Miscellany, mostly of the Christmas and feline persuasion

It is very cold suddenly. Winter! Things appear to be hardening all around. The ground, for one. Drivers are more aggressive. Fewer are smiling. Coats are zipped high and tight.

But I patently refuse because Christmas is nigh, and I am nothing if not a jolly g-damn Christmas reveler.

My entire dining room table is covered in holiday card- and gift-making supplies. Even Oliver, a serious crafting guy, is impressed. "Mama, you have a LOT of craft stuff." Tom, too, feels my Martha-parts are really living big these days. I think my use of his heat gun took him aback just a tad. But y'all, embossing powder is fun! Teachers, grandparents, friends, neighbors, "strangers" (those online friends you've not yet met in real life but intend to and so in the meantime, snail mail during the holidays!)...there is much love and gratitude to be shared. 

Lest you think my inner activist is quieting, she is not. There is much work to be done, and I have tried to do at least one action-item per day since the election. The orange yam continues to disgrace the office of the Presidency. It is shameful. I am ashamed of him. Stand strong everyone.

"When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Indeed!

The Nut and I spent a great deal of quality time together today. He is so delightful! Also, Big Boggle. Fun game for the whole family. I was competitive but only quietly. ;) Oliver repeatedly found "Ol" and "SOS." I'm not sure what to make of that- hidden message?

He lives a charmed life.

I finished Hillbilly Elegy, quite good not amazing; more on it later, yesterday and am continuing now with H Is for Hawk, masterful. Does anyone else feel totally overwhelmed by content lately? God, it's like a world-sized snowball.

Do: cook your salmon with lemon, olives, grilled artichoke hearts, salt, and a pat of butter in a foil pack. Serve with asparagus, quickly roasted until just crisp-tender, generously dashed with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. A healthy, easy, winner of a meal.

When history repeats

I spent yesterday at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Months ago, when the museum opened, my mother-in-law, Claire, got two tickets, and although I'm sorry my father-in-law wasn't able to join her, I feel awfully lucky I got to take his place.

It is an incredible place in many ways. The sheer number of artifacts housed there is astounding. Even if you simply looked at everything and ignored all placards, you'd need days to get through. But you would never want to do that because the enormous amount of written information enriches and gives context to those treasures. As do the interactive displays and videos. And the museum shop which has a deep, library-like book selection that I felt I only scratched the surface of.

Claire and I spent a good two hours, maybe more, on just the bottom three floors which starts a couple hundred years prior to the Atlantic slave trade. The museum does a phenomenal job of educating visitors about when slavery shifted from being something that affected people of many colors and faiths and was often a temporary status to a thoroughly racialized commodity exchange of black bodies to white hands. The concept of whiteness developed and in a depraved effort to continue profiting and gaining power off the backs of black slaves, white slave owners and sympathetic members of the government enacted increasingly repressive laws banning education, religious practice, the ability to move from place to place and so on. The rights to safety, privacy, personhood were completely stripped away. 

In 1705, the Chesapeake region made it legal to dismember any unruly slave and passed a law stating that "all negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves are considered real estate."

In 1730, Humphrey Morice, Governor of the Bank of England, said, "Negroes...are a perishable Commodity, when you have an opportunity, dispose of them for gold." 

Evidence of slavery's vast dehumanization efforts is, of course, prolific in the museum, and being surrounded by quotes and slave-for-sale signs and pictures of children being ripped from their mothers' arms and men branded and hung is deeply upsetting and moving, which is at it should be. The museum felt almost holy to me in some ways. I say that not from a religious perspective but from a spiritual one of profound sorrow and sadness and humility.

In many ways, the hardest things for me to handle were the sentiments and efforts to dehumanize and criminalize that were current hundreds of years ago and still feel awfully present today. We continue, in too many ways, to perpetrate entirely-too-similar ills on Black Americans now as we once did.

It is unconscionable and deeply shameful.

In 1864, Spottswood Rice said, "Whether freeman or slaves the colored race in this country have always looked to the United States as the Promised Land of Universal freedom." He must have been so hopeful then, just after the Emancipation Proclamation (EP) had passed. And yet, Reconstruction brought with it the Southern "black codes" and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and ferocious backlash after ferocious backlash.

In 1876, Frederick Douglass said, "You say you have emancipated us. You have and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? Bue when You turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst, of all you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters."

As you know, it wasn't until 1965, a hundred years AFTER Lincoln's EP that Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act giving Black Americans the right to vote. Their attempts to register and act on that right were often threatened and repressed and made impossible. And in 2013, the Supreme Court (the majority view expressed and written by Chief Justice Roberts) voted to strip huge parts of that Voting Rights Act because "our country has changed." But has it?

Three years later, "our country" in some ways* voted in an unfit bigot with zero political experience and lawsuits of fraud and sexual assault hanging over him because they wanted to "take our country back to its former greatness." 

You can't not see how all this fits together. How we are not remotely post-racial. How in fact we are still a racist place that believes the myth of racial inequality created by white Europeans and Americans centuries ago. Race is a social construct and as it was once used to oppress some for the benefit of others, it way too often still is.

Sure, it's often couched differently, it might simmer rather than boil. Trump and the whitelash he inspired are eerily reminiscent of the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK following emancipation. Racism isn't the only reason Trump "won," but it's a big factor. 

When I hear Trump talk of forcing Muslims to register, and then I go to the NMAAHC and see Freedom Papers for which free Blacks had to register every two years and carry at all times, I shake in a seriously uncomfortable way.

When I heard Trump supporters scream about Civil War were Hillary to have been elected and scream about locking her up so that they could "take their country back" and then I read Douglass' words of having been turned loose to face the wrath of infuriated masters," I shake some more. 

When I read that more than 50% of every 100 slaves taken from Africa died before "being placed" and then I look at the outrageously imbalanced numbers of Black Americans now incarcerated, I continue to tremble.

We all should. It is time to rise the fuck up and own our history, America. It is time to figure out how to stamp out the insidious scourge of racism that bedevils and weakens us. Racism is not the only issue facing America. But it is a big one. We need to be and do better. NOW.

*I say "in some ways" because Trump lost the popular vote by a landslide, by nearly 2.7 million votes at last count.

Crumbs, dear friends, loss, strength

That is mos def one of the vaguest post titles I have ever written and will ever write. It's ridiculous. But so was today.

After a very emotional weekend which included an enormously beautiful memorial service for a friend gone too soon, one of my dearest pals arrived into town last night. This was a balm. I was covered in cat hair and wore no make up. Jack was raising hell about going to cotillion's Holiday Dining Etiquette class which, let's be honest, is the reason I registered him for cotillion in the first place. Eating soup with one's hands? Not appealing anywhere, and yet he persists. Oliver had just split his pajama pants from knee to ankle and was slightly overtired-manic after a perfect day at a pal's house. Tom was goggle-eyed because he'd been to memorial part deux until 2 am. 

If a friend can saunter into that fray, you know she's a good one.

As such, Anne and I celebrated with cocktails, and a large skillet of pasta, and laughter and the realest sort of talk. And then Oliver went to sleep, and Jack came home with a large pamphlet from National Protocol, LTD (OMG, that is so intense! But he did learn so much! Amen!), and Tom went to bed because he was drained, and then we exhaled and clinked glasses and felt the same gratitude- for good friends and bedtimes.

She and I are taking yet another online writing class together. That's how we met, and today found us beginning the fourth or fifth one anew. We wrote together this morning, quietly, at my kitchen table, and then parted ways for several hours.

During that time I saw another friend who lost her mother two months ago and her husband on Thanksgiving. The pain of 2016 is unceasing it seems. Oh, and Ben Carson is heading HUD? What? I am struggling to ingest this news. It's like every day brings a new presidential appointment or expose which is rather like ripping a whole body scab off each and every morning; they are all that terrible. 

Anne walked back in as I was snarfing salad from the mixing bowl and attempting to roll out large amounts of butter cookie dough to stamp before the boys got home to decorate them. Teacher gifts. It's a good thing I wasn't mainlining Xanax, for christs sakes. I mean, shit, 2016.

We caught up from our days, and I was starting to feel centered again and then two hours later, there was a debacle with an over-frosted cookie and a brother and awful words were screamed from one brother to another, and one ended up with a swollen ear, and both were crying, and I just sat in the kitchen like someone who'd just dared look Medusa in the eyes. Frozen. Stunned. Immobile.

Tears coursed down my stone face, and rage through my icy veins, and I was surrounded by crumbs of the cookies I'd just spent hours rolling and baking and cooling, so thoughtfully and hopefully. And that's really the worst of it, I think. That hope and time all in smithereens on the floor around me with kids crying amidst it all and a friend watching on. As if anyone should see the inside of the sausage.

But of course we all see that, just not together. And we should, and Anne did. And she said, "Well, my goodness, I am right at home." Which is, of course, just perfect because she meant it so sincerely and with such love. Because she, too, has found herself crying and surrounded by crumbs and  fighting children and a complete shock at just what the fuck happened on a random Monday night for which you had planned and had such hopes.

It is an hour later now, and I have stopped shaking from rage. I have had some wine. One cleaned the smashed cookies, and I put the others are in Tupperware. Ben Carson is still head of HUD but everyone is standing up for Comet Pizza (as they should), and so many are brave in this fight for our country.

I think about the historical arcs which great countries summit and bend round. I think about how imperialism died and dynasties fell and greatness was vanquished, and I wonder if this is not our time to fall so deeply and so hard. I wonder if the cookie crumbs are the hopes of American progressives, who see the better whole we could be but aren't. Sometimes, hard landings are the only way to learn. 

I think about the resistance, the fight for better. Hell, the fight for good. The fight towards a better, more cohesive tomorrow. And I think about how I will always fight for that, even when I am covered in cat hair and my crow's feet are pronounced and my kids are melting down and I am ashamed of my country's leadership-to-be. This is precisely the time to fight, to resist, to march, to stand up and speak out. It is the time to "feel at home" and to find strength in that and to make the perpetrator sweep the crumbs and to all work hard tomorrow. Damned is the one who won't, for he will lose in the end.