Americana

Sometimes, you have to take a vacation. You don't actually have to leave the house to do this particular type of traveling. No packing, no tickets, no delays and cancellations, no sciatica from sitting in the same position on the plane for hours on end. This kind of vacation - let's give ourselves permission to plagiarize Ferlinghetti - is a coney island of the mind. It originates in the decision to give it a rest. By it, I mean all the slime of public life in this election year, as well as Orlando, Istanbul and Dhaka. I'm thinking of the pictures of children in Caracas standing in front of empty refrigerators, a shelf with one mango. I mean the feral rightwing populism spreading like mad cow disease in our country and throughout Europe. I mean the reality of climate change, right here, right now. To the anguished verse of this dirge, I'm adding a chorus of all the very real life struggles, my own and those of all the people around me, all the people I care about. Today, in the face of all that, I'm singing a different song. I'm going rogue, re-inventing myself as a person who is not exquisitely attuned to every ripple of suffering near and far, making space for celebration. Just for the Fourth of July.

Understand that growing up in New York in the '50s with the family name Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel in the news every morning, I was not brought up on patriotic overtures. We did not see ourselves as Americans in that fireworks, picnics and parades kind of way. My mother and father, well-spoken and beyond reproach, liberal Democrats by profession, were themselves raised by immigrants and had not yet acquired the full complement of native mannerisms. The next generation, of course, learning its lessons from Hollywood, from Dick and Jane, became more acclimated to the cultural landscape. We became more fully at home in our home. Now I live, literally, in a Norman Rockwell town, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the artist lived and used local people as models for his paintings, a cop and a young boy at a lunch counter, a family gathered for Thanksgiving. I know these images are sentimental. I'm not entirely delusional and I'm disdainful of American exceptionalism. But just this once, I've decided to make a random list, in no particular order, of aspects of life in our country that give me pleasure. Just this once.

I love the oceans, one on each side, framing the prairie and the mountains; the approach on the dunes at Marconi beach in Wellfleet where I drag my clammy canvas bag stuffed with towels, sunblock and those books I look forward to eating for lunch. I am all expectation advancing along the walkway, rose hips and and beach grass growing courageously out of the sand, until I see it, the Atlantic, and it disrupts my breathing. I love the Pacific at Big Sur, more enormous than the imagination, where I went to prepare just before my mother died. The sea stretched endlessly before me beyond the cliffs and the sky glistened overhead. I felt safe entrusting her to their care, my mother as I remembered her, breasts escaping her skirted floral suit, her hair stuffed into a pink bathing cap. In recent years, I have fallen in love with the Mississippi, doing its Mark Twain thing through the humid Minnesota summer air. Habits being hard to break, I find myself thinking about slave ships and steamboats bringing their human cargo downriver. But I catch myself in the act and wag a finger. Not today.

I'm listening, instead, for the sounds coming up the river and filtering into the aural awareness of people up north and all over the world. Gospel, spirituals and bluegrass, the indigenous music of the American outback that mothered the blues, jazz and rock and roll. I'm hearing all the sweaty, raunchy, gravelly, unschooled, uneuropean music that I listened to and danced to when I was young. Girl groups in slinky, sequined dresses, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East, come to mind. This was the soundtrack of our newfound sexuality and the rhythm of protest. We stopped for grilled cheese sandwiches off the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to the March on Washington in 1963 and put some coins in one of those juke boxes right over the table so we could hear Little Stevie Wonder do Fingertips Part II. Stevie was 13. I was 18 and teetering on the edge of understanding.

Still, this is a frenetic pace. I need America's pastime, a drowsy ballgame to rock me into dreams. I love all forms of baseball, major league at Fenway and Camden Yards and the Oakland Coliseum, vendors tossing bags of peanuts in their shells through the air; minor league parks like Wahconah in Pittfield and especially little league fields. Watching an eight year old take on those ritual moves, fading back to make a catch in the outfield, practicing a menacing batting stance, my optimism is restored. Baseball is a reprieve. When I'm tired, overburdened by pointless suffering that I can't remedy and need to give it a rest, baseball creates just the right level of white noise for a luxurious and unapologetic nap in front of the tv on a holiday afternoon. With any luck, there will still be a measure of well-being in the world on the Fifth.