The Sum of a Small Town

The grocery store, the liquor store, the fitness center, the dollar store, the photo and framing shop, the tax preparer, the hair salon, the karate dojo, the dry cleaner, the video store, the pet store, and the pizza restaurant. The post office and the satellite bank office. Across the street there was a restaurant, there was a gas station, there was an employment agency, there were some offices, there was another pizza place, there is yet another pizza place, another hair salon, another dry cleaner, another bank, a tile store, another restaurant that is closed, a dentist, a chiropractor, and some offices that might be open.

This is the swatch of commerce, plain enough workaday material of ordinary stripe. This is the strip heart of the small town. The cross heart is at the intersection with the gas station and the library. There, three churches are up and down the street from each other, more outposts than not. There are three cemeteries, none of them near a church. There is another gas station farther down the road.

There are three schools, divided for grades kindergarten through eight. There is a fire station, a police station, a town hall, and a town building. There are four federal mailboxes, two in front of the post office itself. There is a convenience store and there are six apple farms that I can think of. There are four seasonal flower and produce stands.

There is a main straight road and many right angled intersections, but there are also forks and curves and turns, and many intertwined loops. The interesting streets end at woods or turn on to unpaved roads. Those rough edges mark the town borders. The inside of the town is more opaque than smooth, and its interest is more inherent than evident. There is history and there is contemporaneity. There is longevity and there is transience. There is a middle ground that is sometimes hard to find.

Air and Simple Gifts

And Yo Yo Ma’s wide smile and the seagulls high in the palest blue around the white Capitol dome, if you were watching on MSNBC. Twelve noon struck during this song, easily the most sublime moment of the inauguration, and one in which Barack Obama became president. This even before the oath so awkwardly offered by a man who surely had not voted for him, and so graciously received by this man who certainly had not voted for him to become Chief Justice. America!
But music carried the moment into time and into the space all around, an aural benediction that captured the power of the course of human events that followed. Words of power, words of pressure, words of grace. Hope and virtue; an air, and simple gifts.

Words to Live By

These things are old. These things are true.
And we are not to break with rash and brash entitled hubris those things that anchor us. That is what virtue can teach us. And we are better for listening to and hearing words that hold meaning like full fruit, and that are served in a cadence that itself recalls us to the time and place where our better selves were named, where and when we ourselves named those things which we need to hold to be better, and to be reminded over and across time to be better. That we deemed them to be self-evident does not mean we remember that they are. All the mighty truths and all the mighty words that we the people call our pole star are as ephemeral or as enduring as our intention to remember them. We are to remember that even in this exponential digital google age of trash and discard, we are defined by our deeds propelled by our beliefs. If we wreck and dismiss our ideals in a fit of pique or a convulsion of power and greed, we exist in a moment and then we are history; shattered atoms of a wasted and wasteful nation, an antipodal paradigm even in its mass fission, a polar opposite to the hard clear concentrated light of a star.
Thank you for saying it all, President Barack Hussein Obama. Belief, solidity, our touchstone for national bearings, our call to account for our stated principles. A clear-eyed, fair-minded, powerful, and authoritative assessment of our time and place. No apologies for truth, and no pretense about what was false. This was an inaugural address to us here and now, and its call for the ages was premised on the imperative to pick ourselves up and begin. Obama and his family in the colors from a prism on a clear and cold January morning model civility, decency, humanity, and certainty. We forgot what that looked like out in front of us. Yesterday he held up our truths for us and for the world to see. Like children faced with the broken heirloom, we need to own it, to fix it by using new glue, to renew what is timeless, and to live with that contradiction that calls us to account and to be better for it. And to make each other better for it. Dare I say it? Our new president said it yesterday. Yes we shall.

Obama Understands Greek Drama

Why Hillary for Secretary of State? Obama is steering between the Scylla and Charybdis* of Hillary and Bill. His eyes are open and fixed on the far shore of genuine governance. (Because this is real and not Greek mythology and he already has the Golden Fleece, let's note that Obama's navigation also brilliantly and effectively keeps Bill in a box. Bill can no longer be de facto Secretary of State of the Clinton Global Initiative. He also had to show his Funderwear and will now have to ask permission to buy any more . . . .)

*From Wikipedia . . . . "Scylla was a creature who dwelt in a rock, and regularly ate sailors who passed by too closely. Her appearance has varied in classical literature; she was described by Homer in The Odyssey as having six heads perched on long necks along with twelve feet, while in Ovid's Metamorphoses, she was depicted as having the upper body of a nymph, with her midriff composed of dogs' heads. Charybdis had a single gaping mouth that sucked in huge quantities of water and belched them out three times a day, creating whirlpools."

Verse 2

We sang this this morning and I had never paid attention to the less familiar words until today. Please teach your children the second verse to "O Beautiful for Spacious Skies."

O beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control, Thy liberty in law.

Amen.

Yes We Did

This was a very good day on earth.

Blank Canvass to Start (Part 1)

How to inculcate belief? How to turn thoughts into words into deeds? How to get out of the doldrums and this town? Canvass! I took our children to New Hampshire on Saturday.
Searching the electoral map for proximate leverage, it is clear Massachusetts needs to go north. We believe Massachusetts will vote for Obama, but we are not convinced New Hampshire will. The state’s track record is red, and McCain makes Peterborough his Bethlehem. And there are all those Hillary voters who gave Obama the primary loss . . . . We didn’t go north in 2004, and we should have. So, time to fill the tank with the most affordable gas and go.
The fringe benefits of a journey together are legion. We get the busy teenagers in one place at the same time. We get to groan collectively at all the McCain/Palin signs that line the exurban roads to the highway on-ramp. We get to change the words to a Mamma Mia song to “Give me, give me, give me Obama on Tuesday!” and sing it at the top of our lungs as we follow MapQuest to Nashua. We get to laugh as we drive intentionally but bewilderedly around urban streets that are a world away from our leafy cocoon, asking new faces how to get to the Obama headquarters. I get to smile ruefully as my worldly and knowing daughters tell me we should have GPS. I get to have a bigger smile when I find Obama headquarters on the strength of a map, friendly strangers, and my intuitive sense of direction, all attributes I commend to my girls. And we get to share an eye-popping, heart-swelling moment as we hunt for a parking place in a sea of cars festooned with Obama stickers, crowding the verges and accenting the blue tsunami of Obama signs that welcome us to the huge warehouse nerve center of the Nashua campaign. We are so happy together. Our lonely, exurban Obama bumper sticker has come home, to New Hampshire.
We have no idea how to canvass and the girls are nervous about hostile responses. Inside the warehouse, we are encouraged by a hoarse, adrenalin-charged, terse, college-age Obama volunteer who power-schools us in the process, dos and don’ts as we stand in a group of about forty other new canvassers. We are bunched between blue lines painted on the warehouse floor, and more volunteers arrive and are clustered in rows before equally efficient and buzzed campaign workers. Our exhortation concluded, we follow the arrows to the registration station and get lots of stickers we can layer ourselves with. The girls are excited at these preparations and the energy and friendliness and the sense of purpose from the volunteers. One guy really gets stars from my eldest daughter when he thinks she might be of voting age. (She is so not.) At the next rank of tables we are handed our clipboard with instructions, Google map, and lists of voters’ names and addresses and information pertinent to their undecided status. We have boxes we are supposed to check off about their present decisions, if any, about Obama, Jeanne Shaheen, and the Democratic congressional candidate. And whether or not the campaign should come back again and again till Tuesday. The clipboard and the data and the questions give us credibility and courage and out the door we go.
Without the GPS but the campaign’s excellent directions, we wend our way through Nashua’s intersections, past MacDonald’s, Quiznos, and Subways, down streets with big McCain signs and small, past a plethora of local race placards and “I’m a Gun Owner and I Vote” posters. We reach our assigned set of neighborhood streets and decide where to park the car so we can hit the most houses most efficiently. We all get out of the car, Obama hats and pins and stickers labeling us out loud. That in itself is liberating, as I have been conscious in some of my regular daily doings about when I wear my Obama shirt and when I don’t. My bumper sticker and yard signs always speak for me, but the loud, silent disapproval of too much political opining sticking out makes me wary in dress with some fellow parents and neighbors.
Our first house to approach is very small, like all the others we will knock at, if it is a house and not a row of apartment doors in subsidized housing. Our target neighborhood is mixed with working poor and unemployed, retired or otherwise - elderly, young singles and couples, middle-aged with families, older parents living with grown children - and small outposts of slightly nicer properties with day-after Halloween decorations and clear evidence of childhood streets and dreams and the deep imprint of one archetype of American life. The benefits of this journey for our girls are looking pretty interesting now.
We open the gate in the chain link fence and walk up the short concrete path between two small brown strips of grass and ring the bell. This bell, unlike many we will try to ring, works. There is a small yard, claimed and defined by the fence on three sides. Cars on the busy street behind us whiz by and we feel a little unprepared, despite our marching orders and printed instructions. We were told not read off our script, but to speak naturally and openly, so I scan the notes again quickly before the door opens. It does and a wry and sleepy face of forced patience assesses our cheery tentativeness. He knows why we are there and he says the campaign has been there many times in the last week. He is in his late twenties, as is the woman voter who lives there as well, and he says they are still deciding and probably won’t make up their minds until they get into the booth. We remember then to introduce ourselves and we make some hopeful and encouraging statements and wish him well. Then we consult the clipboard and check him and his housemate off as still undecided, dooming them to more visits from volunteers in the next two days. We feel unsatisfied, but at least proud to have done one house and we leave, forgetting to give him the packet of voter pamphlets we have for every house.
Chagrined by our first less-than-successful encounter, we turn the corner and begin the next street in new earnest.
To be continued with tales of myriad moments of closed doors, open doors, and four hours of door-knocking democracy in action with elemental encounters with fellow Americans - and how we learned later that there were 2000 volunteers so far by the time we turned in our clipboard -