A Midwestern Road Trip

soothes the soul...

I've been on the road for the last week. Left DC for Ann Arbor on the 19th.

Did a poetry reading at Jay Platt's West Side Book Shop on the 20th. That was a wonderful time.

Julie was there, of course (I stayed at her house). And my sister Teri came up from Chicago. Old political friends and old co-rec softball friends and old Student-Book-Service-University Cellar friends and even a young man taking a poetry class at the University of Michigan showed up. And all of them attentive and kind. A sweet, extended moment.

Then, after another day, on to Chicago, where I spent a night at sister Dale's and another night at brother Mark's house. I got a chance to talk to John Bachtell at the community center at 33rd St. and S. Wallace. John enthusiastically agreed to a public reading sometime in the next month or two. The next day, I talked to Mike James at Heartland Cafe about doing the same thing. Michael was just as agreeable as John. So it looks like I will get an opportunity to read at venues on both the North and South Sides at a March or April time to be announced.

On Thursday afternoon I headed down to Urbana where Nate and his partner Nikki live. Nephew Abraham (Mark's son) showed up in Urbana, too--on Friday night. Abe makes an occasional appearance on In and Out, in the comments section (here and here, for example). He's a tough audience, always challenging me to substantiate my opinions.

Abe just got a new-media type job with the Chicago Tribune after working for several years in the news division side of Google. His perspective on similarities and differences between the news room at the Trib and work life at Google, recounted in "From Google News to the Chicago Tribune, Observations after a month in the newsroom" are fascinating.

I love being on the road, seeing my kids and sibs and old friends, but I'll be glad to be heading back to D.C. tonight. For one thing, I sort of miss my writing routine. And for another, I want to blog more often, a change that seems too difficult to make when traveling.

Marrianne has also suggested that I begin using Facebook and Twitter to help promote whatever I post. Given how exciting it is when the audience for these pages grows by even a couple new readers, I'm looking forward to following her advice.


... and bookends Hilary Clinton's congressional testimony 

In the meantime, I have been a far less diligent consumer of the news in any form, this past week. But at a McDonald's stop a few days ago, on a TV actually tuned to CNN, I did manage to catch some of Hillary Clinton's testimony before Congress. I was briefly riveted by what I was seeing. Clinton seemed so formidable, almost intimidating the members of Congress who tried to confront her. She's no stone face, either, and displayed a wider range of apparently authentic emotion than that generally displayed by others (mostly men) who testify before Congress.

It struck me then that Clinton might well be the Republicans' worst nightmare. Right now, among all possible candidates for president in 2016, she probably has the highest name recognition and favorability rating. She almost certainly has the most demographically diverse group of potential supporters among registered voters, and first claim on the most talented and experienced election strategists in the country.

Sure, there are reasons why she might not run, and reasons why she might lose, but it seems to me that the stronger arguments are on the side of a Clinton run and a Clinton victory. If that turns out to be the case, eight years of Obama would be only the first act of a Democratic resurgence capable of wiping out much of the damage inflicted by Republican administrations dating back to Richard Nixon. (Here's a piece by Robert Reich that discusses some of that undoing).

Of course, that would just be remedial action. There is still the very large problem of climate change, which must be addressed in the most progressive possible ways, no matter how late in the game it might be. That, as I've argued before in "The Climatological Cliff Looms Largest" and "Calamity Jeff Speaks," must be a first priority if human beings are to avoid a dystopian future.

Such continuing progressive action, if it is to come, will require a center-left political coalition that has not previously manifested itself in the United States. It will take leftists, who sit out most elections (or participate half-heartedly), deciding that they are all in; deciding that the political compromises that characterize democratic governance at its best are not so compromising as they have always seemed. Arguably, if leftists are willing to back off from an ideological rejection of electoral politics, it might be possible to put to together a center-left electoral majority big enough to convincingly defeat the forces of reaction that dominate the Republican party today and make the world's oldest democracy more democratic, and governable once more.

Anyway, Hillary Clinton might very well be the candidate most likely to mobilize that center-left coalition. Sure, she's no leftist. And Bill Clinton's history as a driving force in pushing the Democratic party rightward, and his role in welfare reform, also compromise Hillary in some fundamental way, at least insofar as many leftists are concerned. Nevertheless, she is admired for her political courage, for her competence as Secretary of State, and for her leadership in the first effort to achieve national health care reform, however disastrous the attempt turned out to be. Add leftist electoral engagement to Clinton's obvious political strengths and to the feminist enthusiasm that is likely to boost her campaign, and the possibilities for a major Democratic victory in 2016 go up.

Maybe nobody else sees it that way, but I'm betting that there's a few Republican strategists who have their fingers crossed for anybody-but-Hillary.

The Incompetent Traveler and other updates,

including hatred of polytheists

Brendan flew unaccompanied to Detroit on March 27. Older sister Julie met him at Detroit Metro where they laid over for some six hours before catching a plane to Seattle. It must have been about midnight, maybe 1 a.m., east coast time when they finally landed. Older brother Nate met them at the airport and wisked them to the Seattle home he shares with partner Nikki. Cousin Abraham and partner Irina where there, also, having flown up from San Francisco to spend 48 hours or so in cousin adventures.

While Brendan was away, Marrianne and I planned to play. But sisters Dale and Teri, brother Mark and various nieces and nephews planned for a Pesach seder at Mom's house; given that this might be Mom's last Passover, it made sense to go, even if it would tear a chunk out of the time available for Marrianne and I to do fun and loving things. So, at Julie's instruction, I went to Priceline to seek an affordable roundtrip ticket to Chicago and back. It worked--going early Monday a.m., returning mid-day Wednesday would cost just over $200, a deal at today's prices.

Marrianne and I did squeeze in a date on Sunday night, but I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Monday to catch the Super Shuttle to the airport for my six o'clock flight (Metro trains don't start running until 5:00 a.m., that wouldn't get me to the airport and through security in time for my flight). Everything worked pretty decently except for discovering after I reached the airport dreadfully early that my flight wasn't Monday at six, it was Tuesday at six. My bad.

There was a time in Chicago when people would ride the Blue Line out to O'Hare to sit in the observation lounge and watch planes taking off and landing. The golden age of aviation, you know. Pan American Airways to the Orient. Good stuff. Brother Mark used to take son Abraham out there for a visual fix on wide open airport spaces and the wild blue yonder. It wasn't so much like that last Monday at Washington National. More like sleepy, droopy people, closed kiosks and stores and the dark before dawn. There was a Starbucks open to kill a little time until the Metro opened and provided a cheaper way home. And there was the astonished looks and dropped jaws of those around me who shared in the news that I had arrived at the airport the day before my flight. He looks normal, they were thinking, but maybe he's dangerous, or bad luck, anyhow.

When I got home, I put in a little time on a longer poem I'm working on, but mostly I was a sleepy, droopy shell of a man. A sleepy, droopy shell who knew he needed to get up at 3:00 a.m. the next day, also, so that he might get to the airport on time. I really wanted to get to the airport on time. And, after a quiet evening at home on Monday night, arrived on time.

Passover is the most universal of Jewish holidays, I think. It involves eating, it involves ritual that honors those who gather around the table, it reminds us of captivity and celebrates both liberation and fidelity to an ethical understanding of the world. It also teaches us a complete disregard for a fact-based understanding of history in favor of stories and legends that evolved to serve the institutional goals of a religious faith with which I have a complicated relationship.

Personally, my preference, above all, is for the commandment to remember when we were slaves in Egypt. In light of that memory, the Jewish declaration of "never again" after the Holocaust, should more appropriately be "never again to anyone, anywhere, including Palestinians. I recognize, though, that among American Jews there is a decided bias towards "next year in Jerusalem," rather than the remembering when we were slaves in Egypt thing. It is with some satisfaction that I note that African-Americans, by and large, see the Exodus story as having little to do with Jerusalem and more to do with slavery, which is one of the reasons for the universal appeal of Passover--that, and the fact that Jesus' last party with his posse was a Passover seder.

Anyway, since about 200-300 AD, the real underlying motivation for the seder, at least according to the learned rabbis of the period, is the commandment that the story of the Exodus and the rescue by God, working through Moses, of the Jewish people must be told every year to the children. This commandment was honored in detail by brother Mark, who planned and conducted a 45-minute seder which captured and maintained the interest of the very youngest cousins (going on 4- and 5-years-old) in attendance. Manu and Ollie, the sons of niece Stacy (mark's stepdaughter), knew their own parts (the Four Questions, as well as other bits of info Mark had rehearsed with them, visibly and actively anticipated the moments for direct participation, and hurled themselves in the most full-bodied way into the ceremony, delivering both questions and answers with awesomely good timing.

It should be noted that while Manu and Ollie participated with great maturity, most Epton family seders, at least since Dad's death and even before, border on chaos because of the behavior of Teri, Dale and I. OK, maybe, mostly me. All I know is, they get really loud and Mark, who always leads the seders because he's the serious one, obstinately soldiers on. Julie called during the seder because she and Brendan and Nate were thinking about Mom (Grandmother, as she is always called). I put the phone down next to Mom so they could hear what Grandmother was hearing. For her part, Mom was pretty much ignoring the chaos, smiling benignly at Mark and radiating affection for the better behaved, especially Manu and Ollie and Ethan, her one and, to date, only great-grandchild. I don't know how long the Seattle connection stayed open, but they probably heard Mark patiently leading and me bellowing. (Mom always used to say things like, "Jeffrey, stop bellowing," which, of course, I always saw as unfair until one day in San Francisco, during a champagne breakfast following the San Francisco Marathon, someone at another table turned to me to ask, "would you please stop bellowing?" at which point I yelled out "Mom!" and things deteriorated from there--but that's another story.)

Of course, there was an extra wine poured for Elijah, that stiff-necked prophet-warrior from about 700 BCE, the time of stiffest competition between polytheism and the monotheistic God of the children of Israel. I had hoped to be on the seder agenda, so I could do my pedantic best to remind everyone that we were slaves in Egypt and ought to recognize the aspirations of the Palestinian people, as well as tweak Elijah for his awful intolerance in regard to Jezebel who, as Phoenician princesses married to kings of Israel go, was not really so bad. At least not compared to Elijah, that rabblerouser who stirred up the Jewish hoi polloi, inciting them to murder 450 priests of Baal, the god of rain and sweet water, and a personal favorite of Jezebel's. Sure Jez was hot for Elijah's blood after that incident, but her murderous rage arguably paled next to Elijah's (and the one God's) hatred of polytheists. The longer poem I've been working on incidentally, is an attempt to resurrect Jezebel and cast a critical eye on Elijah.

Regardless, I probably could have injected myself into the seder anyway, but I was so impressed with what Mark had done, I restrained myself. It was a grand seder. Mark led with grace and competence and Dale cooked everything and did a wonderful job. Unfortunately, most Eptons don't care much about food--Audrey (Mom), Teri, Mark and I, at least--so Dale's efforts had to be appreciated more by in-laws who have a more balanced understanding of the role food plays in life than by her own siblings. Still, most of the rest of us do clean up after meals decently well.

Left Chicago on Wednesday. Brendan returned to DC on Thursday and Marrianne's mom (Audrey M., as opposed to my mom, Audrey E.) arrived the same day to spend the long Easter weekend with us. Between picking up everyone at their various arrival points and making other preparations, I didn't get back to the business of blogging, at all. And not for the next four days (through yesterday).

On Saturday, I called Mom (Audrey E.) to see how she was doing. Not so good, she seemed incoherent. On Sunday, she was suffering a lot of headache pain, so Teri took her to the hospital where they tested her for everything, but suspected a stroke or bleeding on the brain. As it turned out, it was neither one. She had a bladder infection, which frequently causes disorientation and temporary memory loss in other women. Though we all recognize that Mom may not have a lot of time left, it was very scary to talk to her and not have the conversation make any sense. But Monday she was better, released from the hospital with the infection under control, even though there's still no explanation for her severe headache pain.

Monday afternoon, I drove Audrey M. to meet one of her nieces living in the area, who would later get her on the bus back to Pittsburgh. It was a good visit, full of meal preparation and eating and easy conversation. And by the time I got home, the word from Chicago was that Mom was home and watching the White Sox Opening Day game. Mark Buerhle threw seven shut out innings, Paul Knoerko homered in the first and the White Sox won.

Mom says she's getting a lot of lunch and dinner invitations from friends. She jokes that they all think she's going to die soon and want to see her before she gets too weak. But she's not going anywhere, she claims, as long at the White Sox have a shot at winning it all. Most years that fantasy is pretty much finished by mid-July, but White Sox pitching is looking pretty strong. If the hitters come through, I think this is going to be a good year in Chicago.

Maya Angelou's Book

Continuums On Which We Live

I'm reading Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I'm certain that I should have read it earlier in life, but at least I'm reading it now. In the book, as James Baldwin said, Angelou "confronts her own life with ... luminous dignity." Baldwin's gracious endorsement seems an appropriate assessment of Angelou's accomplishment and though I haven't finished the book, there's a few thoughts on the way to finishing that I'd like to get down here.

In one particularly vivid portion, Angelou, who seems to have been a generally dour child (with good reason), describes the excitement of her graduation from elementary school in Stampps, Arkansas. After what seems to have been weeks of VIP treatment from Stampps' black residents, Angelou and her classmates suffer through the appearance of a white man as guest speaker whose comments remind everyone in attendance that they are second-class citizens with little hope of controlling the course of their own lives. The joyful optimism and gratitude with which Angelou started the day was dashed by a speaker whose "... dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium." The speech served to remind the audience only that they were "... maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

The enormous hatred inspired in Angelou as she sat listening--"I wished that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all the whitefolks in their beds..."--quickly envelops everything and everyone. "We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other."

It is a dark moment, with no apparent hope of resurrected feeling. After the white man, who has no wish to mingle, leaves, it is time for the class valedictorian, Henry Reed, to speak. Angelou sits and listens, marveling that Reed would even bother to give his address, "To Be or Not To Be." She is unmoved. "I had been listening and silently rebutting each sentence with my eyes closed." Suddenly Reed begins singing, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

The audience begins singing with him. Soon everyone has joined in.

"Stong the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope, unborn, had died.
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?"

Angelou describes the moment as the first time she had really heard the words of the song.

"We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered."

It is a transcendent moment for Angelou and everyone else in the crowd. Somehow the song, James Weldon Johnson's poetry has restored them all. "I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940," Angelou writes, "I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race."

"If we were a people much given to revealing secrets," she continues, "we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians and blues singers)."

It is enough. But Angelou's book has more and I am not done with it. But it has also stimulated this thought for me: Perhaps we don't name the continuums with which we measure ourselves correctly. We are all of us, black and white, rich and poor, ambitious and resigned, complicated people. But we don't really know how to think about ourselves or the people around us with any real subtlety. The challenge ought to be defining some real life standards by which we should be measured. Angelou has me thinking about this one:

At one end of a continuum is a question asked by Angelou's brother Bailey when he was, say, 13 or 14. "Uncle Willie, why do [white men] hate us so much?" At the other end of that continuum is the persistent determination with which Angelou pursued a job as conductor on a San Francisco street car. Getting the job would make Angelou, who at the time was not yet out of high school, "the first Negro [hired] on the San Francisco street cars." She did, indeed, become that person.

"During this period of strain Mother and I began our first steps on the long path toward mutual adult admiration ... She comprehended the perversity of life, that in struggle lies the joy."

So, where do I place myself on that continuum. I am certainly not much like the 13-year-old Bailey who asked his uncle a question that Willie didn't want to answer and probably didn't know how to answer. I have answers to Bailey's question. But how far along that path have I gotten?. How thoroughly have I comprehended that astonishing perversity that Angelou outlines: How much have I struggled and, in the process, how much joy have I wrested from this life?

At the end of her street car chapter Angelou says this:

"To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."

I like that a lot. If I could, I would try and persuade my children, Nate, Julie and Brendan, that real standards for measuring oneself are subtle. Have you surrendered to the murderous pressure of adult conformity or have you continued the fight against the superior forces of maturity? I don't wish them lives of constant struggle. But I'm pretty sure that no sort of real peace is possible without it. And I'm inclined to believe that if we do not struggle, if we give in, we could become things that we never wished to be. People whose successes bring them no comfort or people who have forgotten about their own dreams and measure themselves by the standards of others or people who don't care about the questions of troubled children.

Of Nate and Julie and Brendan

My someone's-growing-up trauma

Last night, Brendan went to bed without saying good night to me. He doesn't do that very often. I stewed about it a little.

It has been so long since I lived with Nate and Julie, but when they were around Brendan's age I was gone many evenings at city council meetings or for other stuff. Not saying good night to them every single night just happened, so I didn't particularly notice when it did.

And then other things in life happened, separation and divorce among other things. So the frequent and absolute separations from Julie and Nate had a different sort of painful and poignant quality. Not saying good night was such a small thing compared to being in Dayton, say, while they were in Ann Arbor.

But life with Brendan has a different sort of rhythm. I'm home almost all the time. It is Marrianne, who travels much more frequently than I do, who has to deal with the little separations, with not being able to read together at bedtime, with missing tender "good nights."

So last night, when Brendan was acting indifferent to the point of clowning around excessively while I was trying to say good night, I pleaded with him to chill out. When pleading didn't work I stomped out. That didn't work, either. If he felt guilty, he didn't act it out. There was no "sorry, Dad," no hugs. He and Marrianne read a while and they both fell asleep.

This morning, he was fine. So was I. But as I watched him preparing for school, getting dressed, sorting out his book bag, I saw a boy both on the cusp of adolescence and a child with eyes still way too big for his face and a book bag too heavy for his still small frame.

"I can't decide sometimes," I said to him, "whether you are a teenager or a little boy. How does it feel inside you?"

"Right now, I can't decide whether to rehearse my part in Hamlet or sit on the floor and watch Sports Center," he said. "I have to get my part right, but ESPN seems more exciting."

Given that watching ESPN seems to be a part of the lives of many adult men, I'm not sure if Brendan was defining the pull of two opposite poles, but his answer wasn't what I expected from a ten year old. To be honest, I think it's me who isn't keeping up here.

Julie Came Around

Stoic endurance is for Julie
not a sign of strength
or weakness
but of missed chances.

In weather Julie senses quakerly
opportunity to see that of god
in every thunderstorm, every
dry spell. Even the lowliest,

fleeting squall reveals
god. Maybe, I
taught her that. Maybe,
it was in me once.

But today in DC, in sunny,
blustery cold, I am undone,
hardly reaching even no account,
unsatisfactory, stoic endurance.

I do not suffer unfairly,
only there does not seem to be
a piece of god in this cold.
It is said that as one

freezes to death,
numb indifference
is the blissful stage
before unconsciousness.

I wouldn’t know.
When Julie at four said,
my toes are frozen, she spoke
as we struggled with slushy sidewalks,

maneuvered between glacial piles
of snow, caught in a condensed,
relentless freeze-thaw-freeze,
I said, eyes to the sun, face to the sun,

body to the sun, do you trust me?
Yes, Julie said, with the fervor
of conversion and a prayer for warm toes.
OK. Good, then. Close your eyes,

feel the heat pulsing gently
Feel through cheeks.
See through eyelids.
Test the air, your nose

knows the way to the beach.
Note the orange glow of the midday sun.
Seen best with closed eyes. Heat
beating warmly. Walk the

beach with me? Savor the sun.
If we were in Ann Arbor now,
we’d be slogging through the snow.
But we’re barefoot on warm sand.

Sand actually hot on our toes.
Exotic, our naked, satisfied feet.
Are we warm yet?
And Julie said, yes, we are warm.

Our toes are so warm.
Our visit rich with our wonder.
Our lives focused this moment.
That message to Julie, coax a little warmth

from always available stock,
came around yesterday.
On the Metro platform, I turned to face the sun.
More brightness than heat, I could still feel it.

I could feel my satisfied feet grabbing sand.
And the cold and bluster drifted off,
leaving Julie and me at the beach,
so long ago, so fresh today, so warm.

Note to Myself: Postless and Bereft

My gosh, it's been more than a month since I posted last and I miss it. I've been traveling, mostly, and managing Brendan's multiple schedule changes, including his traveling, as the school year ended. I was in Dayton, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Chicago, San Juan and, I think, somewhere else that slips my mind. Marrianne has been in even more places. This is fun, I guess, but it also provokes anxieties and a desire to avoid confrontations with oneself, making it more comfortable to displace such confrontations onto others.

I also had a week with actual real live vertigo. Talk about feeling elderly and disabled, I was there. But that, too, has passed.
And I've written some and thought some--no kidding--and should be ready to write, or try, with greater frequency after our family trips (which will include Julie, however briefly, and Nate, unfortunately, not at all) are over and Brendan starts back to school in early, early August.

Love to Babies

Nathan Night Rain,
you were an infant with
apple cheeks and patience.

Julie Anna,
you were a witch baby,
wise with foreknowledge.

And Brendan Isaac,
you were king baby
with windmill arms and bicycle legs,
wailing your loud strong music.

As Isaac brought joy
to Abraham and Sarah,
with a handful of weight,
with the heat of new beginning,
with the scent of everything to come,
so have you brought
gift after gift after gift

of Nate asleep on my heart,
warm weight waxing,
innocent of his fierce protector;

of Julie at midnight recalled,
fresh weight needing nothing
but that which was freely given;

of yourself,
urgent and new;

all of you, gift after gift after gift
to a father stirred and grateful
that the elements combined as you.