Turning…Twisting…Thanking
“Become a kitchen implement” assigns the English teacher in poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Sifter.” The kitchen comes alive! Be a child in her classroom as your turn comes and read aloud your two paragraphs. Blender, tray, drawer—soup pot, serrated spoon, muffin tin. Because Nye chooses a flour sifter, I can see my grandmother in her favorite room in any home. One practiced hand holds while the other turns, her rhythmic slow sifting for biscuits and pies. Nye realizes over time the sifter’s true gift to her. The handle’s movement allows bad days to sift through. A steadied handle holds the good days. “Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time.”
Thank you to sweet sifters Ady Barkan and David Hogg.
At the beginning of November, 39-year-old Ady Barkan died of ALS. Congressman Jamie Raskin: “Ady was a dazzling and prophetic leader for health care for all Americans, a passionate activist for strong democracy and someone who always put humanity first. He will be sharply missed.” Barkan will be sharply remembered, too, his influence gathering momentum. “The knowledge I was dying was terrible, but dealing with my insurance company was even worse.” The unforgettable preview to Barkan’s documentary “Not Going Quietly” celebrates a “ready-to-rumble” cross-country traveler championing universal access to health care, knocking on doors of Congress, grinning while arrested protesting a Supreme Court nominee, advocating at the 2020 Democratic Convention. “As I’ve lost the ability to walk, more people have followed in my footsteps.” Communicating with his eyes when he could no longer speak, always displaying tragedy-defeating humor, Barkan kept planning and fighting. “The weaker I get the louder I become.”
After surviving the 2018 killings at his high school in Parkland, Florida, David Hogg along with some classmates founded “March For Our Lives.” What did they do while battling grief and shock? Hogg spoke in Washington, DC five weeks later at a massive protest against gun violence organized by the group: “The sun shines on a new day and it is ours.” The “March For Our Lives” website should be required reading, especially its “mission and story.” President Biden’s establishment of the White House “Office of Gun Violence Prevention” marks a recent September achievement. Watching Virginia election returns for both Senate and House of Delegates on November 5, I felt more at home at home. What an ecstatic Hogg at the Democratic victories mightily assisted by his grassroots organization “Leaders We Deserve.” Because 80% of the organization’s effort focuses on electing state progressives, “the NRA was defeated tonight in Virginia. Democrats proudly ran on gun control and won.”
“The comic person is unconscious…ignorant of himself…an easy automaton of acquired habits.” Early twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, author of Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, switches gallery seats back and forth between both chambers of the current US Congress. He marvels as his views on comedy take flight. Reality moves, spontaneous and elastic, alive—tick-tock, real now. The past remains unchangeable, unmoving and inelastic, fixed—neither tick nor tock, unreal always. Reality’s opposite, robotic repetition, needs fixing. What laughable Congressional performances! Stale mates and mechanical comediennes—unconscious, ignorant automatons.
Members of a healthy society seek cures for such rigidity of mind and character. Comedy appeals to human intelligence so that we can first laugh and then get it right. “Rigidity is the comic, and laughter its corrective.”
The door opens to hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on the impeachment of President Biden. Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett speaks to robots everywhere: “Repeating the same lies will not somehow turn them into truths. Repeating the same lie that he won isn’t going to turn the election around.” And she speaks to everyone both present and alive: “Honestly, if they would continue to say ‘if’ or ‘Hunter,’ and we were playing a drinking game, I would be drunk by now.”
Oh, but then and then again and again, the last two minutes of The Crockett Address. Look at her. Listen to her. She concludes: “I hope and pray that my parents love me half as much as he (Biden) loves his son. We need to get back to the people’s work, which means keeping this government open so that people don’t go hungry in the streets of the United States. And I will yield,” she concludes unyieldingly. A civil rights and criminal defense attorney, her website’s list of priority issues rings true. Voting Rights. Health Care Coverage. Reproductive Justice because “Texas works to ban and criminalize reproductive care.” Equality because with “an extremist Supreme Court majority, Representative Crockett is determined to file and pass safeguards for the LGBTQIA+ community.”
Thank you, Jasmine Crockett. Thank you for the laughter vaccine.
Stacking kindling and waiting for snow, poet Rita Dove settles into the in-between time that is “November for Beginners.” Pouring rain—dwindling light. Sailing wind—secret ache. “When spring comes / we promise to act.” How? Foolish, like every spring. To accompany Dove, trumpeter Harry James blows what could only be an “Autumn Serenade.” Those last few notes, though….
“I internalized his music as if it were the soundtrack of my life,” writes Chris Dixon on behalf of so many fans. “Jimmy Buffett was pretty much exactly the person you hoped he’d be.” But the singer/songwriter experienced, as everyone does, that pressure drop feeling. Sunk, a water treader deep below the surface. But Jimmy the sailor/surfer lived letting “Bubbles Up” direct him. Follow the bubbles up. “There is light up above / And the joy there is always enough.”