They Can't Take That Away From Me

If you're anything like me, right about now you feel like everything you hold dear is imperiled. After tomorrow, we may be entering a new dispensation in which our president (God forbid) is intimate with both the KKK and the KGB. Your inclination is to focus on those things that give you solace, casting a soft glow on your life, inspiring gratitude and making you think of drinking pernod and listening to Edith Piaf. Writing in the second person gives you just the distance you need to escape the black hole of "it can happen here." So you go the second person route which you have not done since the very first blog post on seventysomething when you couldn't quite believe you were taking the plunge. You considered calling this piece "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things," but mindful that sentimentality is the flip side of violence, you determined that the treacly, alpine Julie Andrews lyric didn't fly. Instead, you went with Gershwin, 1937, Jewish New York, defiance in the face of brown shirts on the move. The following is a list, hardly exhaustive and in no particular order, of some everyday encounters, all virtually free of charge, that belong to you irrespective of the outcome of the election  and that fill you with tranquility, joy and amazement. So there.

Drinking coffee in bed. In the indolence of seventysomething, you don't generally rush out of the house in the morning. You can make a pot of coffee and pour a cup for yourself (black) and one for Frank (with milk). Then, you can get back in bed and read, letting the caffeine work its magic, orbiting other worlds. You can fly to Rome with Jhumpa Lahiri in the pages of In Other Words. Watch the remarkable Jhumpa, raised in Bengali and educated in English, as she surrenders to Italian. You can wander with Rabih Alameddine in Yemen, Egypt and Lebanon and tell him how much you admire his intricate novel, The Angel of History. You are hopelessly infatuated with books like a horny teenager. You can't live without them.

Lemons. You love their astringency, the perfume that floats up from the oil in their peel when it's grated over linguini. Lemons make everything taste better, cod, custard, cocktails. So Mediterranean. You love their color in a blue bowl, definitively yellow as if nothing else, no daffodil, no sundress could compete. The way they offer themselves up off the tree in your sister's backyard in Berkeley. You are grateful to lemons for their simplicity and their versatility, their willingness to make themselves useful.

Walking in Stockbridge. You never get tired of ambling in disbelief down Main Street from north of the library, past the Dutch roofed old town hall, past the gracious Riggs buildings with their charcoal shutters and matte blue doors separating the pain inside from the pain outside, all the way to the cemetery where your friend, Al, a wandering Jew, an interloper, ended up surrounded by legions of church people from old Stockbridge families. Nothing much changes in this town. The trees do what trees are called to do, leafing gracefully in the spring, exploding in cherry blossoms as spring becomes summer, turning pumpkin in autumn, letting go as winter approaches. You feel no need for a different walk. It's less than a mile down and back, but you see something new every day.

Words. English words inhabit your cells in densely populated housing projects. There are so many of them and each one plays different music. You love their roots in the classical languages, connecting you like ancient Facebook friends to Socrates and Virgil. Sometimes, they arrive in steerage or by caravan from the Arab world. Alchemy. Algebra. The history of language defies politics. Eighth graders in Indiana don't know they're engaging with the mathematics of the Arab world when they struggle to solve equations. They don't know that the word ojala, Spanish for hopefully, comes from the Islamic devotion, if Allah wills it. Words are sneaky. They don't carry passports. They vault over the big wall and set up shop. There are some that irritate and some that terrify, but truthfully, you love almost all of them promiscuously.

You will not be deprived of these pleasures no matter how far the armies of the night advance. You have read the history books and you know that the struggle to remain who you are in the face of the monster is crucial to survival. In the cacophony of the moment, you wish to make it clear that you
will not be bludgeoned.

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