The Thin String

Recently I’ve read a slew of books that have characters with a sense of place; they come from a culture rooted in some geographic area, a language spoken to their people and understood.

I don’t have that; I’m an American.

Which is to say I am a cultural mutt.

On one side I have relatives arriving in America in 1637. I have a straight line from there to membership in the DAR (should I want it), to a diary from my Civil War veteran ancestor, to census documents from 1890 on up to 2010. It is an easy shot. I am named after one of these ancestors. I know nothing about her.

Yet it is a shot with no identity. In America, we love to say what we are. We are Italian. We are Jewish. We are Cherokee and Mexican and Polish. I believe I am a mix of British, Dutch, Alsatian, Scotch, Irish, Swedish and Iroquois but nothing about me confirms that. My family has no traditions, no meals we share or prayers we say that have passed down from generation to generation like a loving quilt of identity and home. We don’t have those words that tie us to each other. Every holiday is a rudderless experience; they are new each year and thus wide open. Nothing has any sense of sacred.

We have one phrase from my Swedish grandmother. She is the only one of my relatives of any “pure” culture heritage, and thus the only one who has any. What I know in Swedish is a toast she taught my mother, a silly little bar song to celebrate all the pretty girls in the room. That’s it. 9 words. And the grandchildren, me included, are so attached to this, because it is something. It is a clue; it is our family’s secret language that ties us to what we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Maybe that is it: culture ties us to history, ties us to family and ties us to the sacred. That commonality tells us who we are by telling us where we came from; it serves as the string, collecting the beads of each life and each generation.

Holy Day

Easters have gotten less important with time, like birthdays. It has little to do with baskets full of shredded green plastic grass or cheap chocolate molded into fertility demigods; it is the meaning that has faded, not just the trinkets. I haven’t had an Easter basket since I was 10 or 12. Maybe younger. My childhood was spent with more browbeating about meanings than presents and it stuck. Every Christmas and Easter I go through this mental obstacle course, trying to remember to focus on the meanings of the holidays rather than the accoutrement that dress them. And every holiday I fail. I forget, or I remember but feel nothing. I tend to want to spend those days alone; cloister myself into meaning. To be completely honest, I get more emotional about Independence Day than I do about Easter. The brilliant bursts of light in the sky, the hand over the heart, singing Francis Scott Key: this is a holy day to me. This I understand. There is life and bright color and hope and joy.
As my faith has faded to more muted tones so has my guilt about my lack of holy on holidays. I appreciate the day, I get why it is important. I just don’t feel anything about it but a vague sense of gratitude and an even fainter sense of loss.

America or Something Like It

I found America today. Twice.
She wasn't hiding out in the halls of Congress, the Guggenheim, the Grand Canyon. No, that would be too iconic. She didn't smile, didn't wave, didn't look my direction—no, that would be too Canadian.

She acknowledged me as I handed her money and walked out, so in that way today I was America's John and that's just kind of disturbing to think about.

Yes, I found America today. Twice.

My first America find started at 8am, when I, in my professional-looking best, got into my car to drive 2.5 hours to freaking Surry County, NC which in its county seat of Bumblefuck houses a very nice and impressively new Court House.
Because THAT'S HOW MANY SPEEDING TICKETS THEY ISSUE. They may have a Burger King as their only restaurant but they got a nice Court House, paid for by the ticket revenue they collect.
More than any other county in the state.

Legalized fraud? You betcha.

Back on Christmas Eve I got busted for going 80 on the Interstate...in a 70. With traffic.

Ten miles over exactly. With traffic. Ticket was $15. Court Costs? $121. Seriously Pissed? Priceless.

I pleaded down to an “improper equipment” ticket which carries a larger fine but no insurance points and today I was driving up to hand them my money and leave. I walked into Bumblefuck's fancy courthouse and was face to face with a slimmer version of Wilford Brimley in a bailiff outfit.
“You a lawwwyer?” Slim Brimley asked.
“No sir.” I replied in my pearls.
“Well you dressed too pretty to have to be in court.”
I don't know what Emily Post would have me say after someone comments like that, so I simply took my things and went to find my courtroom.
I was in the courthouse for exactly 10 minutes.
And I was told I was “dressed too pretty to have to be in court” twice.

And to be truthful, I was. The place was packed with women with stringy hair and ill-fitting, poorly made clothes carrying screaming children with Lightening McQueen and some leaked condiments on their shirts. The men were in work pants or wranglers, all with some NASCAR paraphernalia on their bodies somewhere. It was like being drugged and waking up smack-dab in the center of a “be the next Joe the Plumber” contest. I swear if someone had seen me in my glasses and my hair up and said I looked like Palin I would have lost it.

Then tonight I made the mistake of “stopping by” Wal-Mart.
Everyone knows that there is no such thing as “stopping by” a Wal-Mart. Even at 2am those checkout lanes wide enough to sort cattle are still sorting the bleak-eyed stares that come from being in a Wal-Mart. There is always, ALWAYS a line.

And I hate that place, why did I go? Truthful answer: the $5 DVD bin. One of the benefits of going to Wal-Mart is the feeling of leaving Wal-Mart. I come out of there feeling like the smartest, most well-dressed, well-adapted, hygienic and successful person to ever walk the earth. I come out confident I can face tomorrow. Again I ran into women threatening children with mortal harm with one hand and handing them candy and video games with the other, teenagers shopping for baby things, polyester people in a plastic place. America. Or something akin to it. It's like where Brittany Spears should be if fate hadn't totally effed up and put her in a position of quasi-relevance.

I couldn't help but feel like the American dream is alive and maybe one day Brittany could come back to her people here in Wal-Mart and traffic court land.

(I wrote this post very quickly, attempting to try a different voice than I usually use, a more poppy tone. I worry I may have come across as too snarky or even snobby. If that is true, I don't mean to be.)

Sunshine Patriot

It was Thomas Paine who famously wrote,
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

After the lofty and somewhat unrealistic ideals of this election and subsequent inauguration it is time to come back down to the scorched earth that is This Country and figure out who she is under all of this. It feels like a reintroduction of sorts.

I recently made a remark about how, in the throws of this major social change, I was once again proud of my country. This is virtually the same statement that got Michelle Obama into so much trouble in the primaries and a statement I made knowing full well I’d be questioned by a few people for it (and rightly so).

I admit it: I am a sunshine Patriot.

Because I believe wholeheartedly that there is a vast chasm between love and pride, a chasm that is often bridged but a canyon that exists nonetheless, and when I don't recognize my country I am not proud of her and that canyon seems endless.

I love my country. By which I mean our relationship is not entirely neat, by which I mean I am indebted to her and our mutual forefathers for this life that I live, by which I mean there is much I would do in her name should she ask me. I love the way our government is set up; how through soaring economic prosperity and terrifying depressions it has survived, through Presidents that span from capable to corrupt to inept it has stayed intact, even through a Civil War that killed 3% of the population it didn’t falter past that core. I love the sweeping landscapes of this country: from red sand mesas in the Southwest to the rugged shore of Maine to the freedom to sit on the levies of the Mississippi and drink hurricanes from that drive-thru daiquiri stand in New Orleans to the smell of the sea and palmettos that is Charleston, SC. I love our great experiment.
Yet as much as my heart is filled with love for this Nation, most of the past twelve years I have not been proud of her and those who represented her. I have not been proud to be an American. I have looked at my passport and wondered aloud just what was my relationship with the country on its cover. I missed her. That Nation stamped in gold did not represent me; she was a stranger. She made cheap symbols of herself be all that there was to hold to, flag pins and all. That Nation in her jingoistic bravado, clandestine power plays and almost cult-like disdain for dissent was not how I knew her. She was too proud of herself, bold in her intent and selfish in her methods. She was acting like a petulant teenager.

So no, I was not proud of her.

And so when a chance came along to see someone in office who could represent me I jumped at it. I needed to see nine kinds of nerd back in the seat of power, needed to believe that the person who was the face of my nation could be the smartest one in the room, needed to know that the whole world was relieved by the outcome, because though they aren’t our country they are our family. Listening to NPR on Tuesday morning I got proud again. Seeing images of the largest gathering in DC history who turned out to simply be in the space where history was made: I was proud. Just the knowledge that my country can change made me proud. My father graduated from a segregated public high school in the shadow of the CIA headquarters and this year he cried in joy as he voted in the first African-American President. I’m proud of my country that we are resilient; that even in these times we prosper. I'm proud to see that she is slowly coming home.

Yes there is a large chasm between pride and love and this week I’m happy to note that when it comes to my country, the bridge is open again.

For the Better

I remember sitting on the floor in the office of Environmental Studies my junior year of college, watching the planes hit and re-hit the towers and thinking, "Nothing will ever be the same after this. This is history at its worst."
Last night I sat on a couch in my friend's living room, wearing blue Mardi Gras beads, drinking some strange concoction out of an orange bendy straw, watching CNN's headline "BARACK OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT" pop up on the screen and thinking, "Nothing will ever be the same after this. This is our country's history at its best."
We toasted with cheap champagne in white Dixie Cups.We screamed, we clapped, we hugged, we stared. We got emotional.
We literally danced in the street.
As the senate and house results came in, one young guy said almost to himself, "Democrats in the White House!? And Congress!? I might have health insurance in two years!!!" The very first thing he thought of when confronted with such a change was his health. That was and is his biggest fear: to be hurt and not get care, to have something small happen that would bankrupt him for life. How telling. Politics has an intimacy we gloss over.

Just as I did on 9/12, I woke up today not knowing what the day would look like, only that yesterday I witnessed a watershed moment in our nation's history and that from here on out the rules have changed.
This time, for the better.

Declarations of Desire

It's the Puritans' fault we have a set election day.
Blame them for the 20+ months of campaigning and advertisements, the robocalls, the countless countdowns, the feeling of Election Day being a sort of New Years Day for the civic minded.
Thank you, Puritans.
I live in a state that sponsors early voting and many of my friends have gone out and done so. Good for them, any vote at any time is worthwhile!
I consciously chose to vote today because I believe so strongly in the day itself, the feeling of waiting in line for such a purpose; standing in a queue with fellow citizens all keen to exercise their right to do so. I walked into my polling place with no one in front of me; I got there in a lull and took my ballot to my booth and filled in the little circles that I prayed would mean something. I placed my sticker over my heart and walked out into the fall.

I remember the first time I consciously went into the voting booth with my mother. It was the 1988 election and she was one of the last to vote in the tiny fire station five miles from our house. I remember looking up at the levers, my mom explaining what they do and why we do it. I got chills watching her pull that handle to seal her votes and open our curtain to the rest of the world. She did something important.

We women have only had the right to vote for 88 years. That means we weren't allowed to vote for Teddy Roosevelt or Taft or Wilson; we voted after they had come and gone. In North Carolina the 19th amendment was only officially ratified by the state in 1971. We aren't a state that thought it was a good idea to give women the vote 88 years ago. I am blessed to have that privilege now.

Sarah Vowell, whom I'm currently obsessed with quoting, has a lovely statement in her essay, "Dear Dead Congressmen" talking about suffrage.

"...look up the word suffrage in the dictionary. In mine, after noting the main meanings--the privilege of voting, the "exercise of such a right," the third interpretation of suffrage is this: "A short intercessory prayer." Isn't that beautiful? And true? For what is voting if not a kind of prayer,, and what are prayers if not declarations of hope and desire?"