Riding the train home from Lancaster
The Column: 08.04.23
I am obligated to be an optimist because I’ve had a lucky life — I had a big career in a field for which I had no aptitude, my heart got surgically repaired, I married well on the third try — so it’d be dishonest to sing about the water tasting like turpentine and wanting to lay my head on the railroad line so the 4:19 can ease my troubled mind, so I don’t, I sing Van Morrison’s “These Are the Days of the Endless Summer,” but I respect skeptics and I’m glad that investigative journalism is at work shedding light on dark corners.
Take the recent piece in the Times about the NRA’s transformation from an organization of sportsmen to a powerhouse lobby that ruled Congress and expanded the Second Amendment so that we now have 400 million guns in the country and mass killings are a routine matter that has poisoned urban life. You read the piece with disgust at the machinations of politicians, and then you set it aside and enjoy the day. I got to ride the Keystone Express out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and do a show at which I sang, with my friends Heather and Christine, Jerry Garcia’s “Attics of My Life” and Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the audience joined in on the “Sha la la la la la la la la la la la de da,” which we repeated several times until we got the correct number of las. You cannot allow the existence of evil to overshadow the beauty of life in this splendiferous world we walk around in.
Pennsylvania: you have to love a state with towns named Blue Bell, King of Prussia, Wissahickon, Mount Airy, Flourtown, Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, Swedeland, Schnecksville, Lumberville, Plowville, Normal Square, Jim Thorpe, Mount Joy. The map of Pennsylvania is a testament to individuality. The developers of suburbia prefer generic names, such as Riverside and Lawnview but the Keystone State is a land of proud originality.
Not far from where we sang, we saw Amish boys and girls in solemn traditional garb playing volleyball and whooping and laughing and this, rather than the latest shooting, is the real news, the happy persistence of independence and the acceptance of it by the neighbors. The Amish set up tents in cornfields and offer dinner to the tourists, fried chicken and corn on the cob, and I hear that it’s very amiable and the corn is fresh off the stalk and fairly fabulous.
Acceptance is a natural phenomenon. It’s happened with gay couples and it’s happening with people named Samuel who now want to be called Sarah and with Ellens who now identify as Allens. I grew up in a very white community and I am still quite aware of race but I think younger people are much less aware, having grown up with so many shades of skin. It’s a natural process of familiarity.
The media are naturally attracted to despair, death, destruction, division, danger, because they make for a good story. “Hamlet” wouldn’t be a classic if Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude sat in a circle and worked out their differences: you really need Polonius to be stabbed and Ophelia to drown and Laertes to seek revenge and the big sword duel and the poisoned goblet. But journalists go to ridiculous ends at times: for example, a story in the Washington Post about why it’s so dangerous to fall off a cruise ship while at sea. Something, the story admits, that is extremely rare, there being railings and all, but the reporter makes a great deal out of precious little.
I’m 80 and it’s clear to me that ordinary life in America has progressed rather majestically. When I unload the dishwasher and put laundry into the washer as our cleaning lady Lulu vacuums around me, I think of my grandma on the farm, a smart woman and a progressive, and what she might’ve done had she had some appliances and bought chicken at a supermarket instead of chasing it down and hacking its head off and defeathering it and frying it over a woodfire.
Grandma said, “I’ve lived through the best, most exciting time in human history. My life started with covered wagons, and it has gone through jet airplanes and television.” She never drove a car, she drove horses because they knew the way home, but freed of dishwashing and laundry and cleaning, I think she might’ve sat down and done what I’m doing now, writing something in gratitude for life’s blessings. Thanks for everything, great and small. We’re lucky.
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Life is horrible and magnificent all at once. My Puerto Rican grandmother worked for a wealthy white family when she came here, and they would randomly hit her with pots or whatever was handy and scream at her. I didn’t know her then. I only knew her when she owned a soda fountain shop in Freeport on Long Island. We’d visit her there sometimes and she made us the best cheeseburgers and root beer floats. After that she moved to Miami and kept bee hives. She had terrible arthritis in her knees and she would scoop up a bunch of bees in a jar, shake it until they were really mad and then hold the jar over her knees, they would sting her and it brought her relief. She was in the hospital for something fairly insignificant and the doctors recommended knee replacement surgery. She agreed and died of a heart attack days after the surgery. It was only recently that it was determined that bee venom proves effective with people who have arthritis.
Her second husband was a short man with a limp that was the result of a motorcycle accident. His fingernails were always dirty and he smelled like motor oil. Her first husband, my grandfather who I never knew, died of a heroin overdose on a bus headed to Mexico where he was born. My mother was young, and he would shower her with hundred dollar bills but he also abused her and her brother. On the day of her high school graduation he showed up high and started screaming her name. Right before he got on that bus not long afterward, she said that she wished he was dead, and he ended up dying on the bus.
My grandmother was a strong woman and she loved me and my sisters so much. She always sang when she cooked the arroz con pollo that filled her house with such a wonderful, familiar smell, the same smell that fills my house now when I cook for friends. I was beaten by my mother many times, but it doesn’t matter. I sing when I make my grandmother’s arroz con pollo just like she did when she cooked it.
Life is both horrible and magnificent all at once. My grandmother knew it, I know it, and we both chose to sing while we cooked. Chose being the operative word here. We chose joy over tragedy.
We are all lucky to have you writing, singing, sharing.