11/03/2020
Thanks Rob!
As an isolated, lonely kid, I essentially moved into my imagination, which, for whatever reason, was fired most intensely in the compelling, human-sized mythology of America’s birth.
I lost myself for hours in books, stories, biographies, all the drama, the wisdom, the mistakes, the gentle humor, the infidelities and incomprehensible cruelties. Like all young, simple minds, I fetishized the symbols — muskets, tri-cornered hats, early flags, quills. I lived in New England and would wander in the woods behind my house, looking for artifacts, ruins.
I imagined meeting the president, and making him laugh (I daydreamed the headline in the New York Times “Young Boy Makes President Laugh” while walking up the street to go play at a neighbor’s house. I was 7, so go easy... Also, I actually achieved that particular dream, albeit absent the fawning news coverage).
I peppered my grandparents with questions about their arrivals here, their young life in America. The stories were magnetic, magical and tactile to me. I could see them, feel them. Watching grown men weep at the sight of the Statue of Liberty coming into view, the long, terrible journey over and opportunity ahead. Getting busted knocking over outhouses on Halloween. My Aunt Betty teaching Bess Truman to sew.
I read and re-read the incredible arguments and stories of John Adams during the 2nd Continental Congress, how he pestered, badgered, and annoyed everyone to demand independence from the crown, on legal, moral, and enlightenment grounds. I was absolutely transfixed. He was my great hero as a 6 year old (he remains so today).
In high school, after grandma died, my grandpa came to visit, and I arranged for him to speak to my history class, then studying the immigrant experience; well, let’s have one of the real ones come and testify!
I thought he’d tell my classmates about his young life in pre-electric America, in his soft, oddly formal cadences, and through a nasal, long lost New Jersey country accent.
To my great surprise, no, that’s not what he did. He told a little of it, but quickly moved off of the past and nostalgia; the bulk of his focus and message to us kids was squarely, and excitedly, on the future.
And that’s when the penny dropped; I realized that THAT *is* the pull of America, its fantastical promise: a future. A better day lays ahead that hard work, civic-mindedness, charity, decency, affection and a few laughs along the way will manifest, and a genuine excitement to get there.
He saw everything from the armistice of WWI celebrated for three straight days in Time Square, women gain the right to vote, the Klan hold rallies in the empty lot adjacent to the store where the family worked and lived, to the civil rights movement. And through it all, he never lost his unshakable love of his adopted home, nor his surety that ever better lay just ahead.
Last night, I lay next to my snoozing wife in our bed, my glasses on the goofy nose holder on the nightstand, serenaded by soft music coming from our kindergartener’s room — Chopin, Miles, Beach Boys, all to remind her while she sleeps of little, sparkling magic always at work in the world. And I was so deeply grateful for all of it, yet absolutely ripped up at news of MAGA hatters running people off the road, threatening voters, spewing racist nonsense, etc., and their awful leaders and sycophantic followers cheering all this ugliness, cynically calling it “patriotism”.
I still love the America of my grandfather, of John Adams, of Aunt Betty. Lenny Bruce, Duke Ellington, Miles, Kerouac. Thurgood Marshall. RBG. They celebrated beauty, pursued truth, annoyed those who failed through either laziness or ugliness, and made our world, our America, better.
They believed in that better day.
And I believe in that America.
It’s up to us.
