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Letter From New York February 3, 2014

February 3, 2014

Letter From New York
February 3, 2014
Or, as it seems to me…

It has been quite some time since there has been a letter from New York. Fall has collapsed into winter; holidays have come and gone. The creek, in the midst of the polar vortex, has frozen for the first time in recent memory. Canadian geese swarmed the unfrozen portion, having failed to migrate south, caught in the unexpected fierceness of this winter, a winter that has blasted the Midwest and turned Atlanta into the world’s largest parking lot.

The wheel of life has kept turning. Babies have been born and Mandela died, marking the end of an era, the last of the great non-violent protestors gone – a man who made his mark with quiet resistance while in prison and who went on to lead his nation into what all hoped would be a better time.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Academy Award winning actor, was found dead on Sunday in his West Village apartment, a drug syringe in his arm, heroin nearby, another victim of drug overdose. Amanda Knox, the young American woman was found guilty again of murder but will only go back to Italy kicking and screaming. Found guilty once, then the guilty verdict was overturned and then she was found guilty again. Will there be another appeal? How long can this go on?

The Pope continues to amuse and confound while giving the appearance of actually making changes in the most unchangeable of organizations. He appears to be a breath of fresh air while remaining a doctrinal conservative; a fact pointed out pointedly by the New York Post this past week.

Downton Abbey has made its return; season five has been ordered for next year and it seems there is no one who is not interested in the family Crawley. Netflix still grows, becoming ever more ubiquitous and the world waits for the return of House of Cards while Orange Is the New Black continues to be water cooler conversation for many.

Hudson has been extolled in the New York Times, its clever shops praised [it is time to do a fresh walk down Warren Street], its dining scene celebrated. It is the center of “rurbanism,” a comingling of “urban-rural confluence.” It’s a buzzword conceived by Ann Marie Gardner and prominently quoted in the NY Times article on January 16th of this year, front page of the Home section. Everything is town seems to be “curated.”

According to the article, there is a great buzz about Hudson, something almost anyone who has been about the last ten years could have told you. But the noise now is louder. The “Hudson Secret” is out.

About the time Hudson was splashed across the pages of the Times so, too, was Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the Republican frontrunner for Presidential candidate in 2016 – at least he was until one of his aides decided to “get back” at the Mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey with a mammoth traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge into New York City. Then came the accusations by the Mayor of Hoboken that Hurricane Sandy money would be delayed unless she played along with some urban development about which she had misgivings. Poor Chris Christie has gone from being the man of the moment to being booed at a Super Bowl rally. He looked rather glum while Cuomo of New York was downright ebullient when kidding back and forth with the new Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio.

Fortunes change quickly in the political arena. Christie was fighting for a nomination and now is struggling for survival over “Bridgegate.”

And fortunes were won and lost over the Super Bowl, the annual football extravaganza that had the New York Police working overtime to cut down on vice before the Big Game. The Seahawks won in a landslide, as Peyton Manning seemed frozen on the field. The game proved the importance of live television events, once more.

All this has gone on since the last LFNY. The world has kept on moving without this missive. But it will be back more frequently, now that declarative sentences have been conquered.

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Letter From New York, November 26, 2013

November 26, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

Fifty years later…

I was a young boy in Catholic school in 1963 when, in the early afternoon, it was announced that the President had been shot.  Not long after, it was announced that the President had died and we were all sent home.  At home, on that rainy November day, standing in our living room, looking out at Bryant Avenue, watching buses trundle down the rain slicked street, in a grey room on a grey day, I turned to my mother and asked her a question for which she had no answer:  what kind of country are we to do this?

I remember distinctly the color of the wood frames of the window, that I was looking out to the world and looking to the world to give me an answer.  That year the living room was painted an ivory color: I was standing behind a chair with a pink velvet back, next to a marble top that held ashtrays for guests, cocktail napkins and other assorted party goods, I remember all those odd details because that was where I was standing when I understood that Kennedy had died.  Not where I was when we I heard it but where I was when I understood he was dead.

I was crying that afternoon, once I realized what had happened.  I hadn’t realized what had happened when I heard the news; I only realized it when I was home, in the safety of my home, in the warmth of my home, in a place where I thought I was allowed to feel.

I was Catholic.  Kennedy was the first Catholic president.  We had all watched his inauguration on television in school on the portable television I had carried to school from my bedroom.  It was a major moment for Catholics, though not for my family.  We were Republicans and had supported Nixon – definitely a minority at Visitation School that year, 1960, when he had been elected. 

The 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy has brought back to me all kinds of memories of those days, the day he died, seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live television, the day he was buried.  I recall we watched CBS, Walter Cronkite’s voice carrying us through the trauma of having what we thought of as a lovely young man, youngest man elected to the Presidency, with a lovely family, the leader of the free world, a man of eloquent words and the capability of stirring men to motion, gone in a sudden, mad moment that even today seems incomprehensible.

Conspiracy theories flow like a raging river even now; there are conferences for them, those who think Kennedy’s death was the result of a far-right conspiracy or the result of Castro’s revenge, or that the Mafia organized his death or Lyndon Johnson’s Texas cabal organized the President’s death to catapult their man into office; it was Kennedy’s own driver who murdered him.  There were shots everywhere on the grassy knoll.  There are, it seems, a thousand theories and a hundred conspiracies, which have kept the case from closing on Kennedy’s death.  The Warren Commission was a white wash.  It goes on and on and will probably never end.

Kennedy was a man who said:  A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.  And Kennedy was an idea that has lived on despite our growing knowledge of his flaws and faults and all too mortal foibles, of his dalliances with interns, movie stars and mob connected women.  He accomplished only a middling amount in Congress but he was an idea and he lives on, an idea that drove us to the moon and back, an idea that created the Peace Corps, an idea that still inspires us to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”

He is gone.  Those of us who remember where we were when we heard he had died are entering our late middle age or more and will be exiting the stage.  The 50th Anniversary of his death is a marker for those who remember where they were; fifty years is a long time, a lifetime, a half-century in which the world has radically changed.

It is said his death marked the end of innocence but we were not innocent then.  We were a deeply divided country, simmering with rage over integration and economic issues that bubbled over in the years following his death.  His death was the punctuation point for all the troubles to come.

But Kennedy was an idea and he lives on, an idea, an abstract, held in higher regard than any other post war President, 90% of people think he did a wonderful job and they think that because he is an idea that lives on, an eloquent idea that drew us beyond ourselves both while he lived and since he has died.

 

 

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Letter From New York, October 30, 2013

October 30, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

Usually I write my letters from the bucolic setting of the cottage, on quiet Sunday evenings.  Tonight, however, I am sitting in the Odyssey offices and my fingers got itchy for the keyboard and my mind needed the stretching that comes from putting words to digital paper.

It will be Halloween tomorrow night and I will likely be in the city, surrounded by a borough’s worth of children [and adults] dressed for trick or treat.  I vaguely remember being a child and working Bryant Avenue for a bag full of treats – I didn’t have any tricks up my sleeve.  There is something joyfully innocent in all the ruckus that comes with kids and Halloween.  Huge amounts of sweets will be given out and dentists all over the land will gleefully rub their hands together at the thoughts of the cavities coming.  One woman in North Dakota plans to hand out “fat letters” to obese children.  Now that’s a bummer. 

It is definitely turning nippy here in New York.  We went from a string of impossibly beautiful days to a string of days when the weather could best be described as: eh.  Which mostly describes my mood: eh.

I just passed over the headlines a while ago.  Sebelius has gently self-flagellated in front of Congress, apologizing for the blunders that have brought a harsh spotlight on the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka Obamacare.  She may be forced to resign though so far the President hasn’t demanded a head on a platter.  While she was apologizing the President was defending up in Boston while that state’s former Governor Mitt Romney went on record as blasting AHA once again.

The NSA [National Security Agency] is defending itself even as the revelations of what it’s been doing keep getting bigger.  Seems they are interested in everyone from Angela Merkel down to you and me. Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, one of the biggest ad agencies groups in the world, has gone on record on NPR as saying that all of this has damaged “Brand America,” which it has.  Not irreparably, but damaged none the less, so Sorrell says.

Facebook, of the screwed up IPO, has rebounded and is now trading far above its original price point, making early investors finally happy.  Stocks, in general, are up, if down slightly today.  Happy we have avoided a shut down, the markets are ignoring that this is just a temporary fix and we have kicked the budget can down the road a bit – to past Christmas at least.

Vladimir Putin is, according to Forbes, the most powerful man in the world.  The President of the U.S. is number two.  Does this prove that it’s good to be the dictator?  I believe Angela Merkel of Germany is the fifth most powerful person in the world despite the fact she couldn’t keep the NSA from spying on her cell phone conversations.

We have had a lot of embarrassments lately, haven’t we?  I mean the very public, very bad, simply awful debut of the website of the AHA [Obamacare] and all this spying that the NSA has been doing, exposed by Snowden, who is holed up in Russia with the world’s most powerful man.

There’s good news.  Our deficit is DOWN to $680 billion!  Down to 680 billion.  We’re doing something right, I guess.

While the budget deficit is down, gun deaths went up again as six more people died in a North Carolina shooting today.  It appears to have been a custody dispute gone really wrong.  About 10,000 people have died from gunshot wounds since the Newtown massacre nearly a year ago.  It’s a drumbeat that just won’t stop.

And that’s sort of the way it is today, October 30th.  A bit like the constant line from the Laurel and Hardy movies:  now that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into! We move from mess to mess right now and it would be possible to get pretty discouraged from all of it.  But what else to do?

Vote!  It’s Election Day next Tuesday.  Time to make your voice heard! 

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Letter From New York

September 16, 2013

September 16, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

It is early Monday morning as I begin to write this, riding the train back down into the city, a grey day, rain falling softly, chill with the first leaves turning.  I am wearing both a sweater and a jacket; last night I had the first fire in the old Franklin stove.  Tonight there may be frost in the Hudson Valley; the seasons are changing.

The anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone again, with its reading of names and somber remembrances.  It felt less raw this year to me, less time spent catapulted back to that day, to the raw emotions of shock, surprise, hurt and confusion.  Though I say that, I know I will never be free from that day nor, I think, will any New Yorker who lived through that experience.  Sudden loud noises still cause me to jump.  I have learned to be watchful traveling about the city.  I ride the ends of subway trains, not the middle because for I deem them safer from any terrorist bombers.  Wouldn’t they want to ride the middle of the train where they might do the worst damage?

So I am changed by that day, forever and always, as, I suspect, is everyone who lived through it, in some way carrying a bit of post-traumatic stress with us as we continue to plow forward into the future.

We have seen in a week the stunning turn around in Syria from imminent bombing to a tortured diplomacy that hopefully will succeed in depriving Assad of his chemical weapons without a missile being fired.  It’s a stretch to hope this but a stretch we have committed to taking and one that resonates with a country that is weary, weary as we were, perhaps, when Viet Nam was winding down, exhausted by the expenditure in lives and fortune for muddy goals not completely achieved.

When asked this week how I was by an old friend with whom I had not talked in awhile, I responded that my life, compared with 99% of the world was pretty miraculous, which it is.  I don’t live in the suburbs of Damascus.  I am riding a train down to New York through some of the most beautiful countryside America has to offer, the grey light glinting off the magnificent Hudson.  I have health and am successfully navigating my recuperation from arthroscopic surgery on my knee, not too bad but not quite the walk in the park the doctor made it sound.

Yet, like many Americans, perhaps most Americans, I have a sense of ennui.  As we felt as Viet Nam wore down, we are tired and there is a sense of travail.  We have endured ten years now of war in far off places.  We are still weathering the Great Recession, an economic downturn that narrowly avoided being another Great Depression.  We have been dodging bullets, literally and figuratively, and we are weary from it.

Yet we rebounded from the ennui that came at the end of Viet Nam, the oil crisis, the roiling inflation of the 1970’s, the shock upon the body politic of Watergate, a President resigning and the horrible fashion choices of the era.  We survived that, we survived the Yuppie 1980’s and we will survive all this and return to a sense of forward movement.

It is easy when we are in such moods to chat about the decline of America and we are in such a mood.  We have survived ten very difficult years, leaving us questioning much, just as we did at the end of Viet Nam.  We will question for a while yet and we will come up with answers.

I believe the national spirit will revive and prosper.  We have some very challenging and exciting times coming toward us.  There is some economic revival, we have a pause in Syria, the country is barreling toward the moment when whites will be the minority and that will reshape the country in ways we have yet to discover.

On this grey, chill day, I feel the warmth of optimism, wondering what the future will hold, for the country and for me.

 

 

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Letter From New York August 19, 2013

August 19, 2013

Writings from the side of the creek…

It has been grey all day in Claverack, just a bit on the cool side, perfect weather if you wanted to do all the shops on Warren Street in Hudson but I’m afraid I couldn’t quite manage that.  I am cozied in the cottage recovering from arthroscopic surgery on my left knee, a torn meniscus the culprit.

Once finished with the surgery on Wednesday, my dear friend Lionel drove me up to the cottage where I have retreated for four days of rest and recuperation after a stunning set of days on the Cape and the Vineyard – Provincetown with my friends Dawn and Gail and Edgartown with Jeffrey and Joyce, ten days where I did my best to turn off the outside world and concentrate on the beauty that is the Cape and the Vineyard.

Then home for a few days and the surgery, which has kept me close to the cottage, leg elevated, ice pack on for a half hour, off for half an hour, a steady rotation that marked my first three days of recovery, days that were stunningly beautiful. I sat and recuperated on the deck, staring down at the creek, watching a gaggle of geese sail majestically up and down the creek as it glittered in the sunlight dancing between the tree boughs.  It was an idyllic setting for recovery.

And as the sedation slowly washed its way out of my body it was good to reflect on what has been, for the most part, a very good summer albeit with its intimations of mortality that came with the death of my friend Joe Eros.  I have cruised to Bermuda, visited my town of origin, walked the streets of Provincetown, stared at sunsets over Edgartown harbor and feasted with friends at numerous good restaurants here and there – and the summer is not quite over.  Labor Day Weekend I will go to the Wisconsin Dells for the wedding of my best friend from high school’s youngest son.

It has been so idyllic that the drumbeats of reality have seemed particularly far away.  It was hard to imagine the rioting and protests in Egypt as I scudded across Edgartown Harbor with my friend Jeffrey on his sailboat.  The plight of Snowden seemed far away; I didn’t care if he ever got out of the transit area in Moscow’s airport. 

I have felt carefree about the NSA and the thousands of times a year they apparently have flaunted the law in their eavesdropping. How could I care when it was much more important what I would have at Devon’s Deep Sea Dive in Provincetown? 

As I was having a shrimp special on the Vineyard, NBC and CNN were getting themselves into hot, hot water with the GOP over proposed projects on Hillary Clinton.  Surfacing from my knee surgery, it seems the GOP has punished those two networks with bans from the Presidential Primary Debates in 2016.  Couldn’t they have waited to see the projects?

Russia cracks down on homosexuals and the world becomes outraged.  I care though my outrage seemed muted by the sun on the Vineyard, where I learned to love the BTBama, a latte with four shots of espresso with grapefruit zest – it could start any heart.  I sipped it while reading the morning papers in the Behind The Bookstore café in Edgartown, owned by Jeffrey and Joyce, where all the news seem muted by the pleasant present of lattes and papers and good weather.

Soon, Labor Day will come and with it there will be a return from the land of the lotus-eaters into every day reality that will be unbroken by time in the pleasant spots of the world.  It will be a fall of concentration and nose to the grindstone but I will have had the cosseting of a mostly marvelous summer.

In the fall, I know I will have to turn myself to creating the future, not just enjoying the present.  Summer fades and the tasks of fall mount up but buoyed by those summer memories, hopefully yours were as carefree and jazz filled as mine.

 

 

 

 

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Letter From New York

July 22, 2013

July 20, 2013

A vision of things not to be…

When I was very, very little I encountered the McCormick family. They had six children, all about my age. I don’t know quite how I met Sarah, the McCormick that was my age but we were fast friends by the time we walked together to Kindergarten at Fuller School.

I grew up with that family and have remained close to them in all the decades that have passed since Sarah and I headed off to school for the first time. It is unusual, I know. Our childhood friends seem to slip away as we move into adulthood but Sarah and the entire McCormick family did not. When they moved to St. Louis after 8th grade, I flew down to visit them. When Sarah was living in Spain, I visited her there. When she moved to Albuquerque, I visited her there and she visited me when I lived in Santa Monica. Her son, Kevin, has grown up thinking of me as Uncle Mat and I think of and call him my nephew.

I attended family reunions with her and stood with the McCormick family when a drunk driver killed the youngest daughter, Trish, one night shortly after I had visited her in Colorado.

Mary Clare is the oldest and lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I have visited her there, was present when her daughter Margaret got married and returned when Margaret died. She and her husband Jim lived in New York awhile and we dined together at a favorite restaurant, Café du Soleil. I introduced them to my friends and they became friends.

John and Eileen, the parents, settled in New York after St. Louis and once I had moved to New York, I dined with them on a regular basis at their country club and attended family events with them. I contributed to John’s 80th birthday presents as if I were one of the kids. I mourned when both of them passed away within months of each other.

For four years I have spent my Christmases with these people. They are as much a part of my life as if they were my blood family. They are a family of choice and I went to be with them once again when Joe Eros, the oldest son of Jim and Mary Clare, died in an accident while he was hiking in Alaska, where he was stationed in the Army.

Kevin and I sat, looking at Joe in his coffin, and he said to me that he had always had a vision of the future and it had included doing things with his cousin Joe. We cried together. I, too, had a vision of the future that included getting to always know Joe a little better. And now our vision of the future included things that would not be…

He was a special man. Smarter than anyone I know. His Uncle John said that before there was Google, there was Joe. There seemed to be no nook or cranny of history of which he didn’t have some knowledge. He had a wry, dry wit that would bring a crooked smile to my face as he would crack a joke with his own crooked grin. His eyes danced with intelligence.

After 9/11 he joined the Army, served in Iraq, left the Army, went to law school and re-enlisted and was stationed in Alaska, a place he loved. He died doing what he loved, being outdoors, being alive.

I cannot tell you how much I miss him and miss that I will not have more opportunities for knowing him better. His brother Michael went to Alaska and met with his friends, met with the people who had been present when the accident happened and then accompanied Joe home. My admiration for Michael is enormous and my vision of the future includes knowing him better. He demonstrated what an amazing man he is during this painful period.

I have my family of origin. I have a family of choice. My vision of the future includes them both. I cannot imagine it differently.

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Letter From New York

April 29, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

The sun is setting but you can only tell because the light is fading.  The glorious weekend of sun and warmth in the Hudson Valley is ending in a curtain of grey that descended a couple of hours ago.  Below me the creek flows clear and clean, having glistened all weekend with sun sparkles dancing on its waters.  A magnificent bald eagle perched for a half hour or so on one of the embankment’s trees.  I watched him peruse the land before he spread giant wings and flew to the north, low along the creek, seeking prey I suppose.

Prey.  I wonder if that is how the Boston Bombers thought of the people that were killed and wounded?  Prey:  a person or thing that is hunted.  Prey is what people around the world have become, hunted by individuals who wish to do indiscriminate harm to a general population with whom they disagree for some reason.

Back in Iraq [remember Iraq?] the Sunnis are being preyed upon with lots of car bombs.  In Afghanistan, something is blowing up on what seems like a daily basis.  Syria.  Well, Syria is the whole caboodle – bombs, rockets, IUD’s.  Nerve gas?  May be.  The Israelis and the French say so and the Obama administration is carefully considering its opinion and its options as it once said: nerve gas use is one step too far, the red line, the Rubicon. 

Shootings go on unabated in this country – and elsewhere.  Italy had two policemen shot as the new government was sworn in. 

We have a cornucopia of violence in the world. 

After my last letter, a good friend asked me if all this made me angry as well as sad.  OF COURSE it makes me angry.  And what is frustrating is to whom do I direct my anger?  At Congress, for failing to pass background checks even though 90% of the country seemed to want them, according to polls.  Yes, I am angry at Congress and background checks are only part of the reason I am angry at Congress.  This bunch seems to be a particularly inept set of boobs but then Washington somehow has always seemed to attract an inept set of boobs.  Another friend of mine, in her brief time in Washington, sat next to a Senator only to realize he was one of the stupidest men she had ever encountered.  How do we elect stupid people?  And we do, not always, but we do.  How else do you explain Michelle Bachman?

And it is not just the U.S. that has this problem.  Every democracy seems to have this problem.  It seems one of the issues with democracy.  Go back to the Greeks.  I’m sure they had their fair share of elected boobs. 

Last night I was at a dinner and found myself silent while listening to people talk about gun control.  I said nothing because there was no room in what was being said for a dissenting opinion.  Minds were made up and I wasn’t ready to spoil a pleasant social gathering with a dissenting opinion in a room that had no space for it.  And that made me sad.  We’re polarized and unable to discuss opposing opinions.

Yet, interestingly, I found myself in all of this, a greater admirer of America than I usually am – and I have been aware of how fortunate we are since I was a kid, returning from Honduras.  There I was confronted with how lucky I was as a middle class American kid.  I had hot water every day.  I had my own bedroom, my own bathroom.  I had…so much, in comparison.

And despite all our faults, our boobs in Congress, our rapacious corporations and their lobbyists, we are still an amazing experiment in the history of the world.  Flawed and faulted, I admit, but still an amazing experiment still being worked on in the laboratory. 

As the night turns from grey to black, here at Claverack Cottage, I am hoping we continue to experiment and that we find success in the laboratory of history.

 

 

 

 

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Letter From New York

March 27, 2013

Letter From New York

March 26, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

 

It is Sunday, early evening.  The days have grown longer; the sun sets slowly in the west on a day, mostly gray, in the Hudson Valley, a quiet weekend for me.  Friday I arrived at the cottage, fell asleep watching video on my ROKU box, woke to a Saturday that was errand filled and capped by friends for dinner.  Today, Sunday, Palm Sunday for those who follow the liturgical calendar, the Sunday before Easter, was a day of long rest, waking, coffee, TIME Magazine in the morning, the NEW YORKER over brunch at the Dot while everyone else labored over the NY Times Crossword Puzzle.

At Odyssey, it is a time of strategic planning.  I feel data flowing out my ears, having looked at it from so many different ways I understand why down looks like up to me.  Sun comes wafting through the clouds now and again and I feel like that’s a bit of the metaphor for life right now – sun breaking through the clouds now and again.

Strategic Planning feels like that, too.  Sun coming through clouds, once and again, while struggling over a past to make sense of a future, a healthy exercise most organizations go through now and again.  And, in the midst of it, it causes one [namely me] to think strategically about my own life; a thing we should do now and again.

Undeniably middle aged, I must look at the next act of my life, think where I might want to be and all the answers to that question seem to be here.  To the here I have created over the last twelve years, in a home I have owned longer than any other, this little cottage overlooking the Claverack Creek, a small and cozy shelter.  Thankfully, all on one floor, minimal maintenance, all the things one looks for as one grows – older.

Older.  What a powerful word that is in a world that worships the sun-kissed golden youth of potential immortality that is inherent in the celebrity obsessed world of early 21st Century, not just in North America but in the industrialized west; we have become glued to goings on of people like the Kardashians who have perfected the art of being famous for being famous.  They make Paris Hilton look like a piker; they, too, will be followed by someone else who will be even more famous for being simply famous, someday.

I was standing at the pharmacy counter waiting for a prescription [another reality that hits the undeniably middle aged] and looked over the tabloid magazines clustered near the check out register and wondered:  WHO are these people?  Most of them, it seemed to me, were famous for being famous or having done one thing that they continued to trade upon to keep them famous.

This is not, you understand, a new phenomenon.  It’s been with us for quite some time – it just seems it has become more of an art form.  And it makes me laugh somehow.

Because while all of this is going on, there are those who don’t ascribe to the culture of fleeting fame, but are looking, in this, the early days of the 21st Century, for something deeper.  Folks my age, who have had the glitter and the glory, who have stopped and gone:  yes, but I need to know the meaning of my life.

And there are younger people like my nephew Kevin, who seeks to make a contribution and isn’t caught in the allure of the glitter and the glory, making an investment in education both for his future and the future of the rest of us, for he will be helping to shape all our futures.

When I feel despair [just look at Congress], I pause and think of the engaged, seeking to make things better.  When it seems nothing has changed, I look at issues that were unspeakable fifty years ago that are now common conversation [gay marriage] and know that the world evolves.

It is a grossly imperfect world.  It always has been.  The powerful and mighty always seem too mighty and powerful.  Economic inequality seems to exist and yet seems, to me, so much less than a century ago.  War still rages but we haven’t blown up the planet.  Tendrils of hope still grope for life all over the world. 

It is imperfect.  But hope has not died.

 

 

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Merry Christmas

December 24, 2012

Letter From New York

December 24, 2012

Or, as it seems to me…

It is Christmas Eve.  It is snowing in West Virginia, where I am, sitting in the kitchen of a house older than the country, a place where Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have slept.  It belongs to my friends Jim and Mary Clare Eros, whose younger sister, Sarah, is my oldest friend, known since before I remember knowing.  She and her husband Jim are making paella.  Their son Kevin and his cousin Joe are in the TV room watching a DVD.  Outside snow is falling.  We are all waiting for Michael, Jim and Mary Clare’s son, to arrive.  It is a perfect Christmas Eve. 

Back before they were married, Mary Clare and Sarah were McCormicks and they lived behind us when I was growing up and somehow they “adopted” me and here I am, all these years later, celebrating my fourth Christmas with them in a row, a small tradition I hope keeps going.

It is a restful moment in a time that has been hard on the national consciousness.  In Newtown, CT families are dealing with the unthinkable, a catastrophe of human making.  A seemingly tortured soul expressed his angst by slaughtering twenty children with automatic weapons, slaying six adults who worked in the school after murdering his mother and before killing himself.  After a series of mass murders, America stood up and took notice with this particular occurrence, probably because of the age of the victims.

The NRA suggested arming every school guard – or something like that.  What was it that someone said?  The only way to deal with bad guys with guns was good guys with guns?

A few days ago, four people were killed at a mall.  This morning two firefighters were killed as they responded to a burning house in upstate New York, in Webster.  The slaughter goes on, regardless of the Holidays.

Perhaps, at last, we will have enough of guns and killing and something constructive will be done about our national penchant for violence.  Perhaps this Christmas season will be the turning point.

In Washington, we seem to be careening toward the Fiscal Cliff.   The Republicans remain intransigent, stubbornly determined to have their way against the will of the many, continuing their demonstration of determination to ignore the good of the country.  I have lost all respect for the Republican Party.  All that is left is disgust.  They’re the Grinch determined to steal Christmas…

BUT, at this moment, I am in West Virginia.   Snow is falling.  There is a tower of presents in the library waiting to be opened and bottles of champagne to accompany the opening.  Not bad.  Around me is my family of choice while my family of origin calls and chats with me about their Christmas at home.  I am, in this moment, profoundly blessed and blessed enough to be cognizant of the fact.

The country continues to be challenged but perhaps because I am in the glow of the Holiday, I am hopeful.  Hopeful that we will learn from the tragedy at Newtown, hopeful that Republicans will wake from their stupidity and actually work on solving the issues in front of us, hopeful that peace will emerge from the chaos of Syria, hopeful that Israel and Palestine might find peace, hopeful about all things because this is a hopeful time of year.

AND it is December 24th and we have passed the date when supposedly the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world.  I can breathe easier.   That one has been over my head my whole life.

So it Christmas Eve.  May all of you who read this, have the Happiest of Christmases, the Merriest of New Years and experience joy and warmth and love.

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Letter From New York November 28, 2012

November 28, 2012

Or, as it seems to me…

It’s over.  The Election that is, slipping behind us in the wake of history, already becoming lost as we move forward into the future.  Republicans are wondering what hit them, exactly, as this was supposed to be theirs for the taking – certainly I thought I would wake in the morning of January 7th to a President Elect Romney, a thought that frightened me I will confess.

But that didn’t happen.  Romney lost and appears lost.  Republicans have returned with control of the House but not the Senate with the White House still home to the reviled Obamas.  Never quite got the vitriol they inspired from the right.  Starting in 2008 the Republican’s entire agenda was to make him a one term President.  Having failed to do that where do they go?

Not more than a few days ago my brother was in a conversation with some folks about the Election.  He opened to the fact he voted Obama’s way and was met with disbelief by one who said:  you know he’s a Muslim.

How do you respond to that?  How do you deal with that level of ignorance, denial and just plain stupidity?  And, at the end, should it matter in a pluralistic America?  Because that’s what we’ve become – a pluralistic society that is growing only more pluralistic with every election.  That is what hit the Republicans this time in the solar plexus because this could have been their election if they had met more in the center.  Obama won but he also just didn’t lose.  He was on the razor’s edge the entire election, right up to the end and pulled through a narrow popular win while winning big in the Electoral College.

Now understand I gave more to Obama to win than I have ever given any President at any time.  I didn’t want Romney to win.  I’ve made it clear in these letters I didn’t want Romney to win because I didn’t feel the man could be trusted.  And I wanted to like Romney.

Oh, how I yearn for those good cloth coat Republicans of my childhood, when my parents were Republicans and it felt like it was a party that made sense.  Now it doesn’t make sense to me and, frankly, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to a lot of Republicans either.

They own the South and much of the center, the broad plains states but owning the South and the not well-populated plains states won’t carry you to the White House.  There has to be some sense of the center and that’s not something the Republican Party can quite seem to master right now.  And I mourn their inability to do so.

To my great surprise, Republicans have become the party of the crazies, the out of touch folks, the ignorant, the naysayers of our times.  I don’t remember Republicans like this in my childhood.  Where’s Everett Dirksen when you need him?  Six feet under where much of the Republican Party lies buried right now.

And I am praying for a resurrection, not of the Republicans of 2012 but of the Republicans of old, the ones who genuinely cared for the Republic and played for the middle.

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