Playing the Bugle

Addison, October 18, 2020

“I don’t know what I am going to do with myself for the two and a half weeks before the election.  Maybe I can go into a coma.”

I emailed those two sentences to a friend one morning very early a few days ago as I sat in front of the big windows in Freeport and sipped my first cup of coffee, watched Venus and the crescent moon set while the sun tip toed from behind the black frilly limbs of the white pines and the denuded bodies of the balsam poplars in the forest just beyond the glass. 

By the time the sun was overhead and the magic of the first-light morning had been exchanged for the hum-drum weariness of late morning light, my friend had sent an answer:

“Try and find something positive to do for the next 19 days.  It will pay off, mental health is important.”

Harrumph!  I notice my smirk and the tingle of little bees in my brain and the mild sense of effrontery I feel that I, the person who has guarded and guided like a faithful dog the mental health of thousands, am being counseled as to its importance.  “As if I didn’t already know that!” I think to myself. 

I am an oldest child, the oldest of five.  And furthermore, I am one of the oldest mental health practitioners in the State.  I’ve practiced so long that my Social Work License, which gives me the right to diagnose and treat mental illness, is one of the lowest numbers in the State.  When we first moved here in 1974 from Illinois, Social Workers weren’t licensed to treat mental illness and thus were not insurance reimbursable.  So, off I went, merrily merrily merrily, to find a lobbyist and write a bill and put it through our legislature in Maine, testifying before the State licensing commission as to the importance of mental health.   

Well, well, even all these years later, I observe now, I am still behaving like an oldest child. A pompous, obnoxious oldest child.  Now is no time for attitude.  Now it is time to be grateful for my friend who wants to take care of me, for her reminder that my mental health is important.

My friend doesn’t mean that I should think positive thoughts about how we are responding to covid or to the political crisis we are in.  My friend means I should DO something, advice I have given to hundreds of despairing and depressed patients over the years.  She means I should write postcards.  Canvas door to door.  Call voters.  She and her husband have been doing political organizing work to get out the vote since the mid sixties. These days their hair, as they say, is on fire. They are up early and home late, talking to voters, distributing signs, organizing events.  A few weeks ago, she gave me a stack of postcards to handwrite to prospective voters for the State Senate seat in Addison.  My handwriting deteriorated after five of them.  Whoever got those next forty postcards must have wondered if they came from a deranged mind.  Perhaps I will brave going door to door in Addison but, unlike my friends, I will have no passion in the doing of it. 

But what I do have energy for now is to write: these essays, this blog.  To quote W.S. Merwin, the poet, Buddhist, antiwar and environmental activist, rare palm tree farmer, who died last year:

“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? ... We keep expressing our anger and our love, and we hope, hopelessly perhaps, that it will have some effect.”

I thought about Merwin’s idea of how we share a desperate hope to save the world as Biden sat and sometimes, out of pure passion, stood and answered questions at the Town Hall event in Philadelphia.  That night, Biden was a man pouring his heart into every word, summoning hope with every sentence.   He was a man, I imagined, standing before a very big garden, one he’d tended for years, a garden filled with sweet yellow corn and plain squashes, purple eggplants, red potatoes that smell of dirt, scarlet dahlias, big billowing daisies, giant nodding sunflowers.  See this garden…this is ours, this is America, this everyday unadorned beauty.  But it is being plowed under, bulldozed, bullied, belied.  But it can still be saved.  You can vote.  We can preserve what we love.

My father and the men of his generation had a desperate hope to save the world when they  joined the Armed Forces to fight against fascist governments.  A little of Joe Biden’s decency and of the twinkle in his eye and the soft spot in his heart reminds me of my father.  Though my dad was a Republican, I know he’d be angry and frightened about what is happening in our country now. He risked his life to fight fascism.  He would be horrified to know that it has arrived on our shores. My dad was a small town lawyer on the South Shore of Long Island, a town much like Biden describes the place he’s from: a town where “everyone either was a firefighter, a cop or a priest.”  My dad’s clients didn’t have a lot of money and sometimes they paid him in homemade wine and fresh caught bluefish.  I can tell you he’d want me and he’d want you to care about the homeless, out of work and underpaid and uninsured.  I can tell you that’s what he thought democracy was.  A place where everyone has a chance.  Like he did.

(My dad is the man standing on the right)

When we buried my father on Long Island, fifteen years ago, three men in Army uniforms saluted my mother and handed her an American flag, folded in that tight triangle, that special way he carefully taught us to fold the flag.  A man with a bugle played taps.  Pretend I know how to play the bugle and am playing it for you now.  I am, at the top of my lungs, blowing the poet’s note of desperate hope into the air to remind us of all we love. 

 Can you hear it?