The Long and Bumpy Road

 Over the long Thanksgiving weekend I watched the new 3-part documentary on The Beatles which is focused on the intensive days of creativity, desperation, interpersonal and artistic conflict, and playful chemistry that evolved into a couple of albums along with the iconic and unannounced “concert” the band performed in January of 1969 on the rooftop of Apple Studios in Savile Row.  I leave it for others to critique the documentary – a sort of “fly on the wall” view of those intensely tedious and only occasionally productive days. As I later commented to my brother about the 8-hour program, “that’s a lot of sausage to watch getting made.”  Sausage, that is, that became some of the most memorable songs of multiple generations.  

 

The fascination that has lingered with me, however, is less the almost guilty piquancy of watching the realness of these lives or the alchemy of how songs are teased out of thin air and more the varying reactions to that surprise performance from the roof.  Cameras captured the facial expressions and body language of those on the streets and sidewalks below.  Microphones recorded their comments, ranging from the fawning to the furious.  Offices emptied.  Cars stopped.  Passersby paused and congregated, first in curiosity and confusion that soon melted into fixation as clarity spread like a contagion.  “That’s the Beatles!”  

And, of course, the police were called.  Because alongside those whose only complaint was that the performance didn't go on longer were those who were appalled at the fact that it had happened at all.  “Disruption,” don’t you know.  “Disturbing the peace.”  Stifling disapproval, then, side by side with swooning adulation coupled with gratitude for happening to be in that very place at that very moment.

 

Side by side.  “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” as the familiar saying observes – a colloquial translation of Lucretius’ expression from the 1^st century BCE, “quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum".  What is food for one man may be bitter poison to others.

 

Even, apparently, when it comes to The Beatles.  No wonder we disagree about cornbread versus white bread stuffing, roasted turkey versus smoked.  No wonder we argue about masks versus personal freedom, infrastructure maintenance versus lower taxes, diversity training versus clarity about particular identity, Hummers versus Teslas, creation as pyramid versus creation as egalitarian community, climate versus progress, “more” versus “better”, stability versus wanderlust, “fit for heaven” versus “no earthly good”, “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays.”  

 

What is food for one may be poison to another.

 

So it was that, while watching and listening to The Beatles thrump out the familiar rhythms and lyrics to “Get Back” from atop that Savile Row roof, I found myself reconsidering.  Perhaps it is that we less need to “get back” to some Elysian Fields of quietude and communal harmony that never, in fact, really existed, and instead simply “get on with” the patient, cacophonous and persisting work of crafting ways to live in a diverse world where some stop what they are doing to listen to the music, while others call the police; annoyed by the interruption.

 

Our dissonance will not be “fixed”.  It will not be beaten into submission, bent by persuasion or ignored by distraction.  It will, at best and if we have any grace, be navigated.  Our dissonance is the start and finish of our collective selves.  We will not ever tune it into harmony.  We will, if we are to survive – I’m sorry, I can’t help myself – let it be.

 

 

 

A New/Old Thanksgiving

We do love our origin stories - our cultural "creation myths"; Columbus "discovering" America, freedom-fighting "heroes" dying at the Alamo, the defense of "states rights" that birthed the Confederacy - never mind that common tellings and classroom teachings of all these "histories" are, at best, "Disney-fied" caricatures and at worst egregious contortions of much more complicated truths. 

That tension is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than at Thanksgiving. At the very least, perhaps we can acknowledge that there are decidedly different interpretations of that bucolic banquet of brotherly love shared by big-buckled Pilgrims and generously benevolent native peoples that elementary schools love to reenact this time of year. 

Interpretations and, of course, implications. Routinely overlooked is the fact that those hungry Pilgrims repaid the kindness of their saviors with a determined campaign of genocide. In that hotter light, reenactments of the scene ring a little hollow. 

Such an acknowledgement, however, need not dampen our collective, albeit annualized, enthusiasm for giving thanks. The truth is that the quaint tale of that happy cross-cultural meal is something of a newcomer to the celebration. Which is to say that the idea for a national day of thanksgiving wasn't originally centered around colonists and Indians. Whatever happened around Plymouth Rock in 1620, its association with the national holiday we celebrate this week wasn't cemented until John F. Kennedy's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1963, and then only by illustrative allusion. George Washington, in the first official "suggestion" in 1789 that a day be set aside for giving thanks calls attention only to the existential reality of our collective indebtedness to that which is beyond ourselves and our resources - specifically, that it is the "duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor..."

Duty. Obedience. Gratitude. Humble supplication. The recognition that we are indebted to something outside of ourselves.  Whether or not we are the religious type, at the very least we could take a moment to acknowledge that we have had thirsts that others have quenched, hungers that others have fed, ignorances that the wisdom of others informed.  We neither conceived nor birthed nor reared ourselves.  Someone else discerned gravity, split the atom, invented toothpaste.  Few of us grow our own food, build our own houses, make our own clothes or generate the fuel to power our homes or vehicles.  We receive.  Instead of one more day celebrating and occasioning over-indulgence, an annual holiday set aside to cast aside the persistent but laughable fantasy of self-sufficiency - to concede that there are no "self-made" people - could be nourishing, indeed.  President Washington's Proclamation wouldn't be a bad precedent to remember as we gather on Thursday with our families or at least our thoughts. But there is more.

For years the idea of giving thanks as a part of our national ethos was kicked around regionally and voluntarily, until things began to fall apart. 

Literally. 

Civil War pitted us against each other - South against North, states against states, neighbors against neighbors, parents against children. Siblings against each other. Cats, no doubt, against dogs. It was a mess. And in the midst of it all, Abraham Lincoln, the elected little boy with his finger in the cohering dam, took the advice of a 74-year-old magazine editor who wrote to the President urging him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival." His subsequent 1863 declaration was the first national establishment of Thanksgiving Day, and was devoted to reconciling a country actively dismembering itself in Civil War.

Readers and students will note the absence of any mention of Pilgrims or Indians or turkeys, green bean casseroles or marshmallowed sweet potatoes. What is powerfully present is the confessional acknowledgement of division, and the grateful amazement that somehow, and despite ourselves, we are surviving. 

In these present days of our own civil war - of deep division among neighbors and families and partisans - that sounds like the kind of Thanksgiving observance we would do well to recover. Gratitude that, despite our concerted effort, despite the corrosive effervescence of our collective acrimony and inability to agree on quite literally anything, somehow and inexplicably - save by the determined and sustaining interventions of an over-benevolent Power - we haven't yet annihilated ourselves or each other or the world we live in.  Yet.  Despite the worst of our inclinations, obsessions, addictions, denials, prejudices, extravagances and apathies.  

Life wills to live.  The earth wills to flourish.  Individuals will to relate - yes, debate, but also congregate; yes, wound in the process, but also forgive and heal and hope.  Together.  Despite ourselves.  Sometimes - oftentimes - around a table, carving an entree instead of each other.

Thank God.

I know, that sort of observance is harder for kindergartners to reenact, but I'm thinking they are up to the challenge. I'm only hoping the rest of us are up to it as well.

Happy, Healing Thanksgiving.

Life as Occasionally, Selectively Precious

 I didn’t follow the trial.  In truth, I hadn’t even heard the story of Kyle Rittenhouse and the gun he carried and the trigger he pulled until the story was closed in a courtroom with two simple words:  “Not guilty.”  I only know, therefore, the barest facts:  two lives were ended with impunity.

 

It’s hardly an anomaly.  Which is to clarify that this isn’t about young Mr. Rittenhouse, or about rehashing the deftness of the attorneys or the discernment of the jury.  It’s about us.  It’s about me.  It’s about how life has come to be both the most precious thing of all, and the cheapest.  Life, the most volatile fulcrum of political debate; life, the empty plastic bottle tossed out the window and blown along the gutter.  

No, that’s a poor metaphor.  Plastic bottles are at least recycled.  Discarded lives are routinely and ironically mummified like the pharaohs of old and entombed beneath an etched marker as a gesture of honor and respect.  And so comes to be in the conduct of our culture this bizarre sacrality of embryo and corpse, sandwiching worthlessness in-between.  Holiness in promise and memory, but about the actual neighbors moving in our midst?  Not so much.

 

It’s hard to comprehend how we collectively descended into this irrationality; how this aspirationally idealistic people – nominally neutral but functionally, fiercely religious – could become so inured to the embodiment of life while philosophically fawning over the concept of it.  It’s the old absurdity, writ large:  “I love humanity.  It’s people I can’t stand.”  

 

We love the idea of life; just not the flesh and blood of it, never mind the reverencing of the actuality of it in our various religious traditions; never mind the literal incarnation of the Divine according to Christian testament and creeds.  God, we are taught, enfleshed, living and moving among us.  

 

But God had better watch out.  Almost everything turns out to be more important than those who are living and moving among us – our guns, our property, our “freedoms”, our “way of life.”  A virus might kill us all, but we are apparently willing to expend our last breath defending our right to contract it – and spread it.  A man falls asleep in his car in the fast food drive-through lane?  Shoot him and tow him out of the way so that the rest of us can get our pink slime burger.  The election not go your way?  Mob the Capitol and attempt to hang the one you believe responsible.

 

Because lives are cheap – except when they haven’t yet been born, and after they have had the decency to die and get out of our way.  

 

Unfortunately, the odds are increasing that “we” will one of these days be viewed as the cheap impediment in someone else’s way.  Perhaps that will be the moment I remember how precious life actually is.

 

And having been “wonderfully, fearfully made”, worth the nuisance of honoring and protecting – even when you make me uncomfortable, or I am in your way.

Grateful in this Season of Gratitude

 And so a new day begins.  I know this not because I am awake – that happens, in tandem with episodic sleep all through the day as well as the night in this season of my life – but because as I stepped outside to release the chickens the guard light on the face of the barn switched off.  Surely that constitutes some kind of official proclamation.  

 

New days, especially these days, prick at me the invitation to greater intentionality.  What will I do with these daylight hours?  Toward what meaningful purpose will my calories be burned and my oxygen inhaled?  There are plenty of incentives in the gathering chill in both the weather and the culture to simply go back to sleep, or to settle resignedly into Rhett Butler’s famously apathetic retort to Scarlett O’Hara.  The problem is that increasingly I do – give a damn, that is.  More than a damn, in fact, about what happens to the soil and the air and the water and the trees; about the diminished and trivializing values beneath our food supply and energy supply and moral paralysis and entrenchment in ignorance and disdain for the common good.  As a civilization we seem determined to regress into primitivism – collectively casting ourselves in the leading role of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Having been born as something of a wise and old soul, we seem to be aging in reverse, becoming more and more puerile with every passing day.  And election.

 

So, there is a troubling much about which to give a damn.  

 

But somehow, stepping off the porch step in the crispness of the morning, beckoned by the muffled rooster crow inside the coop anxious to be free, the light I experience is more than the alternation of sun and moon.  Maybe it is my age, newly cradled as I am in Medicare.  Maybe I’m finally growing wiser.  Or maybe it is simply the month of November and its evocation of Thanksgiving.  Who can say?  All I know is that I am increasingly mindful of gratitude for so many surrounding, animating and nourishing gifts - place and possibility and people I love, sustenance in countless forms, and grace-filled hope; increasingly staggered by the cornucopia spilling out around me.  And how I am more and more conscious of the need for Thanksgiving to be something of a lifestyle rather than a day.  

 

And so this new day begins, and inhaling a deep and frost-bracing breath, I step into the brightness of its hours, grateful for the calories I get to burn, and the good and useful work on which I pray they will be expended.