Hurrying for Home
photo; Ana Lucía Torres
four-legged Luna
watches her namesake show off
best moon pie dog treat
Tie your shoes for an evening “April Walk” with poet Jane Kenyon—let’s check out winter’s leavings. Shiny green moss and bog-bound picnic table—leaning birches and flowing water. Look at this swimmer! “Huge, suspended in the surge, grandfather” turtle claws downstream. The wind hints at rain so we see grandpa off and head for home, its windows “brazen in the setting sun.”
Fred Guttenberg and Maxwell Frost care about home. They care about this country. They care about you.
Michael Guttenberg, Fred’s brother, died in late 2017, his illness caused by work as a first responder at Ground Zero. Months later on Valentine’s Day, Fred’s daughter Jaime did not come home from school, murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. While attending a public vigil the next day, Fred spoke at the mayor’s request. He has not stopped speaking about gun violence. He wears his grief, obvious even when he smiles, and he keeps going. News shows, podcasts, speeches, interviews, lively-worded callouts on social media—Jaime’s dad backs candidates for local and national office and whips up voter registration and participation. Guttenberg’s two books speak clearly. Finding the Helpers: What 9/11 and Parkland Taught Me About Recovery, Purpose, and Hope. And with Thomas Gabor, American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence. Major myth destroyed: neither a gun in the house nor brandishing a gun out and about increases your safety. Only chronic misinformation from gun lobbyists and the NRA perpetuates the deadly lie.
Guttenberg supported the candidacy of the current youngest member of the House of Representatives—when a teenager the new congressman joined survivors of the Parkland murders as an organizing director of the 2018 “March For Our Lives.” Two Floridians walk the same beat.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost, drummer in a 9-piece salsa band, marched in President Obama’s 2013 inaugural parade. An activist since the school shootings at Sandy Hook in 2012 and survivor of a gun incident in Orlando, 25-year-old Frost won his 2023 election to represent central Florida. What prompted him to run? The turning point, his incentive, hit him hard in the summer of 2021—he met his birth mother and learned about her entrapment in cyclical crime and violence. Though affording an apartment near his D.C. workplace on Capitol Hill proved impossible at first, he persevered. This past September, Representative Frost introduced the President when Biden announced the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence and Prevention—days ago, on April 11, Orlando’s representative cheered the largest expansion of gun background checks in the past 30 years. Frost serves on the House “Committee on Oversight and Accountability” and his is already a prominent voice on a powerful committee. The salsa drummer’s commitment to his constituents and the nation deepens “because when we lead with love, there is no limit to what we can achieve.”
Listening to a “String Quartet” reminds poet Carl Dennis of a quiet, intimate conversation. Alone each instrument sounds unique—together they play only one song. Forget going solo when “conversation like this is available / at moments sufficiently free and self-forgetful.” From an instrumental to a singing quartet we go….
Beyoncé propels the “Blackbird” to soar into night’s dark sky. Accompanied by a quartet of Black female country singers, she reimagines the song written and recorded by Paul McCartney and his three friends. “All your life / you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” Vice President Kamala Harris offers Beyoncé praise and everyone permission: “Thank you for reminding us never to feel confined to other people’s perspective of what our lane is. You have redefined a genre and reclaimed country music’s Black roots.” The plight of Black girls during the Civil Rights movement, especially the Little Rock Nine, inspired McCartney’s 1968 songwriting. He relishes Beyoncé’s just-released “killer version.” One of those Little Rock Nine, Melba Beals, beautifully expresses in an NPR interview the significance of a Black woman’s voice freeing the blackbird: “It gives it new meaning. She’s saying whatever is your thing, get up, pack your wings and fly.”
We head home on another Beatles loaner tune. McCartney also admired Aretha’s version of “The Long and Winding Road.” Maybe windy nights—perhaps crying days. But the road “that leads to your door / will never disappear.” Home stays put—you are there.
Annie Dillard’s propulsive essay about a global solar eclipse, included in her Teaching a Stone to Talk, swirls and dizzies. Seeing isn’t believing. “All at once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed.” Bang! Her slammed brain remembering fried eggs, Dillard concludes: “Enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”