Wistful for the Old-fashioned Country Childhood

Time folds in on itself. Has it really been this long since I lived with young children? Now they are all more than thirty years old and not easily entertained by building a fort of furniture and blankets. Do children still do that? Times have changed. My three grew up mostly without the internet. None of them had a cell phone before they turned 16 and got their driver’s license. Social media and text messaging did not exist. If we wanted to see a movie, we went to the movie theater or rented a video. Many independent or controversial movies never made it to our small town. Our house was so far out in the woods that for many years we didn’t get TV at all, and when we finally did get TV we had maybe three stations. My children recited and memorized the times tables instead of relying on a calculator. If someone gave one of my children a gift, I expected them to write a thank-you note and mail it. Who writes actual thank-you notes anymore? We ate home-cooked meals every night, heated the house with a woodstove, and read books out loud every evening. Ron and I raised resourceful, thoughtful, creative, capable children.

With grandsons now two and four years old, I enjoy plotting things to do with them. This has recently led me to contemplate how many children coming up today have the kinds of old-fashioned experiences that my children had. Some of the disparity from then to now is not a time disparity but a place disparity. Many more children grow up in urban and suburban areas than rural areas so some of the things my children did are things that country kids typically do and city kids typically don’t. That hasn’t changed from then to now. For instance, my children rode horses. How many children growing up today have ridden a horse? My children know how to bank a fire so that it smolders through the night to keep the house warm. Most children don’t rely on a fire to heat the house.

This line of thinking led me to compile a list of things that I think all children should have experienced while growing up. I would be curious to know how 16-to-24-year-olds score on this list and to learn how many of them had most of these experiences. My list is very much the product of a mom raising country children in the Northern California climate. Nevertheless, I believe that childhood should include these experiences. Here’s a cursory checklist.

Have you ever….

Made hand-cranked ice cream

Rode a horse

Cared for an animal (pet or livestock)

Seen the Milky Way at night in a place far from light-bleed

Built a fort from chairs and blankets and sat inside it and read stories

Planted a cover crop in a vegetable garden in the fall

Baked bread and baked pie with a homemade crust

Collected firewood

Started a fire in a wood-burning stove or fireplace

Slept with a hot water bottle

Put kitchen scraps into a compost pile

Tended a vegetable garden

Read a book before bed by candlelight

Participated in a family read-aloud

Made a puppet show

Gone fishing and eaten the catch for supper

Eaten venison

Flown kites

Rode in a wagon

Distributed homemade holiday cookies to the neighbors

Caught bugs and looked at them under a magnifying glass

Made Christmas tree ornaments

Written and mailed a thank-you note

Made a sachet with lavender (from your own garden?)

Made things out of colorful pipe cleaners

Collected feathers

Gone on a treasure hunt

Driven a stick shift (manual transmission) vehicle

Drank well water directly from a well

Gone swimming in the ocean

Dug clams on the beach and roasted them over a campfire

Danced in the rain

Made something useful out of wood

Sewn clothing

Made candles

Drawn a map

Gone to museums of natural history, science/technology, culture, and art

Seen a live play, heard a live concert, seen a live dance

Swung on a tire swing

Heard frogs croaking their mating song in winter

Made popsicles out of juice

Gone cherry (or berry or apple or peach or etc.) picking

Canned and preserved fruits and vegetables in the summer to eat in the winter

Put up applesauce

Climbed a tree (sat in a tree to read a book?)

Painted a rock

I could list many more such things but let this suffice. I can’t say that I did all these things as a child myself because I did not but I think my children did. I remember fondly and with pride that one year Yael put up quarts of peaches, Akili stayed home from school to watch the vet spay the cat, and Sudi went out on the deck every night for a month to observe the moon to write about it in his moon journal (a school assignment). My children attended a small country school where families brought their pet goats along to the Spring Sing. When my children went trick-or-treating on the street where their school was, one of the teachers handed out warm, fresh, home-baked chocolate chip cookies instead of candy, and of course the cookies were safe to eat right there on the doorstep. The world keeps changing and the pandemic challenges parents every day to raise children in harrowing circumstances. I don’t say it’s easy.

My husband and I raised survivors and optimists, and the human species needs such people in this world of climate chaos, injustice, and horror. I have said it before, I say it again, I wanted to give my children an enchanted childhood so I moved to the forest. That sounds like the description of a Miyazaki film. Maybe that’s why my children and I love Princess Mononoke so much. Add that to the list – all children should see it. Once my son said to me, “Only the three of us know how truly miraculous our childhood was at the Ranch.” All of them live in the city now, but the forest is in their blood. 

Princess Mononoke

Lost in the Machine

Have you noticed how businesses, particularly within the healthcare industry, have insulated themselves from client/customer contact to an alarming degree using the technological machinations now available to them? I give you a case in point. In July I got a referral to a gastroenterologist (GE) to discuss digestive issues. “Digestive issues” turned out to be an understatement since, if you read my previous blog post, I had a destroyed sigmoid colon that was removed with major surgery. Anyway, back to the GE. The earliest appointment they could give me was in mid-October and it was a telemedicine consultation. I took it and I kept it even though I had the surgery in the meantime. I thought perhaps the GE would have some insights to share. A few weeks before my appointment, I received an email telling me to call the GE’s clinic to have them set up an account for me in their patient portal to provide “paperwork” prior to the appointment. Fair enough. I began trying to call the clinic. Every time I called, I went through a voicemail maze and was put on hold. Sometimes I waited on hold, other times I couldn’t wait around. Twice I waited on hold for 20 minute and never got through to a person. The email about calling the office was sent from a “donotreply” address so I couldn’t respond. The website offered no avenue for contact.

More and more businesses, particularly health clinics, employ the machinations of impenetrable phone and web-based systems to manage incoming communications. When I actually connect with a live human via one of these machines, it takes me a moment to recognize that I’m talking to a person and not a voice message, bot, or assistant-algorithm. I never did get a live person at the GE clinic prior to my telemedicine appointment, which turned out to be a colossal waste of time. The doctor had no helpful advice and doggedly tried to convince me I needed a colonoscopy, despite the fact that I no longer had a sigmoid colon and that surgeons had recently thoroughly examined my colon with my abdomen split wide open using their eyeballs and not a camera on a stick. After I politely cut the session with the useless GE short, I suddenly realized that I had still never communicated with her office.

I tried calling the office yet again, one last-ditch attempt, and once again went through the voicemail maze and spoke to no one. I had never once received an email with a viable address to which I could respond. So I reverted to that 20^th century mechanism called pen and paper. I mailed a letter to the clinic and chewed them out for being so inaccessible and I enclosed photocopies of my insurance cards so they could bill for my worthless session with their clueless GE. A few days later, I received a text message from their office confirming that they had received my billing information and the woman who texted me actually gave me her direct-line phone number! So I called her. We discussed the problem I had reaching anyone in the office and she apologized and said they are having systems issues. Ya think?

That clinic was an extreme case, but I have had similar difficulties getting through to healthcare providers and businesses. My husband has had bizarre and unbelievable experiences attempting to order health supplies to support management of his diabetes. He has literally spent hours on hold with no other option. Businesses seem to have given up on the notion of front office staff and are invested in these machined systems that keep clients at arm’s length. It’s infuriating and unviable.

Here’s another story about getting lost in the machine. We have a subscription to the New York Times for home delivery of the Sunday paper to our door and it includes access to all digital content. I read the NYT every day online, Ron plays the word games on his phone, and we enjoy getting newsprint on our fingers while reading an actual paper on Sundays. It’s an old-fashioned pleasure. When I first set up the subscription, many years ago, I received a special rate for it. That good rate lasted for a year. At the end of the year, I called the NYT and asked if they would extend the rate. They did. And they continued to do so for years afterward. Every six months I would call and ask for an extension and they would give it to me.

So a few weeks ago, the good rate expired again, and I called as usual to extend it. The person I talked to said they had no deals available to offer me and my rate would be doubled starting that week. I thought perhaps I had just had bad luck and gotten a mean person or a person having an off day. So I tried going on the chat online and asking if I could get my rate extended. At first I got an assistant-algorithm that couldn’t figure out what I wanted but eventually it passed me off to a chat-person, who also declined to extend my good rate. I waited a few days and called in again and once again was told that the rate couldn’t be extended. We decided to switch to an all-digital subscription, which is less expensive than having the Sunday paper delivered as part of the deal. We couldn’t justify paying so much just to have a hard copy of the Sunday paper when we could access all the content online anyway.

I called the subscription office and explained that I wanted to cancel our Sunday paper subscription and switch to a fully digital subscription instead. The agent then asked, “If I could give you a special rate on the Sunday subscription, would you keep it?” I asked what kind of rate and it was the rate I had originally wanted to keep to begin with. So of course I accepted her offer and now I have the rate I wanted in the first place. Explain to me how this is an efficient way to do business.

I have a friend who just turned 90 who has no computer. She doesn’t know how to use one. Without online banking, she pays her bills by mail. She drives to the AT&T store in the nearby shopping mall to pay her phone bill in person with a check. If she encounters something that is only doable online, she calls a younger family member to take care of it for her. When I want to send her pictures of my grandchildren, I go online at Costco and have prints made, have them delivered to my door, and mail them to her. I’m beginning to think that she is onto something. The convenience of doing everything online or from smart phones is no longer a convenience when more and more transactions require hours on hold or getting lost in the system or a complete inability to make the necessary connection. Lately, I find myself longing for a simpler life, a life outside the technology machines.

This is me reading the Sunday paper a few years back when we first got our subscription.

What Happened to Amy?

 

She was blindsided by a health crisis.

Having enjoyed good health all my life, I am in shock to be experiencing a serious health crisis. After major surgery, the long-term prognosis is good for my full recovery and many years of excellent health in the future. But only after a few months of slowly and painstakingly regaining my health will I arrive in this promised future. Oh how I took my health for granted, assuming that with my careful diet and lifestyle, my knowledge of nutrition and how my body works, I could avoid serious illness. It didn’t work that way and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened.

Here are the medical facts in a nutshell. Five years ago I had my first diverticulitis attack. Until then, I didn’t know I had diverticulosis. My diet and lifestyle contraindicate ever contracting this disease, but my genetics doomed me. My mother and both my grandmothers had it. It was a time bomb ticking in my body. I have fought valiantly these five years, narrowing what I ate more and more and taking a host of nutraceuticals and herbs to aid digestion. But this summer, soon after I moved to Portland, my health deteriorated. I had one abdominal infection after another, was hospitalized several times, lost my energy, and lost my appetite. The constant antibiotics and constant battle with infections wore me down. Finally, in September, a smart surgeon figured out from my CT Scans that I had entered the endgame of my journey with diverticulosis. I needed to have my sigmoid colon removed, and, as they discovered when I was on the operating table, I needed it removed immediately to save my life. I’m a hard woman to kill.

Removing part or all of the sigmoid colon is a common and routine surgery that has been conducted for decades to address all sorts of issues from diverticulosis to colon cancer. Even though it is routine, with relatively few risks, it is still major surgery. It laid me flat. It’s amazing how quickly our muscles atrophy when we don’t use them. Nearly ten years of diligently going to the gym washed away overnight. I could barely move. I don’t remember anything from the first two post-surgery days. When I got out of the bed and forced myself to move again on Day 3, I crept slowly on a brief walk around the ward using a walker with a member of my care team and a physical therapist walking beside me to prevent me from falling.

My weeklong stay in the hospital after the surgery was actually a pleasure because the care team was terrific. I had super nurses and CNAs, a great physical therapist, a brilliant young surgeon, and other helpful staff who contributed to my recovery. I enjoyed engaging them in conversation and we shared stories, they told me about their families and pets, I learned the meaning of their names, I had them explain their tattoos, they made me laugh, and they kept me entertained and comfortable. I heard how the married women’s husbands had proposed to them (one of my favorite questions). I gave advice on potty training toddlers, dealing with seasonal allergies, and more. They made me feel like the grand dame of the fifth floor. I gave the nursing staff a good laugh by telling them that I felt like I was staying at a spa. (I asked them what time I was scheduled for my manicure.) On my last day, many people popped into my room to say goodbye and wish me luck. One of the CNAs told me, “It has been a pleasure to care for you.” After I had settled in at home, I sent them a bouquet of flowers to thank them.

Coming home was hard. I’m looking at days, weeks, months of slow recovery. I can feel myself improving and getting stronger by very small increments. But I wonder how I will survive these weeks of healing. The days drag. I lack patience for my uncooperative body. I don’t get much done, although I’m easing back into my grant writing work, which I can do from bed. I tire easily and spend too much time during the day sleeping so that I don’t sleep through the night. I take a slow and careful walk outside twice a day without a walker, enjoying the brilliant fall color in the maple trees. If only I could fold time and jump to a few weeks from now. If only. I feel fortunate that my ill health is short-term and that I can look forward to achieving that magical state called “good health” one day in the future. I doubt I would have the courage or determination to continue life if I had a chronic or serious disease with no end in sight.

I have to work to keep my mind occupied and my attitude positive. I am grateful to my friends and family for their extraordinary support. My husband Ron has given me so much. When I was so terribly sick during those first few days after surgery, Ron sat on my hospital bed, held my hand, and sang to me. How could I not feel better from that? I have a long road ahead and keep the vision of a complete recovery as my guiding light. I am reminded once again of the fragility of our lives. Mysterious forces beyond our vision work their designs.

I wish you good health, dear reader. Do not take it for granted.

 

 A gratitude bouquet. Much for which to be grateful.

Fresh Start

Last week the New York Times published a piece by a psychologist about rebooting for a better life now that the pandemic appears to be winding down in this country. The article introduced a program called Fresh Start. Participants could sign up to have prompts texted to them every day for ten days to help them rethink their lives and establish new habits, routines, and attitudes. I didn’t sign up, but I have been imagining the prompts. Do you really want to read Middlemarch? When is the last time you laundered your sweat pants? Did you figure out what oregano is and do you know how to use it to make pizza? If you have small children, are you practicing speaking in complete sentences when they are asleep? Have you made a plan yet for what to do with leftover hand sanitizer? Where did you put your boots? You have a puppy? Seriously? 

While the pandemic continues to devastate communities around the world, the U.S., under intelligent and organized national leadership (sigh of relief – finally), has managed to get things under control. And with this new step forward, the psychologist writing for the NYT explains that people think of their lives in chapters and a collective chapter in ours has just ended, with a new one beginning. At the beginning of a new chapter, we have a greater capacity to establish fresh and healthier routines, both for daily living at a granular level and for our lives overall in broader strokes. Rather than returning to a vanished normal (did it ever exist?), we can rethink how we want to live our lives. We can make a Fresh Start. 

I would say that I jumped the gun on this Fresh Start new chapter thing by a few months. I am emerging from the pandemic having already downsized my stuff, moved to Oregon after 43 years in my beloved California, sold that behemoth of a house, rented a little apartment, and become an on-call babysitter for the two little boys who are the center of my universe. I am entering this new reality to find myself laughing maniacally at things that a three-year-old thinks are funny (such as shouting BOO then jumping around like a deranged kangaroo) and changing five-alarm poopy diapers on a supersized toddler who eats more than I do. Not rain nor sleet nor dark-of-night nor global pandemic can keep a Jewish grandmother from her grandchildren. It took me a little while to reorganize, but here I am. 

In my Fresh Start, I have a gluten-free bakery and a four-story gym with an astonishing array of shiny strength-training machines. It does not compare to the little gym I used to go to before. After not going to the gym for more than a year, I have row upon row of equipment at my disposal. If I look hard enough I will probably find a machine in there somewhere that will work the muscles in my eyelids. I have discovered bread and cinnamon rolls again at the mind-blowing gluten-free bakery. If I’m not hallucinating, I’m actually buying a challah every week. I lost ten pounds during the move, then started to gain it back in cinnamon rolls, then started to lose that off at the four-story gym. My body is so confused. 

On Fridays I do a little Shabbat ceremony before dinner every week with the grandchildren. The three-year-old says “you’re setting it up” when I put the candles in the candleholders, pour the grape juice, and cover the challah. He loves to pull his chunk of challah after the blessing. Soon he’ll know the blessing by heart. The toddler pulls his chunk of challah too, and we indulge his love affair with grape juice. He points enthusiastically and shouts at the candles periodically during the evening, chitter-chattering at them in his secret language. I get to bless the children. May the spirit of the universe, that permeates all things, protect them from harm and bring them peace. 

I see in the news that many wells in California are running dry and there is no rain in sight, no snow pack from a painfully dry winter. It rained here every day this week. Sad that I am for California, land that I love, I feel a greater sense of relief than I ever imagined I would feel to have fled the drought and the upcoming fire season to the South. Certainly there is summer fire danger here, but not to the extent in my previous home. My hair is curling up in this damp weather in ways it hasn’t for decades. Who am I? Who do I want to be? How long has it been since I asked myself these questions? I contemplate my options, my actions, my choices, my opportunities. Where do I want to place my focus, my time, and my energy in this Fresh Start? 

I’m not bringing you astonishing news when I say that home is not a place, it’s in our hearts. Locked in the house with my husband during the pandemic, I fell in love with him all over again. Relegated to the computer screen to visit with my children, I spent more time with them than I have in years and appreciate them now more than ever; dazzled that I could have possibly raised such brilliant, compassionate, gifted human beings. Who was I to dare such a thing? How did I achieve such success? Prevented from embracing my grandsons, I quit my old life without hesitation and stepped boldly into a new one where I am present to wrap them in my arms. 

I think of that Chinese character for crisis that combines characters for danger and opportunity. The pandemic brought all of us crisis. What do we do with that? What positive value do we make from it? Where do we go from here? I am grateful that I and those dear to me survived the danger, that I recognized the personal opportunity open to me, that my husband agreed with me about the nature of that opportunity, and that we seized the moment and took the leap together. This move was not easy. I feel like I suffered the hazards of the Oregon Trail to get here, metaphorically speaking; I survived versions of starvation and snakebite, having my wagon stolen (slapped around by beastly interstate movers), contending with rampant disease, being shot at by renegade train robbers, and all that. But I made it to Oregon. What a process! If you had told me one year ago that this is where I would be now, I would have laughed you off and told you to guess again. 

I love my new life.

 

The usual image for Oregon Trail is the covered wagon. Since that is an image that brings horror to Native peoples, I didn't want to use it. Instead here is a photo of the actual trail.

 

 

 

 

 

On the Move Again

Heraclitus is oft quoted as saying that the only constant in life is change. I would argue that there are more constants than that. The constant of the transcendence of love. The constant of the inevitability of death. The constant of the smoke detector chirping only in the middle of the night to alert you of a dead battery. The constant of the wild turkeys making a holy mess scratching up the front yard looking for dinner. The constant of the position of the stars in the night sky. But it is true that change happens with steadfast regularity.

I would say that I enjoy change, although it doesn’t happen as frequently in my life in recent years as it did when I was young. While in college, I moved around a lot. For a dozen years I never lived in one place more than ten months at a time. My philosophy was something like, “when the stove gets real dirty then it’s time to move.” I could fit everything I owned, including two cats and a dozen houseplants, in my car, which was an olive-green Volare station wagon. Actually, I didn’t have a car or even know how to drive until I was nearly twenty-two, when I moved to St. Louis to attend a PhD program in English at Washington University. After hearing from many people that I needed a car to live in the Midwest, and in the St. Louis area in particular, I decided to learn to drive. Before my move to St. Louis, while visiting my parents for a month before heading to Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont for the summer, I got my driver’s permit and had my mother take me out to practice. I learned to drive (more or less) in two weeks (without causing the death of Mom although I came close to it), passed the test, and bought the Volare. I wound up with that ridiculous vehicle because I wanted to buy a VW bus but my mother feared that, having just learned to drive, I wouldn’t be able to handle a VW bus because (as she said) the turning radius was different from that of a car. She thought I’d crash the VW bus. So, in a classic Jewish mom lifesaving move, she offered to buy me a used car instead if I bought something else. Since I needed a vehicle large enough to transport my belongings, she suggested a station wagon. She found the Volare. Wearing my patched hippie jeans and sporting my untamed mane of Jewish curls, I wound up improbably driving a starkly middle-class suburban vehicle that looked like something I had borrowed from my father. It’s just as well since I probably would have been pulled over every fifteen minutes by the cops if I drove a VW bus. For the next few years, behind the wheel of a giant motorized martini-olive, I kept dreaming about the VW bus that got away.

Once I met my husband Ron and had someone to clean the stove for me when it got dirty, I tended to stay put for longer. Then we got married and started a family, and that put an end to my wanderings. With two small children and another one on the way, we shot the moon in 1991 and moved from Berkeley to our forty acres of remote forest at McNab Ranch. That’s a famous family story, which many of my readers have heard already, including the part about the first night we were out on the land at our country home when my Chicago-born-and-bred husband turned to me and said, “Where the f--- are we?” That moment resulted in the creation of the where-the-heck-are-we sign that held pride of place on the road leading to our property for nearly two decades. My point is that I have never feared making big change. It’s good for the soul to shake things up now and then.

After our magical years raising the children at the Ranch, we moved in off the land. That move was precipitated by an emergency situation that made up my mind. One night at the Ranch, Ron’s blood sugar dropped dangerously low (he’s diabetic), the glucagon shot malfunctioned when I tried to use it, and I had to call 911. It took the ambulance half an hour to get to our house. Fortunately, Ron is still alive. But I said, “That’s it. We’re out.” We sold the property and moved less than a year later. Our house in town is five minutes from the ER. I have had to call an ambulance quite a few times in the thirteen years we have lived here and the paramedics can get here in less than five minutes. Sorry Grim Reaper, Ron’s a hard man to kill.

Why am I reflecting on changes and moves at this moment? Because in two weeks we move to Portland, Oregon after forty-three years in California. I anticipate loving my new life in the far Pacific Northwest; however, I will always consider myself a Californian and think of myself as a climate chaos refugee who fled the inferno. When we moved from Berkeley to the Ranch, we had to deal with a lot of craziness from the people who bought our Berkeley house because their realtor was as reasonable as a sack of cats. To cope with the stress and insomnia, Ron started watching a French children’s show broadcast out of Montreal that starred a talking pineapple puppet. When he woke up in the middle of the night, he would find the talking pineapple on the TV and watch an episode. The French-talking pineapple got him through the move (and gave him a somewhat-French accent for a few weeks, very sexy). Now he is coping with bouts of stress and insomnia by watching Steve Irwin swimming with sharks. This apparently calms him down. (The sharks do not speak French.) Perhaps he finds the vision of someone in more danger than himself soothing. Perhaps he identifies with a man encircled by deadly sea creatures. I have never understood how that man’s mind works. He keeps me guessing on purpose.

So this is the part where I say farewell to the beautiful land that I have loved. But don’t cry for me California because I am going to live near my grandsons. I doubt I will care so much about the weather, the landscape, the size of my new apartment, or the luxurious absence of the necessity to remain on evacuation warning for six months out of the year, because I will be too busy keeping a toddler from eating the crayons and chasing a three-year-old on a scooter around the apartment complex. As Obama said, “change we can believe in.” I’m down with that.

The Time for Being Heartbroken is Long Past

  

It has been a difficult week, although not surprising. Not for me and those in my circle anyway. Didn’t you expect this sort of thing would happen? Haven’t you expected it ever since Election Day 2016? If anything is surprising then it’s how many people just woke up to it now, at the tail end of the destructive cycle. If anything came as a surprise it was that we went so long before this particular version of hatred and violence happened. I am also surprised that so few people died in the mayhem. I keep hearing people say that they are heartbroken, and I ask myself when my heart broke because it sure wasn’t this past week. How long ago was it? I would say that my heart first broke when I was eight years old and I saw images of children of African descent engaging in peaceful protest as part of the Civil Rights Movement being beaten against the wall with powerful water cannons in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 at the order of Bull Connor.

My heart broke decades ago when, as a child, I began to understand the kind of country I live in, the kind of world I live in, the level of hatred out there. My heart broke when I saw injustice right before my very eyes on TV. My heart broke a long, long time ago. What I feel this week is outrage. What I feel this week is fury. And, if I’m being honest, I feel some measure of smugness because I can say that I knew this is where we were going to wind up when I wept in my husband’s arms on Election Night 2016. This is where I have said we were going to wind up. And yup here we are.

The image from Wednesday that disturbed me most was the Confederate flag flying inside the capitol rotunda (carried by a rioter), and it did not break my heart. There were a great many disturbing images to choose from, but that one hit me hard; and yet I was outraged by that image, not broken-hearted. When I dug deeper, I discovered that the portrait in the background in that Confederate flag photo is a painting of Senator Justin Morrill, an abolitionist from Vermont who helped frame the Fourteenth Amendment (adopted in 1868), which granted rights to those freed from slavery. The fact that he had his watchful eye on that flag from his perch in history settles me and gives me hope. It reminds me that the best of what we are walks alongside the worst of what we are. Both at the same time. Thus, on the same day as that display of violence, hatred, and anti-democracy, Georgia, a state as deep in the South as the Alabama of Bull Connor, made a tectonic shift and voted to send a man of African descent (minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church no less) and a Jew to the Senate to represent a former slave state. I am reminded by these juxtapositions that change happens thanks to the enormous hard work and commitment of folks like Stacey Abrams.

America is a country filled with those juxtapositions. White supremacists waving Confederate flags and signs with swastikas storming the capitol are a part of this country. Native American protestors peacefully demonstrating to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from endangering the delicately balanced ecosystem and poisoning the water are a part of this country. Racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic Americans who believe they have the right to demand control of the government by force live in the same country where the Wall of Moms stands peacefully to protect Black Lives Matter protestors, to protect the future of our children and grandchildren. I won’t delve too far into the injustice and double standard of the demonstrably tender way the police treated so many of those violent and destructive white anarchists rioting because of a threat to their beloved entitlement compared to the police brutality experienced by peaceful Black demonstrators protesting racial injustice (or even walking to the store to buy a snack). We all know that if the people at the capitol on Wednesday had been Black, they would have been face down on the concrete with a knee on their neck in an instant. The National Guard descended on Portland faster than they were called out to quell the violence in DC on Wednesday. This is in plain sight and much has been written about it (see Michelle Obama’s statement).

Certainly humans pose the greatest danger to one another, this country, and the planet. Humans are the most predatory, destructive creatures on Earth. And yet we are also creatures capable of extraordinary and boundless love for one another and for the splendid other creatures who share the planet with us. We are capable of tremendous gratitude and appreciation for the beauty and magnificence of this world of ours, of its inhabitants. This is who we are and who we always have been. We are imperfect creatures struggling to transcend the worst in ourselves to become the best in ourselves through an ongoing process of evolution. I mourn the death of the MAGA-follower Ashli Babbitt along with that of Police Officer Brian Sicknick. No one deserved to lose their life in that madness. Ashli and Brian were each someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone’s beloved.

My heart broke when I was eight and I realized what horror people are capable of but I have lived my life with that heartbreak and have worked to transcend that realization, to salvage a love for the wonder and magic of our world from the wreckage of human failing. I choose love over hate every single day. My email address is jazznkugel – that’s us, my husband and I, the marriage of a Black and a Jew. I rarely think about the larger ramifications of that because he is simply the man I love, not a cog in a social construct. Every day I live a celebration of the possibility (now the reality) of a Black and Jew going to the Senate to represent Georgia. Change happens.

Below is a photo taken in November 2016 of a Native American woman protestor kneeling in prayer at the Dakota Access Pipeline while police sprayed her with water in freezing temperatures. Many protestors were sprayed with water and suffered hypothermia as a result. They can beat us but they cannot change our hearts.

 

Mní Wičóni. Water is Life.