Hope kinetic

I am slowly recovering from Roger’s wrenching loss on Sunday. In all seriousness, I was just crushed. What an incredible match, a fact that in some ways made the tiebreaks that much harder to swallow. Amidst all the ugly news of late (the past couple years), R’s being in the finals was such pure joy, and I so wanted to see him hold that trophy aloft for the ninth time. Alas.

Last night, I had the profound fortune and pleasure of attending a rally sponsored by my House rep, Jamie Raskin (he is awesome), and co-hosted by none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC! It was in support of Rep Raskin’s organization, Democracy Summer, which he started a decade ago, and the importance and spirit of political organizing. I love that there’s an historic educational component too- political science, change, and so forth.

The event was held at a local civic building and was to start at 7, so I got in line at 6 and was about 50 deep. The crowd was wonderfully diverse: young, old, in the middle, straight, gay, black, white, Latinx, immigrant, American born. Our energy and anticipation were palpable despite the pro-life protesters moving ever closer with their six-foot tall graphic signs and false claims that women who chose to have an abortion are likely to end up drug addicted and/or suicidal. Most of us simply ignored them and talked with one another instead. One man tried mightily to have a real discussion; his irritated wife kept dragging him up in line and encouraging him to stop because he was making zero headway.

When the doors opened, people scurried in to get spots as near the stage as possible. Finally, at 7:30, Jamie and AOC emerged, and the crowd of 700+ went nuts. I am an enormous fan of Jamie’s intellect, passion for representing and supporting his constituents, and belief in what good politics can do. Same for AOC, and her magnetism is undeniable, y’all. She is smart, engaging, gorgeous, and absolutely what politics needs more of.

Also in attendance were Bob Moses, THE Bob Moses of SNCC and Civil Rights activism renown, he who helped pull back the Cotton Curtain of racial apartheid in American, who coined the phrase “one person, one vote,” and Danny Glover who I think is Bob’s friend and supporter. Bob is a legend, and as a complete aside, both men have the dearest of faces. Seeing them was like getting two hugs.

Jamie gave a wonderful opening speech about his family history of political involvement and activism and then introduced AOC not only as a colleague but also as his vice chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

AOC gave a thoughtful, rousing address about where we are as a country right now. It is her belief that we are picking up where the Civil Rights movement left off. “America has always been the story of the efforts of some to advance the rights of others while others work to advance the rights of a few.” It is the duality, the many-the few, that essentially defines us and our history.

In referencing the last book Dr. King wrote before his assassination, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, she said that the only way to move from chaos (our present) to community (hopefully our future) is to move forward via organization. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. This is hope kinetic. “We are characters in America’s story- who do you want to be? What side do you want to be on, now and when history looks back?”

I urge all of you to ask yourselves those questions. It is my dearest hope that most of us are decent people who don’t hate different others as vehemently as it seems. Who won’t throw our pluralism and democratic promise under the bus because you really can’t accept who others love, what color they are, what choices they make when it concerns their OWN bodies and not yours. Does it really matter who a person in another state is sleeping with? Why must you demand that everyone live within the singular, small worldview that you prefer? Isn’t the pursuit of happiness a virtue that our founding fathers enshrined? Are not most of us immigrants to these shores? People who came in search of better?

For the first time in a while last night, I felt hope. Not from the hateful things being said to those of us waiting patiently in line by those who’d come to evangelize and demean. But from the efforts of a man whose family has fought the good fight for generations and from a member of The Squad whose mother cleaned houses and whose father died at just 48 and who worked 18 hours a day organizing and bartending to help keep the family home and STILL wore through her shoes canvassing in the Bronx. Who did what everyone said she couldn’t and wouldn’t. Who once here has been celebrated, yes. But also treated with such racist, bigoted disdain and cruelty yet who still rises with hope and determination every day.

Those two represent our future. Those in favor of LGBTQ rights and Black Lives Matter and Choice and ending Citizens United. That is our future.

What character do you play in our nation’s story?

Thoughts on pride and independence

I am in my favorite spot in the library. Ruthie is purring next to me. I have a cold and just woke from a nap. There was a marvelously intense rainstorm last night. Today is hot, steamy, sunny, and blue. Periodically I look at a framed black and white Neal Preston photograph I just hung. It is Freddie Mercury in sweats and a crown, leaning against a door jamb, one Converse-clad foot crossed over the other, a lit cigarette down by his side. He has a gentle, hint of a smile on his mustachioed face. It was 1977. I smile back at him. I love Freddie because even when it was hard, he stayed true to himself, and he was great because of it. There is a profound lesson in that.

I hung him in here because I spend so much time in this room. It is peaceful, there are no screens. I always have a puzzle going, my books and countless treasures surround me. My students and I meet and work in here. Windows and natural light are all around. I enjoy watching the birds eat from the feeder I hung in a crepe myrtle. I enjoy watching my cats watching the birds, their feline jaws clacking and moving with instinct and desire, guttural sounds of hunger emanating from their cores. Recently, a zealous squirrel removed the feeder from the branch; I suppose he became impatient by having to hang upside down to access the food, so he tossed it to the ground below. You have to hand it to squirrels; they’re crafty.

On the way to the airport last Thursday, I was overcome with anxiety, and it sucked. Not because the boys were leaving, but because my tank had been empty for a week already (weeks?), and yet I had a hefty few days with them ahead. To get to camp, we fly to Portland, Maine, rent a car, drive 90 minutes to Belgrade, and then do everything possible to pass the time until we can actually move to camp the next afternoon. None of it is a big deal, but Tom couldn’t come with us, and though the boys were immensely excited, they were also nervous about saying goodbye and being homesick.

As we unloaded and said goodbye to Tom, an incredibly terrific woman who taught both boys in 4th grade and who I am lucky to call a friend, walked up. She was heading to Portland too, to visit her brother. Could we head to the gate together? Her presence and company seemed like a gift from some guardian angel. I did not mention my anxiety but appreciated the way having her near felt like a balm. You never know what someone else is holding; kindness and love count for a lot.

It is beautiful in Maine, endlessly serene. Before driving to Belgrade, we hugged our teacher friend goodbye and went to the boys’ favorite comic store, Casablanca, in Portland. While they were looking, I walked over to Bard for a coffee. It, too, felt like a gift. We wandered around trying to decide on a spot for lunch, and I considered that I could live in Portland were it not for the winters. Bookstores, great food, antiques, a slower pace, the water. As it was PRIDE month, celebrations of LGBTQ were everywhere, including a large rainbow flag flying just below the Stars & Stripes at City Hall. Another gift, for what is greater than to love and be loved for who you are. To be able to be and celebrate that openly and proudly. The world still has a long way to go- in more than 70 countries, homosexuality is still against the law. But 50 years after Stonewall, things are better here, and I am thankful. Let’s hope such progress holds (and continues).

We spent the night in a rented house with friends from camp, a lovely spot with a dock on Great Pond. The boys swam and played for hours, burning seemingly endless energy before we forced them inside to change for dinner. I was thankful to be with these wonderful families, people we just met last year but who are already treasured friends. I shared of my difficult morning; they understood completely, shared ways they felt the same, didn’t judge.

All our boys wanted to make the first boat from the mainland to camp on Friday, so we made it happen. As Jack and Oliver lugged their gear up the island’s dock, I followed with my small bag, smiling at their independence and legs that are starting to look more man than child. I listened with deep happiness as counselors from last year called out to them with joy: “Grossi brothers! You’re back!” And the boys beamed, and so did I. I moved them in and helped them pick spots for their hammocks, visited the wood shop and dining hall, the common rooms and the boat launches, happy for the total absence of screens and electricity, for open-sided tents and the water lapping at the shores and the loons. I am so enormously grateful that they get this time off the grid and away from everything, including the hideously awful military tanks our idiot in chief has brought in for the 4th. I am also grateful for this time for me and for Tom, time to reset, rest, and figure out how to harness what we all learn about independence and self-care this summer and maintain it when they get home.

After our goodbyes which were far less teary and hard than last year, I drove back to Portland, treated myself to a delicious dinner and beer, wrote each boy a letter, and turned out my lights at 8:45. Bliss. I spent next morning at Longfellow Books, communing with an amazing Maine Coon named Buddy in a map shop, enjoying the student and faculty art show at MECA (fell in love with Lewis Rossignol’s work and bought some), and then flew home to a quiet evening with Tom.

I have been reading and working in the yard. One of my best friends was in town, and I was lucky to see her twice this week. I have been keeping myself as informed as I can stomach about the horrific, inhuman situation at our southern border, a situation for which I primarily blame trump and his GOP enablers. Reports by DHS inspectors who visited five facilities in the Rio Grande Valley show that:

children had few spare clothes and no laundry facilities. Many migrants were given only wet wipes to clean themselves and bologna sandwiches to eat, causing constipation and other health problems, according to the report. Children at two of the five facilities in the area were not given hot meals until inspectors arrived. Overcrowding was so severe that when the agency’s internal inspectors visited some of the facilities, migrants banged on cells and pressed notes to windows begging for help. At one facility, some single adults were held in standing-room-only conditions for a week, and at another, some single adults were held more than a month in overcrowded cells. Some migrants were forced to drink from toilets as they were given no fresh water.

Tomorrow is Independence Day, our country’s celebration of declaring itself free from monarchical British rule. In the Declaration, our founding fathers wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness… That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Don’t we care about these words anymore (taking into full account of course the fact that at its writing, the Declaration’s authors did not consider people of color or women to be equal)? Substitute trump and the GOP for Form of Government, Governments, Despotism/such Government, and King of Great Britain, and you have present-day America, a country built on magnificent democratic ideals that are in such peril right now under the tyranny of a deeply immoral man. To those Americans who can celebrate tomorrow but also be ok with forcing desperate people to separate from their children, soil themselves, starve, and drink from toilets, you are hypocritical and cruel beyond what I can imagine. If you are cool with our president yukking it up in the DMZ with Dictator Kim and diverting funds from National Parks to turn the 4th into a militaristic celebration of trump rather than America, you are the antithesis of patriots. You are traitors to the ideals of liberty and welcome. You spit on the racist, brutal history so many of us are trying to reckon with and move past. You dishonor all who have fought for greater rights and acceptance and safety on these shores, all who have died for that here and abroad. I feel so little pride in America right now.

Tomorrow is also Jack’s thirteenth birthday, and I will choose to focus on celebrating him from afar and briefly hearing his voice when he calls from the mainland during rest hour. I will think of the beautiful soul he is rather than the hideous tanks and gross incompetence and evil of trump and his followers. I will hope that one day our country is deserving of my children, our children, the people who look to America as a beacon of hope and a better life (as did, PS, all of your and my ancestors; they were ALL immigrants unless you are Native American).

Miscellany

It’s been a long while since I’ve been here, y’all.

Oliver graduated from 4th grade, and we enjoyed our eighth annual family trip to Wrightsville Beach with Tom’s parents, brother, sister-in-law, and their darling girls.
Children are dying under pathetically inattentive, cruel “protective” custody on our southern border.
Trump is flirting with bombing Iran. His base is enabling his insane idiocy and excusing his many assaults.
Yet another has credibly accused Trump of assault -this time of RAPE.
I leave on Thursday to move the boys to summer camp, and I fly home on Saturday to commence six weeks without them.
Tom is soon to start a new job so we’re not traveling this summer.
Instead we are renovating our dining and family rooms and relearning how to rest and relax.
Nutmeg still doesn’t like Ruthie, but she is holding her own, and things are slightly better between them.
I have wonderful new writing students and last week taught a fun, energetic Canning 101 class.
I am deeply worried about and appalled by much of America.
Tom and I are driving to Brooklyn on Sunday in further pursuit of my passion for midcentury modern, Scandinavian-inspired design.
The fireflies are out, and my blackberry bush is thriving, and the orange calla lily I planted with hope two Junes ago is blooming magnificently.
It is PRIDE month, and love is love, and let’s just cheer that!
Today is Bourdain Day, and I miss the light that Anthony Bourdain was in the world, and I hate that depression lies so believably to so many.
I am so very tired, so very worried, and have so many books I hope I get through this summer.

In the meantime, I am thinking about connection and trust, relationships and self-protection. I am thinking of how wonderfully connective vulnerability and gratitude can be, and yet how exposed such porous borders can render us.

Here’s to peace and goodness, faith and the best of the unknown. Here’s to six weeks unplugged and in nature, to New York City and loving cats, to friends and also boundaries, and to the ways that appreciation and trust can make life richer.