It didn’t matter in the end whether I was there because of my free will or not. It didn’t matter whether God was anxiously hovering over me and fretting over what my next idiotic move would be. It didn’t matter that getting there meant moving through sauna heat when all I wanted was to nap in an air-conditioned room.
I went to the beach, and that was all that mattered.
At 69, I am mechanistic. Questions starting with “why” seem pointless. Things like, “well, what am I supposed to do now,” seem more pertinent. I know that I will close down for the holidays—or rather, that I will be closed. I will feel exhausted and that I have done nothing.
I accept that I’ve done something. In a weird way, my apprenticeship as a bookbinder seems over. God knows whether I have put in the full 10,000 hours that is supposed to be needed to master a craft. That’s five years of 40-hour weeks—and my journey hasn’t been measured by the clock but by the notebooks that piled up and continue to pile up.
An average year has 250 work days—and have I made 1250 notebooks in the last half a decade? I think so, and yes, they have gotten better. Not as good as I want them, but better. I’ve made all the mistakes a beginner can make.
And God knows I’ve written. The idea behind all these posts is that as book will emerge, like a monarch butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, or whatever it is. It will be there lying on the grass, that book of mine, with the dew of creation still on its literary wings. We’ll stand in awe as it soars into the blue sky towards the sun.
What I have instead looks like a teenager’s bedroom. In August I put together all of the blog posts I had written sine the beginning of Trump’s reign of terror—and got a 250-page assemblage of rants. I was going to read it, proof it, discard the always-present chaff and get it ready for the last lap.
I couldn’t bear to open it.
Worse, I’ve written as much in the last three months and I had in the first nine months of the year. So I now will have a manuscript of 600 or 700 hundred pages. A lot of writing is going to hit the floor.
The premise was simple—explain what the hell had happened to the country on my watch. Henry Herrick of Salem—the dude who hung the witches because he fell prey to the same devil that he imagined afflicted the witches. How to explain Trump to him? Nicholas Coleman Pickard—the guy who went to Libby Prison in Virginia to identify and carry home his erysipelas-stricken son, and who “abandoned” his family a few years (and one son) later. He was off to find that gold, and ended up dying decades later at his daughter’s house in Kansas.
Pickard was smarter than Herrick, who left a faltering explanation of his actions. For no reason I can justify, I think Herrick experienced terror, but Pickard suffered a sort of existential fatigue.
They were insufferable but strangely admirable, those damn Pilgrims. They couldn’t live with even the Dutch—who to this day are some of the world’s coolest characters. The pilgrims were total pains in the ass, but they had courage, which was in fact madness except that they got away with it. They decimated the native population. They created a theocracy that we still are fighting to get rid of. They were devout people who went mad because of their religion, yes. But they persevered, and they left a heritage of constant work, constant self-examination to the point of condemnation, and constant striving for improvement.
I know nothing of Herrick, beyond the simple facts the Internet can dredge up. We had, of course, missed the boat the first time around—so Herrick never went through the initial first winter, which killed half of the population, by some accounts. But anyone can feel the isolation that the Pilgrims experienced—starving, far from home, experiencing an unimaginable winter. Herrick—did he look into the dark green forest as we do, a place of beauty and rest? Or did it harbor evil, malice? Whatever tenuous peace the Pilgrims would cobble together with the Indians in the first years would soon fall apart. I suspect Herrick would have been the first to tell you that the Indians were not just savages but perhaps not even people. They may have been tools of the devil for him, and he may have been proud of despising them.
But he was there, damn him, and whatever we are now is down in part to him and his comrades. The Mayflower Compact—is anyone still teaching it? If so, are they teaching it the way they taught it to me? Because no one asked me to read the damn thing so much as to bow my head at the profound wisdom of the 41 men (sorry, all you wives and daughters) who had the courage to create the very foundation of our democracy.
The Mayflower Compact was as sacred as the cherry tree that George Washington never cut, but never lied about either.
The Mayflower Compact turns out to be just this, if we can still trust Wikipedia:
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620.
Would I have had the fortitude to uproot my entire life, get onto a creaky ship (that would soon meet a hurricane, if I remember correctly) with a bunch of other cranks who thought like me, sign a document pledging affiliation with them, and then experience a brutal winter surrounded by savages?
Probably not, but I’m glad he did.
Then there’s Pickard—an ancestor who’s behaving himself perfectly respectably until he gets it into his head to go look for that “gold.” I have my pet theory for HIM—but is it even fair to utter it? Didn’t the guy suffer enough?
We’re zero-sum on the subject of slavery, and we should be. “Yes, but…” doesn’t seem good enough when confronted with the horrors of slavery. From her writing, my grandmother paints her mother (and perhaps her grandmother as well) as a strong abolitionist. Remember all of that business of hosting Booker T. Washington?
The women of the 19th century seem somehow to be carrying the ball on the great moral issues of the day: slavery, abolition, suffragettism and the vote for women. They were right, and the story of Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe (he called her the little woman who had caused this great war) is probably untrue, factually speaking.
I don’t think Pickard condoned slavery. I think he thought it evil, and the sooner it withered and died the better off we’d all be. But I’m not sure that he thought it was his problem, or his job to sacrifice the thing he loved (perhaps) the most. He gave his son to a cause that was blazing for his wife, but to which he felt lukewarm. He got stuck bringing the body home and burying it. Did my great-great grandmother revel in her martyrdom? Did she make a little too much of the sacrifice she had made of her son, and did it drive a wedge between them?
I know nothing about my great-great grandmother, and oddly enough, I know just as little about my grandmother as I get older. But she had a curious pride in being American—she felt that we had done the sensible thing of leaving the old world with its kings and royalty and serfs and poverty. She was ardent in her belief about education, and the power of public schools to shape and mould citizens that could step to the plate and hit any ball thrown towards it. Her God was an Englishman who spoke The King James’ Bible (the idea of a Catholic having anything to do with God was impossible). We were the greatest country on earth because what else could we be?
It should have been jingoism, but it wasn’t. It required effort and maintenance—she read the newspaper every day of her life until the very end, because it was her responsibility. Her first words after surgery were about the Middle East peace deal—the Oslo Accords, as I remember. She believed in an informed electorate, and it was her duty to be part of it.
It was a matter of temperament almost more than principle. Other nations went mad and had their dictators and their wars and their persecutions of minorities and their perpetuation of injustices. We did not.
We were above all that.
It both stifled and elevated. She was a staunch Republican and didn’t think much of John F. Kennedy, but of course she agreed with his, “ask not what your country can do for you…” ideology. We had gotten it right, and it was our job to keep rubbing the world’s nose in it.
And because of that attitude, we often got it right.
She sent her own son off to war, and he came back, having taken care of the Nazis. He rebuilt his life and we rebuilt Germany.
That’s who we were.
Who are we now?
We have a profoundly corrupt man who has no concept of the traditions of being American that I remember. That corrupt man is now failing physically and mentally, but he has shown us that all our traditions hang by a thread. He baited us with fear and then hatred, and we took the bait. He sold us out to our bitterest enemy, and half of the population still loves him.
He has shown us who we are.
I no longer believe that my ancestors are up there in heaven, anxiously waiting for me to pass on and join their ranks. I no longer think that I will have to face Herrick and Pickard—I sure as hell hope not.
I could face the two men, I think, but not my grandmother. In her youth she had been well-off; in her widowhood she had worked the switchboard. She had given her son a pocket Bible when he went off to defeat the Nazis; she was amused when he returned and con
fessed, of course, never to have opened it.
Riches and religion were important, yes, but never her north star. But she was American through and through. She went to the Holy Land and was jarred by the mountains, the rugged and hostile terrains. She was a child of the prairies.
She was American.
May she rest in peace.
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