Yes, it is the first day of July, and that means that the United States will be celebrating Independence Day shortly. (For my international readers, July 4th is when United States’ citizens honor our declaration of independence from British rule. Ostensibly, we gather and honor the fact that we live in a free, democratic society. I know, I know. Don’t get me started.).
This year, it’s a little difficult for me to get on board that red, white, and blue train. So much of what is happening right now in the United States doesn’t resemble independence at all. The National Guard and Marines patrolling the streets of Los Angeles. Immigrants and citizens being kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured. Congress passing bills that gut some of our most important social programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and food assistance). And a president hell-bent on transforming the country into the Fourth Reich and starting a war in the Middle East.
Therefore, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not being all Yankee Doodle in this post.
In my personal life, there’s lots of upheaval and change headed in my direction, as well. My family home where I grew up has been sold, and my sisters are moving to another town about 60 or so miles away. My son is going to be a high school senior this September. And my daughter is relocating downstate with her significant other to attend medical school.
Longtime disciples of this blog (and longtime friends) know that I don’t deal well with change. I’m the kind of guy that always eats the same things for breakfast and lunch. One way to ruin my day is abruptly changing plans. However, I am a realist, and I accept that time and circumstances alter life. U.S. Presidents lose elections. Countries go to war. Parents die. Kids grow up.
Sharon Olds contemplates her daughter and son . . .
Looking at Them Asleep
by: Sharon Olds
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.
When I read this poem today, I was struck by that question love asks: What do you know?
I’m not sure how to answer that query. I know that I don’t like broccoli or MAGA Republicans. Given a choice, I know I wouldn’t watch an Adam Sandler movie or read a James Patterson novel. These are indisputable facts about me. I also know my daughter and son, or, in the words of Olds, this girl and this boy.
Yet, even with what I know, change steps in and fucks things up. This girl and this boy will eventually have lives of their own, shared with people I may (or may not) like. My family home will soon belong to a different family, and they will make their own memories there. President 47 will eventually leave office, be impeached, or die. These are certainties.
In a little over a week, I will be caravanning across the Upper Peninsula and the Mackinac Bridge with my immediate family—wife, daughter, son, daughter’s significant other and his parents. It’s not a road trip that I’m particularly looking forward to because, at the end of it, I will be turning around and driving home, leaving my daughter behind to chase her dreams. I know tears will be shed all ‘round.
A good change that will break my heart a little. My kids are amazing, and I know that the future is in good hands because of them. I just wish that love didn’t hurt so much sometimes.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about taking a road trip, based on the following prompt from June 18 of The Daily Poet:
For this poem, take a drive down a specific road, turnpike, throughway, or highway. Stop at a cafe or restaurant and take notes about what you see, the conversations you overhear, the bumper stickers and the logos on semis and mobile homes. Fashion a poem from your road trip notes.
Doing Laundry
by: Martin Achatz
The day is fresh as clean sheets,
grass and trees green, full of summer.
Everyone in the laundromat looks
like Russian peasants in a David
Lean film, grim, focused only on
detergent and spin cycles. Trucks
line the parking lot, windows opaque
with sunlight, we proletarians shackled
to our agitating towels, underwear, socks,
dreaming of sliding behind our steering
wheels, turning keys in ignitions, and
cruising, baby, windows down, radio
cranked with John Prine or The Boss,
power lines scooping the sky up
and down as we hurtle toward Enchanted
Highway or Carhenge or Spotted Lake,
places where we don’t worry about
hots, colds, delicates, heavily soiled,
where we gather our collective lint, sculpt
it into the Statue of Liberty, stand
before it, immigrants on the deck
of a ship steaming into New York Harbor,
waiting to be welcomed like long-lost
cousins from the old country.
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