Mix It Up

Veterans wearing red poppies
Remembrance Day London 2011

Despite the fact that I have been living a pastoral idyll since Nixon trounced McGovern, I am at my core a city girl. Or rather, I am a person with certain urban assumptions, grateful to be living in a place with almost no gridlock or garbage. These assumptions, the city person's habits of being, have nothing to do with cultural opportunities, although the benefits of late night jazz and Thai food cannot be discounted. I'm referring to the miscellany of human life that I encounter walking down one block in, say, New York. There's an exhausted young father pushing one of those ungainly two-seater strollers. One child throws his head back to guzzle his soy milk. The other wanders blissfully through baby dreamland. Behind them, two Dominican teenagers paint the sidewalk with fancy footwork, music surfing their brain waves through tender ear buds. Turning the corner, a massive black woman, diabetes in tennis shoes, drags her shopping bags home. The woman has a few choice words for the twelve-year old on a skate board who careens around the corner, almost knocking her down. One bags turns over sending pie apples rolling down Broadway, but they are retrieved by a fast-acting samaritan in a three-piece suit and a turban. As Joyce famously said, here comes everybody.

At home in the southern Berkshires, I've learned to make do with a more limited cast of characters set against an astonishing backdrop, green then russet then white, sometimes many shades of gray. Lines of well-mannered pre-schoolers on their way to story hour at the library. The annual Latino Festival in Lee, empanadas and salsa dancing on Main Street. I satisfy my craving for salty, spicy food at the Vietnamese and Indian restaurants, but, in the end, I know I'm living in a place primarily reserved for white people. Many of these people are either older and retired like myself or can afford to set up house far from any job market. Most of us who moved here from the city have traded the 24-hour urban buzz, the peacock plumage of costuming in the street, for a quieter, gentler, more predictable life where from one day to the next you see the same people, or at any rate people who look the same, when you stop at the Farmer's Market for fiddleheads in the spring and macouns in the fall.

The idea of having to give up living in the world, even this manicured version of the world, is anathema. Who was the greedy corporate con artist who first thought of putting all old people in one warehouse and calling it Pleasant Acres? Where is the recognition that these Senior Living arrangements are sinister ghettos that separate people from the texture of life lived in real communities? When you visit your Aunt Mildred in one of these places, you know in your gut that the incentive for herding the old under one roof is the same as the motivation behind prisons and factory farms. Let's round 'em up so we can manage 'em. We'll seat them at assigned tables in the dining room and feed them portion-controlled salisbury steak with canned green beans. We'll distract them with golden oldie sing-a-longs and holiday galas with party hats and noisemakers. They'll be fine. After all, it's not as if they have plans, divergent interests, deep personal histories that seek expression.

Don't send me to Senior Living. I'm not talking about a nursing home which admittedly I'd also prefer to avoid. I understand, I really do, that at a certain point I may not be able to manage my ADLs. That's Activities of Daily Living for the uninitiated. Bathing and dressing and getting the spoon from the bowl into your mouth. I may require nursing care even, if I can still carry out my own preferred ADLs, daydreaming, reading, praying. I may require someone to tie my shoes. But as long as I'm still able to decide between egg salad and pea soup for lunch, while I remain disdainful of bingo and would rather read Don DeLillo on a rainy day, have mercy on me and let me live in the world. I'd rather sit on a park bench covered in bird droppings than slouch on an upholstered recliner in a cavernous sitting room where a sprinkling of other residents are nodding in the middle of the afternoon.

I want to hear babies crying. I want to witness the struggles of the young and listen to their dance music. Give me my own little spot with a few strategically situated handrails and not too many steps and I'll take care of the rest. A little public transportation wouldn't hurt. Like I said, I'm a city girl. I came of age on the Broadway bus.

Tomorrowland

photo by Peggy Braun
courtesy of Sohn Fine Art

Our President, the one we still have, remains audacious about hope. A few days ago, he advised the citizens of Flint, Michigan not to communicate despair to their children. This is the kind of nuanced suggestion we have come to expect from Barack Obama. It implies that he understands the anguish experienced by the people of Flint as they check in to motels in neighboring towns once a week to shower.....but that he also appreciates the corrosive effect that despair can have on young people. He knows that children need hope, even if giving it to them involves a certain amount of bearing false witness. The incident in Michigan makes me think back to the unwarranted optimism of the postwar years when confidence in the future was impressed upon me. I like to say that I was born in the last four days of the pre-nuclear age, August 2, 1945. Of course, as an infant, I was ignorant of the more than 50 million people who had just died in World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombs dropped on Japan. But it wasn't just me. Throughout grade school in the Eisenhower years, unless we were red diaper babies, we all continued to cling to a scrubbed version of reality. Where I came from, we were spoon fed progress with our Gerber's baby food. It was, as the pre-presidential General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan pointed out, our most important product.
We all wandered wide-eyed in Mr. Disney's Tomorrowland, flying to the moon, curing cancer. We were hoodwinked into believing that the epic violence at mid-century was an aberration, that the country would outgrow its racism. We watched as the new cars came off the assembly line and the women waxed their floors on TV and we held fast to the illusion of a future.

Somewhere along the line, while our contemporaries fought in Vietnam, or protested the war at home, or spent those years exiled in Sweden, we lost our innocence. Now, we are confronted with a Candidate who advertises his authenticity, his fervor for "telling it like it is," who gleefully brings the widespread simmering fear of women, people of color and immigrants to a boil. The Candidate serves up a toxic soup - promising to make America great again by playing to a nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed - seasoned with a reality show hot sauce that leaves us desperate for a cold glass of water that doesn't come from the Flint River. What goes around comes around. Some months ago, I saw a post on Facebook that featured a head shot of Hitler next to Trump with a list of characteristics common to both of them. I immediately shared it. Ten minutes later, I frantically took it down, thinking I had gone too far, crossed the line. This is the hopeful child in me, crouching under her school desk in the ludicrous belief that this posture will save me in the event of a nuclear attack. I am a grownup now and can't afford to be so naive.

But what will we tell the children? It depends on our willingness to absorb some portion of the pain of the world, even when it keeps us awake at night or causes us to burst into tears for no discernible reason. Confronting the reality makes it possible for us to know what's at stake when our children ask us difficult questions. The best answers come when we stare down the demons, let them know that we are on to them and will not allow ourselves to be deceived. If we fall for the magician's sleight of hand as my parents and teachers did in the '50s, we will lapse into habits of denial and avoidance. Children know the difference between adults who are carrying a great burden of truth, feeding it to them in digestible bites, and adults who are not paying attention. Children, if they are loved, will ask to be citizens of this fractured world in small increments and sometimes they will see things, like hungry people on street corners, that adults have become inured to. Then, they will be our teachers. We will learn from them that one answer, a first response, to the man's hunger is to give him your sandwich.