The New Rambler

I almost said the Pledge of Allegiance today. I couldn’t quite do it, but I mouthed the words, which is closer than I’ve gotten to saying in twenty years or so. I attended tonight’s school board meeting because there was some library business on the agenda, and they open every meeting with the Pledge.

It has been a rather momentous day, and for me one full of contradictions. I watched the inauguration in the school cafeteria this morning, and then I went down to the post office to pick up the mail, only to find a flyer posted that promised to give you The True Facts about Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday my county did not observe yesterday. This is a flyer you can find on the internet fairly easily, as it comes from a site that uses Dr. King’s name full name, minus the Junior, as its URL. I won’t link to it because I don’t wish to give any more boost to its PageRank, but essentially it accuses Dr. King of being a Jew-hating Communist, among other things. It’s an excellent site to use when discussing information literacy — excellent, at least, if you are fairly certain that no one in the group you are educating will mistake its “facts” for truth.

Needless to say, it was a little distressing to come upon such a thing right after watching a black man being sworn in as President of the United States. Much has been made of Obama as “post-racial,” and he took a fair amount of slack from the left for not being black enough, or not recognizing the Civil Rights movement enough. But it was hard to listen to his victory speech without hearing the echoes of Dr. King’s final address, and it was hard to watch today’s ceremony, with the Tuskegee airmen and Aretha Franklin and Lincoln’s Bible and a crowd on the mall, and to hear on the radio this morning about John Lewis going to stand by the Lincoln Memorial early in the morning, before any of the ceremonies began, and to look at whitehouse.gov today, with its promises of transparency and its prominent coverage of the Obama administration’s recognition of the national day of service — it was hard to see all these things and not feel in some way that perhaps that check Dr. King spoke of so many years ago on that same Mall has been made good on — has perhaps, at the very least, had an installment paid.

Yesterday and today have been about recognizing big names, big people. And that is all well and good, but I want to take a moment to remember some other people, too.

I have heard from time to time in my years as an activist that I am an ingrate and don’t recognize that I have my freedom of speech because people fought and died in wars — the implication being that I should have nothing to complain about and ought to shut up and be grateful that I’m not speaking German. I don’t in any way wish to diminish the very real sacrifices made by people in the military. But I would also like for people to acknowledge the equally real sacrifices made by those who fought in the Civil Rights movement — the people who were beaten and jailed and killed — Medgar Evers and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and James Chaney and all the many others who lost their lives in the struggle to make sure that the rights promised to all Americans in our founding documents were given to all Americans. And I’d like to recognize as well the courage of all the footsoldiers: the people who refused to ride the buses in Montgomery, who marched from Selma, who answered telephones and stuffed envelopes and kept records (for a fascinating look at that side of the moment, I highly recommend Freedom Song, a memoir by Mary King detailing her work as a sort of press secretary for SNCC), and all those who helped.

The summer before I graduated from high school, I met up with my friend at the thirtieth anniversary of the most famous March on Washington. I don’t remember a great deal about the day, just that it was unbelievably hot, and that I was so hot I couldn’t get myself to pay attention to anything else. But I had spent the night before with the mother of Rachel, my mother’s best friend from high school, who had herself been on that great original march thirty years before. Hilda, Rachel’s mother, said to me that morning that she had packed me a lunch — the very same lunch she had packed for her daughter and her compatriots on their bus ride to Washington in 1963 — peanut butter sandwiches on raisin bread, food that would keep well in the heat, because the bus would not be able to stop at many restaurants.

I would like a day — many days, really — when we remember and celebrate these people in the way that we remember and honor our military veterans on Veterans Day and Memorial Day. In the meantime, though, I shall rejoice at what they helped to accomplish, and what I saw today.

Last January my friends Edie and Deb and I made a plan to ski out to the cabin on the South Fork of the Wood River and spend the night, and in February we actually did it, which is more than I can say for many of the plans I make. Deb took many great pictures, and one of these days I’ll post some of them. The snow was a little bit slushy when we went out — Edie and I skiied and Deb snowshoed, and we each went at our own pace — but the moon that night was beautiful. Edie kept running out and then running back in and saying, “It’s good moon! It’s good moon!” and then we’d go out to look, too. Overnight it snowed, and so we woke up in the morning two miles from the nearest road, with the snow all over everything and no tracks in it at all, and Deb got the woodstove roaring again and I made eggs and coffee and oatmeal for breakfast, and later Edie did the dishes and we packed up our things and skiied and snowshowed back through the snow, which went all the way over our skis.

I didn’t start out to write about this, but it’s where I’ve ended up. Deb died just before Christmas. I don’t think I have quite taken that in yet. 2008 had its good parts, but it was also a year in which far too many people that I knew died far before their time. My godson Phelim; Ashton, the daughter of our superintendent; Deb; and then, New Year’s Eve day, Jim Pusack, a friend who was a last-minute member of my MFA thesis committee.

I hope that 2009 holds fewer such events for me and for any of you who may be reading this.

I lost my father and my grandfather within a few months of each other when I was five years old, and then for a long time nobody I knew died. One does not get such a reprieve forever.

One thing I am thinking about in 2009 is how to go about both mourning and remembering the people I care about who have died. The only useful thing I know about grief is that it does not end, and that it isn’t necessary for it to end. You can be a little bit sad every day for the rest of your life. You don’t have to get over it. This year I’m going to be thinking about how to recognize those little bits of sadness and honor them. (I sort of can’t believe that I just used honor as a verb with feelings as the object, but that’s what this world does to you.)

I first read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway when I was seventeen years old, and I was stunned, simply stunned, by the book. If you don’t know it, it’s the story of one day in the life of a woman in her fifties, but in the course of that day, when she has a big party, she remembers all these other various people and places in her life, and there’s a good bit that has to do with the summer she was eighteen. Until that moment I had no idea that grown ups dwelt in the past as well as in the present and future. I was so used to adolescence being dismissed by grown ups that I figured none of them ever thought about the past. I suppose there are grown ups who don’t, but I am not one of them, nor do I wish to be. The things you remember are, in some ways, all you have. I strive to remember as much as I can.

• my friend Jenna’s zine, which arrived in the mail the other day
• cross-country skiing
• figuring out who in town made New Year’s resolutions about exercise by checking out the new names on the Rec center’s exercise punchcards (remind me to offer them help with their website)
• a clean house! (Usually I try to clean in December, before I leave for the holidays. This year I didn’t clean till this past Saturday, but hey, now I have a clean house!)
• cold weather means snuggly kitties
• the days get longer, little by little

I love Winter. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, I don’t live in a place where winters are particularly harsh. They’re no worse than midwestern winters, on average, and they’re in some ways less “bad” due to the lack of moisture in the air, which somehow makes the cold a little less cold. But I don’t mind below zero temperatures, or snow, or ice. I would not want them all the time, but while they are here, I relish them.