Tripping

My week in the here and now has been so full, I can hardly process it, but this blurry old photo turned up and kicked me back into 1973. God, the world was so different then! My friends Rosemary and Freddy were driving cross-country from Syracuse in a VW bug, and I was a bewildered young woman in the process of leaving a marriage, but I had no plan in place. They invited me to accompany them, and I decided this was as good a diversion as any. I had never been west of Chicago, and I wanted to see what was out there.  

I sat in the back seat of the car in the picture next to a large cooler, a backpack, three sleeping bags, and a sack of groceries. We went on a kind of southwest diagonal through Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, eventually finding ourselves in the red rock lunar landscape of Utah, and it seems to me we went as far as Arizona, but we never made it to California, which was always my fantasy destination. Rosemary and Freddy were bickering a lot, and it was hot, and I looked out the window and felt fathomlessly sad. The car was littered with soda cans and candy wrappers, like the inescapable debris of the lives we wished to leave behind.

And oh, the lives I have lived since then! California has been my home for more than forty years, and the girl who sat in the back seat is still bewildered, still evolving, still amazed. My journey has exceeded all expectations, and I have abundant reasons to be grateful, but I am fiercely devoted to the idea that I must do something to make things better before I leave. (I’ll try, anyway.)

A few weeks ago, I had an encounter with a man on a different kind of road trip. He was cruising around our neighborhood in a fancy vehicle looking for a house he might buy for his daughter, who was moving to Florida but needed a California base too. (Honestly.) We chatted a bit and something I said gave him cause to open his phone and proudly show me the screen image, which was a picture of his hero, Trump. I didn’t throw up, but my revulsion was real. The destruction, the lunacy, the cruelty, the corruption, the lies, the vulgarity, the breathtaking stupidity…somehow this gentleman was fine with it all. More than fine. He was utterly lost to it. Despite my better judgement, I ineffectually uttered some sliver of my sentiments, and his smug facade told me all I needed to know.  There are millions like him, even now, and it is a waste of time to try to reason with cult members, but I resolved to use this incident as further motivation. I’m so sick of being sick of it. So tired of the sense of shame and disgust that the huckster and his cronies have brought to our country.

But this was just a glitch. In the days that followed, many beautiful things unfolded.  My friend Alicia made me a quilt of many colors, a multi-hued festival of a quilt with a bright magenta border, a quilt of defiance and celebration.  A dear man named Ron whom I haven’t known for very long pronounced us friends, and I took joy in his openness, his readiness to express his feelings and invite the gift and vulnerability of a friendship, his willingness to say out loud the things our hearts tell us, because there isn’t that much time…is there? One morning, I rode my trusty bicycle with another good friend, Diane. We pedaled along a country road, slow enough to talk, and now and then we were ten years old again.

 I’ve been going to practice sessions of the resistance singers, organized by my intrepid buddy Jan. I sat in the backyard of a local coffee shop as America the Beautiful was sung, a song less of celebration than yearning in this moment, a song I had not sung since elementary school. And of course there was a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, which always sounds timely. The singing group is just a start, and we don’t really know what we’re doing, but it’s something; we’ll sing these songs at a 4th of July parade, and at protests, as we reclaim our country. We’re keeping the food bank stocked, looking in on one another, and some of us will be focusing on getting out the vote.

One evening, I went to a party where the hosts handed us pens and paper and we wandered in a garden, wrote thoughts and poems, and reconvened to share them. It was a kind of sustenance. I also attended an opening of a place called “Third Space”, a community center that can be used for whatever folks imagine: performances, music, art classes, dance, tutoring, fund-raisers, meetings…all in the spirit of democracy, community, and connection.

There were walks, of course, and the usual wonders of this outrageously beautiful landscape.  

Speaking of road trips, my friend Tina had planned the ultimate trip, of roads and planes and boats and trains—a tour of the world. And then she had an epiphany, deciding instead to direct her energy and resources to good causes at home. “I can see the whole world right here,” she announced, and rightly so. There is an infinity in every local moment and micro detail, and actions we take can have a ripple effect far beyond our ability to imagine. I felt proud of my friend. It made me think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence:

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That cannot keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

So, this is the real news, and this is what’s true. Fields were farmed and faulty things were fixed, warm yellow light spilled out of windows, and teachers taught the children. Someone planted trees. Songs were sung and tears were shed and people prayed in all the ways there are to pray. The moments merge into the symphony of the present, and it is happening still. We are community, and, in the words of Jackson Browne, we can be a place:

Where people walk in wonder
And speak to one another
And recognize as brother
The face across the border
Across a sea of differences
Across the drifting sands
The joining of our hands in time

My first sense of the vastness of this country was in 1973, watching it roll by through the back seat window of a VW bug. Now I know my country is also the here and the now, and my broken heart radiates far-reaching shards of light, and I am going to stand tall in this very place traveling as far as I can.