. Marriage is more constantly challenging, motherhood more regularly enervating, driving times but estimates failing to take into account traffic, other drivers’ skills or lack of, accidents, weather.

Our “president” is even worse than he seemed at first, a greedy buffoon with bad hair, bad ties, orange skin, and dubious business success. He is, in fact, a truly horrible, greedy, mean narcissist who still has bad hair, bad ties, orange skin, and dubious business everything. He is a bigot, a racist, a liar, and a fraud.

It has been hard to be back here. Hard to return to swastikas and white supremacists and the pardoning of a man who unabashedly targeted minorities and made them suffer. It has been almost impossible to watch our “leader” make equivalent the neo-Nazi racists and those who peacefully (and even less peacefully) opposed them. There is no equivalent. None.

It has been hard to watch brave men and women who've fought in our military be suddenly banned from service because they are transgender. It has been sickening to hear bullshit claims that their medical costs are too much of a burden to this country, not worth their courage and service, when in fact our military spends five times that amount on Viagra and our deplorable “leader” has already spent more on personal travel.

The stitches itch something fierce and the skin around them is raw and red, irritated by the bandage adhesive keeping them slicked with ointment and padded and covered.

The country aches something fierce and so many are raw and red, furious and exhausted by the fight since our birth, since the Civil War, since emancipation, since suffrage, since battles for Civil Rights and Women’s Rights and reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. Like the worst sort of full circle we have a "leader" - with bad hair and bad ties and orange skin and the meanest streak - who wants to take us back to before, to the time of our birth. To the time when only he and men who looked like him, potentially minus the orange skin, could succeed or even hope to.

Friends and family and millions of strangers spent the past few days battening down for and enduring Hurricane Harvey. It has been a Katrina redux to watch Houston flood. And our “president”? He pardoned a racist crook, banned willing and brave service members, and tweeted a book review on the day the rain started to fall. As if that imbecile reads anything booklength or not about him. He flew south during the campaign although he was asked not to. He’s barely said boo to Texas, a state that handed him its electoral votes, since Friday and might go visit on Tuesday.

While in the Netherlands I got to spend time with a friend there. She was lamenting her daughter’s nearly-six-week summer break; summers are tough for working parents. Who watches their children? Where? For how much? I said, I understand, we have twelve weeks.

Summer is now officially long in the tooth. I’m sick of it. The next eight days will be a slog, an uncomfortable fishing line grin snaking across the remains of August. The rose-colored summer break is at once marvelous and not at all what it appears to be.

And yet this is life. There is a PE uniform to buy (late) and braces to be set and schedules to be made. There is the weeding of the garden, the removal of all whose season has passed, the extra love given to all who persevere in the blurry pages between summer and fall. Perhaps we’ll get some more tomatoes, squash, and melons. But the arugula is long gone, the peppers and okra now wisps of hope. The birds have stolen all of the berries, and I have stopped fighting them. For this year at least.

I will try to find my way back to activism but also to the simpler things that enable me to better care for myself and my family. This fight is going to be a long one, and we all must both protest and pace. It will, potentially, take generations to undo and heal some of what Trump has wrought. But he is not the only one to blame.

This country has never adequately reckoned with its racist birth and past and the ways in which those old tentacles reach insidiously into the present. That failure allowed such a heinous individual to (sort of) win a presidential election, and if we, white America, do not deal with our wrongs now, we are as complicit as ever in laying the groundwork for another Trump in the future.

Stitches may capably close a wound but talented hands don’t ensure the underlying ill is excised. A lovely scar can mask ugliness. Just ask America.