Of Explosions

[Above photo: The Rockets’ Red Glare]

5 July 2022

I heard a wonderful NPR interview two days ago with Annette Gordon-Reid, a Harvard law professor and historian who wrote, among other books, On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.  Her warmth, poise, and capacity to contain the contradictions in discussing Thomas Jefferson were breathtaking. Reading from his writings and other historical documents, she brightly illuminated his struggles with being a slaveholder, espousing equality, and fathering several children by Sally Hemings, his (initially 16yo) slave.  She told the tale of Ms. Hemings accompanying Jefferson to Paris, where she was a free person, there being impregnated by him, and deciding to return to slavery in America for multiple and complex reasons with a remarkable grace and complexity.  That a black woman could speak of slavery and its evils so knowingly yet evenly amazed me. I confess I have wondered at times why the Blacks of this country haven’t organized and risen up to slaughter the Whites as we have them, given the cruelty, humiliation, and unfairness that they have suffered. Yet Professor Gordon-Reid seemed to be living at a level of grace and enlightenment far above my own. (Recall that the Black Panthers were a social service organization, providing meals, health care, and education to their communities; their smaller but better-known armed groups were defensive and violent only in response to violence visited upon them.)  I think that the Black Experience in this country has, of necessity, deeply tutored many in understanding, patience, and compromise.  We desperately need their skills and wisdom to help guide us out of our current political and spiritual crisis. 

The most striking and personally useful aspect of her interview for me was noting her ability to find and value truly wonderful qualities of a person without neglecting to give the bad sides their full due, elevating ambivalence to a virtue.

I mentioned hearing Professor Gordon-Reid to a friend, a senior Child Psychiatrist, yesterday evening. He laughed and affirmed my experience, saying he’d gone to Dartmouth College with her and how they spent a work/study term together in North Carolina.  And that everything wonderful said about her was deserved, in his experience. Such a small world of many little surprises.

Speaking of which, my 92yo sister visited for 3 nights on her way to the Island. She was considerably stronger than I’d imagined, going up and down the stairs in my condo many times per day. We walked, and I drove her, around Portland, seeing lovely parks and preserves. She was taken with it. My brother, Charles, came to supper one night and we reminisced with laughter and sadness, recalling how dysfunctional our family was, how that shaped us all, and how we still managed to have memorable times in our childhoods and do some good works as adults. Like the time Nan’s yellow shorts washed away with the tide as we slept on a beach near Sekiu where we’d fish for salmon the next day. And she, perhaps with cosmic justice, was the only one of us to catch a salmon!  I learned much about her life that I’d never known, including about her 1 ½ years in Europe after Freshman year at Stanford, as well as the family life in Brookline, before the Depression drove the family west to Seattle in 1939.

Despite short-term memory issues and struggling with her hearing, Nan is managing remarkably well.  We got into a couple of dust-ups but I think much of the fault was mine; her anger triggers my own, since I spent my childhood and youth placating an amazing yet very labile and often irritable or capricious mother.  I must work not to conflate her anger with that of our mother—a nice demonstration of Transference—that is, adding my own history to my interpretation of her anger—and act accordingly.

Several of my students in Myanmar are under incredible pressure and in considerable danger of arrest. One mentioned today that she’s not been eating, has lost 8 pounds, has been unable to sleep, and has been “overthinking” since a friend and fellow physician was arrested by the military 3 weeks ago. It made me realize, once again, how much they are all carrying. Thus, when a bomb goes off nearby their apartment or the electricity is on only 4 hours in 24, these things are added to already crushing loads. Our situation in this country, with our democracy at high risk, a regressive and complicit Supreme Court majority, many lying and corrupted politicians, and a powerful, determined, and emboldened Christian Right trying to drag us into “dominionism”—where they can order all of society, including the government, according to “their” Christian principles—is gravely threatened but Myanmar is already a disaster.

On a cheerier note, watching the fireworks over the Eastern Prom last night was glorious. It was a calm, warm evening. The extensive sloping lawns were blanketed with people—-on blankets—-and a great multitude of small craft with winking lights were anchored just offshore. A large demonstration protesting the Roe v. Wade abolition marched and chanted across the top of the Prom and then down its width  via the diagonal road. The fireworks began and seemed to last forever. Firework technology is now so advanced that the rockets explode in a veritable arboretum of blooms and unnamed galaxies, including the inevitable red, white, and blue varieties.  It was so nice to be with a large group of celebrants, all enjoying Independence Day peacefully, however different our personalities and persuasions.

Now to dig a ditch for my EV charging cable.