Notes from a Puritan

It was a little hard to wrap my head around it, but in the end, I had to admit it: Heather Cox Richardson is right. I am a Puritan.

 

A very bad Puritan—so very bad that any serious Puritan (if there are any serious Puritans today….) would scoff at the idea. Actually, I hope he (or she) would scoff: rage, nausea, revulsion are all more likely reactions.

 

I’m an old, homosexual drunk. 

 

That might not have surprised the Puritans, who seem to have had a surprising grip in reality. True—I know nothing about the Puritans except from what Richardson has told me. In fact, I grew up thinking that the Puritans were joyless, mean-spirited people. Haunted, as Mencken said, by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 

This was the prevailing view of the Puritans in the 1960’s in the United States, which is when and where I first perked my head up and looked about me. They were as grim as their clothes, and anything good about them was accidental. 

 

An odd point of view, since I love New England, and everything about the place screams Puritanism, at least to me. The long, tall, white churches, unadorned except for a window admitting the grey light of winter. The sense of order, the calm.

 

I was last in the United States over a year ago, and went with my brother and sister-in-law to New Hampshire and Vermont. The area is over-grown, now, and we saw the rocks that previous generations of farmers had taken from their ground and piled to make a fence around their fields. The people are gone, their children and great-grandchildren have forgotten them and their fields and their stones. 

 

The Puritans, for me, were only a couple of generations (and unimportant ones, at that) away from the earnest and deadly people that ran the 1950’s. The Puritans had invented Hell, and delighted in sending me to it. They were repressed and hypocritical.

 

That’s what I thought, and what I believed everybody thought. But it turns out that while I was away being adolescent, more serious scholars were looking at the Puritans more charitably. The Puritans were serious people, after all, and what they achieved was in some cases spectacular.

 

I assume that my grandmother got it right, and that I am a descendant of Henry Herrick, of Salem. Who was he, and what did he think?

 

He could not have been a simple man—not the way we have become simple. He believed utterly in a God, but a God who knew the future (since God knows everything, right?). He knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, and He wasn’t saying. But nothing you did, and nothing you thought, made the slightest difference. I am an old, homosexual drunk, but I may still have my ticket onto the cloud with the angel strumming away at her harp.

 

Blameless YOU, on the other hand….

 

This is a view of God, and the spiritual life, which is completely foreign to us in 21^st century America, where God has become a Hallmark greeting card, a joke, a weapon, but never any serious figure. I think about God all the time, as I think my ancestor did. But I have no belief that he (if it is a he and not “them”) loves me, and I certainly don’t trust people who tell me he does.

 

So I go to heaven and you do not—or maybe it’s the other way around. Who—besides God—knows? The Puritans did not react as I would react; they didn’t say, ‘well, we’re fucked,’ and go off and get drunk.

 

Instead, they spent their entire adult lives seeking to become better and better people (in their eyes) and dreading the day of judgment. They had, if I read Wikipedia right, a weird sort of relationship with God. They believed in predestination, but also that you had to live an exemplary life to get it. For Puritans, the Bible study, the endless church services, the hours spent in prayer—all of that was preparation for a conversion experience, in which you became (and tried to convince everybody else that you had become) one of the “elect.”

 

The elect ran things, and decided who was a witch and which family truly owned the back forty acres down by the creek.

 

At the back of their minds must have been terror, and a drunk knows that pretty well. I am terrified too—mostly of ending up a drunk lying on a cardboard refrigerator box outside of Walgreens. Terror got me up and to a meeting of AA this morning; terror might have gotten Henry Herrick up and off to church, and then off to be a magistrate.

 

Neither of us believes that we have any friend up there in the sky. And neither of us believes, I suspect, that what other people think about us makes any difference. But it must have been inevitable for Herrick not to look sideways at the people and wonder: are they favored by God? Are they one of the “elect?”

 

Am I?

 

This view of God was completely uncomfortable, unless you happened to live in the society that was spawned from it. Education was huge—you had to read that Bible to get saved, or not—so you have great schools, universities, and libraries. Work was essential, to the point that Richardson confessed that she had always taken her knitting to any meeting / class / activity when she was a young woman. Idle hands may be the devil’s playground, but the Puritans were anything but idle. They were out making fortunes, and the United States was almost unimaginably fertile and fecund.

 

Money was a snare, of course, and so had to be hidden away in banks and trust funds and other unassailable vessels of probity and virtue. You could be spectacularly rich, but never could you show it. It was like being one of the “elect,” people knew about it and respected it—but you could never be sure of it yourself.

 

If a guy named Winthrop gave a speech and said that we were “a city on a hill,” it wasn’t that we were great and everybody loved us. It was that we had made a spectacular claim for ourselves—we were creating a new, divinely ordered society—and the entire world was watching. It wasn’t a pat on the back, it was a call to action.

 

How exhausting it must have been—to wake up each day to obligations, duty, trials. To derive no satisfaction from the opinion of others, to strive mightily with no idea of whether any of it was necessary or made any sense. To have no belief that one’s actions made any difference, and to fear the afterlife and its deadening mate, eternity.

 

The Puritans were adults, dude.

 

And it wasn’t easy, which is why some of us became old alcoholics. It’s also why, when I finally entered the rooms of AA, I was instantly at home. The Puritan ideas, of course, had merged with other, more awful and evangelical forms of Christianity. But if my bed is made (check) and my bedroom is clean (mostly check) this morning, it’s because I grew up a Puritan, and needed the rooms of AA to revive it. 

 

It's the end of the year, and we are in that week before the New Year and after Christmas. I am exhausted, though I have done nothing, or so I tell myself.

 

I lived through this year.

 

I should tell you that Trump is fulminating in Mar-a-Lago—the Department of Justice has released a miniscule portion of the Epstein files and yes, it appears that the cover-up has failed badly.

 

Nor do I know anything more than I knew at the start of the year. It may be exhaustion or the Christmas spirit that keeps leaking through, dammit, but it feels as if we’ve…

 

…turned the corner?

 

…come to our senses?

 

Or maybe we’re just gotten tired. I am tired of the people who love God and are so very loved by him that they have no need to be anything but brutal to everybody else. I am tired of pretending that God put us up here to shine brightly for the world to see on this damn hill. I am tired of believing in endless progress and future joy.

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book that nobody will read, and I will die. In the end, none of it matters, and I know that. But I need to get through today, and the best way of doing it, oddly, is by being a Puritan. It means waking up early, making your bed and getting down to work. It means yearning to be at the beach when you are making another notebook. It means no screaming at the worker in the club who has just now turned on the television to impossible audio levels. It means doing a lot of shit that I don’t want to do, but that needs to be done.

 

But it also means that at the end of the day, I can put my head on a pillow and sleep. I never got to the bottom of who Henry Herrick of Salem was, or Nicholas Coleman Pickard. Do I know my own heart?

 

I lived through this year, I wrote a book, I will die. And who is this “I?”

 

Oddly, I think all that I am is a man who walked down Mounds Park Road, sometime in 2012. That was thirteen years ago, but I remember a cool, foggy morning, and I remember the carpet of white trillium that had been reestablished on the forest floor. I remember emerging from that forest and walking down the road to where my mother had once lived. She was gone, and I knew inside that I too, was walking the road for the last time. There was no reason to come back to that house (now sold) or that hill.

 

There was great comfort in the anonymity. My mother had died, I was soon to be gone as well. The hill remained, gazing at the people walking or driving the road. The hill sees everything and remembers nothing.

 

Other people will walk that road. It doesn’t matter that I will never walk that road again.

 

Only that I once did. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Why Bother?

The problem is that it’s utterly trivial, but deeply emblematic, as well.

 

It shouldn’t matter to me that a guy named Rob Reiner got killed (allegedly) by his son on Saturday. Reiner’s wife also got killed. The son got arrested within hours, and the story of his (sigh) struggle with addiction came out by noon the next day.

 

None of this is important because Rob Reiner isn’t important, at least to me. Rob Reiner is this century’s equivalent to the great Jullien. You don’t know who he is, and neither do I, and that’s the point. Wikipedia, of course, has the answer.

 

 

Jullien seemed unburdened by the weight of his thirty-six names, perhaps knowing that he would achieve fame and recognition throughout his lifetime. He gave the people what they want, and that’s…

 

 

Well, Mahler may have had the Symphony of a Thousand, but did he require three firemen’s brigades to combat the fire that erupted musically on cue in the Fireman’s Quadrille? As memory serves (meaning I’m too lazy to check on this detail, since we’ve all forgotten about Jullien—so who cares), the fire broke out, the firemen extinguished it, the crowd went wild. It was a sensation—like Bad Bunny today. And like Jullien yesterday, Bad Bunny will be forgotten tomorrow.

 

I pay no attention to Jullien or Bad Bunny, and I like to be high-minded about it. I paid not attention to the fact that Reiner had been killed until I heard that Trump had expertly pinpointed the cause of Reiner’s death: Trump derangement syndrome. Let’s get this out of the way:

 

 

 

Reiner is trivial, of course, and so is Trump, of course. Who knows whether history will “judge” Reiner as an important figure in American cultural life of the mid to late twentieth century? Who knows whether Donald Trump will sink to the level of Adolf Hitler / Josef Stalin or merely be forgotten with all the other unimportant presidents.

 

Remember this guy?

 

 

No worries—nobody else remembers James Buchanan either, except that he was (probably) the worst president to have at the time and he was gay (again probably).

 

So a ridiculous, meanspirited narcissist wrote a hateful comment about an unimportant person. It shouldn’t matter, but it does, and I wish I could tell you why it does. 

 

Our commentators go on overtime with Trump’s posts, which they all characterize as “unpresidential,” or “bringing down the moral tone,” or stuff like that. The problem seems to be that Trump is saying all this stuff.

 

I have no problem with Trump saying all of this stuff.

 

I have a problem with him being all this stuff.

 

Actually, I have a problem with us dealing with Trump at all.

 

Trump is a perfectly wonderful crazy uncle, and if he wants to tear down part of his house without any plan (or permit) about what to build later, that’s fine. 

 

But we don’t elect dudes that are crazy enough to bulldoze the East Wing to be president.

 

We used to care, and we used to bother. 

 

It was fun, for a while, not to care, and hate (for immigrants, black people, gay people, etc.) lasted for a while. But like any other drug, our tolerance went up and so did the price. We could bulldoze the White House last week—what’s up today?

 

‘Why bother,’ I think, and then remember a guy I watch on YouTube. He’s an art restorer, and he does these amazing videos, which is how I’ve stayed sober (or at least dry) during this first year of Trump’s unveiled presidency (too many adults in the room, the first time around).

 

Julian (unlike—and I swear I didn’t plan this—his non-namesake Jullien) takes sharp scalpels and then dulls them to scrape off barely-scopic flecks of yellowing varnish from old paintings that nobody but their owners want to look at.

 

Julian step up to the easel!

 

Julian scrapes and scrapes at the stuff only he can see. Wrong—there’s the next conservator, breathing down Julian’s neck, even though he (or she) probably hasn’t been conceived, yet. But Julian scrapes away until even he is satisfied, and then he rewards himself by making extra work for himself on the back of the painting.

 

And he loves to tell us about it. He knows perfectly well that NOBODY is going to be looking at the back of his canvas, and that nobody will see (or care) that Julian has not just lopped off the extra canvas on the back of the canvas and left it to hang there. No—a thousand times no!

 

Julian has done the same stupid thing that he has done all his life and will die doing. He has neatly folded the remaining canvas and secured them in a straight line to the back of the frame with sterile tacks that are slightly lighter than the tack used to secure the actual canvas on tacking edge. He also folds the corners so that no fraying would be even imaginable. He tacks them down—one tack through the folded corner, one tack immediately adjacent to it.

 

I watch him do this nonsense religiously (both of us), since I have just watched Nicole Wallace attempt to control her disgust at Trump’s smear of Rob Reiner. So I am in a state, which means that I am shouting…

 

…GET SOME SUPERGLUE!

 

…YANK IT!

 

…OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!

 

…at Julian, who can’t hear me because he’s in Chicago. Anselmo, the cat, however, is flying in terror up the spiral staircase to the loft.

 

Julian doesn’t know why he does this completely stupid thing, but he does. He even gets a little defensive about it—it’s his studio and he can do what he wants.

 

I got part of the answer by watching an English guy on The Repair Shop talk about the difference between true craftsmen and all the rest of us. The craftsman will do things that make no difference and that nobody will see. They regard it as a guilty pleasure, at best, and an annoying quirk at worst.

 

It’s not either of those things.

 

It’s actually an intrinsic part of being a craftsman. Julian does his thing on the back of a canvas as the pope might take communion: it’s not a sip of wine but a celebration of life itself. He might contain himself if I walked into his studio, paid for whatever work he had done on my canvas, and then ripped off that canvas on the back (hey, I’m the customer!)

 

But he wouldn’t sleep that night.

 

Every craftsman has something stupid like that—so the theory goes. 

 

I do, as you will see if you remove the endpaper from the inside of the front and back covers. The whole point of endpapers is to hide the untidy edges of the corner—so why am I busy trimming them off, forming that beautiful pattern, which is no more than three sides of a square, but do I care?

 

No, Julian is in his studio cleaning up the back of his canvas and I am in the loft squaring up the back of my covers. 

 

And Jack is in heaven, having told me to sand the undersides of the floor boards.

 

Jack, my father.

 

It was the first time I realized both that he (and all parents) are crazy and that I didn’t have to do anything about it.

 

We were building a house, sometime in the 1970’s, and Jack had gotten some cheap lumber from the US government, which had painted it progressively-more-awful shades of green.

 

My job with the green paint was the same as Julian’s, with the varnish.

 

I had to do a certain number of floorboards every day after high school, which meant that after three hours of sanding I was deaf and numb.  Fortunately, I had an electric sander, and not a dulled scalpel. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about Julian yet, nor did I understand why we needed to sand the side of the floorboard that was going to face the dark crawl space under the house. 

 

Who was going to see it?

 

“WE will know,” said my father, in much the same tone of voice that Moses had used, reading the ten commandments to whoever-it-was wherever-it-was.

 

A Charlton Heston voice and impressive, certainly. I dismissed it as more of the parental nonsense I was drowning in at the time.

 

I find it comforting, nowadays. I need to live in a world where Julian is finishing off tidying the canvas at the back of an oil painting and I am squaring up the corners of my book. 

 

I need to live in a world where guys are doing the right thing, even when nobody will notice…

 

…and not doing the wrong thing because it gets attention.           

 

 

Oh...and about God

Or the teapot, which is the best I can do.

 

You all remember good old Bertrand Russell, who went running around in the first half of the 20^th century smoking his pipe, being a Lord (OK—an earl / Earl, which is worse), writing the most important book on mathematics of the century, and generally being insufferably right.

 

 

Of course he was right—he was smarter than the rest of us.

 

Well, he also wrote a book entitled, Why I Am Not a Christian, which may make him not-so-insufferably-right in your eyes. It may make him only insufferable.

 

Right or wrong, he gave us a teapot—not much from an English earl, you might sniff, but there are a lot of us. And the rich don’t get rich (and certainly don’t stay rich) by giving that money (or the ancestral lands, or even a few sheep skins for the spines of my books) away.

 

So Russell left us only the damn teapot, but that said, I have learned to love it. I am, in fact, resigned to heaven…so much so, that I’ll proselytize.

 

Lord Russell (the earl, not the lord—which is confusing to simple types like me), much like little Marc, set himself to deal with the problem of religion. But did he fiddle and faddle, running from a theistic deity at 10 AM and settling into nihilism by noon? No, he plowed ahead, relentlessly using logic to settle the vexing issue of the vexing Master of the Universe.

 

Bless him, he was honest, as well as atheistic. 

 

Ooops—sorry, he wasn’t an atheist.

 

He can’t be. He has faithfully examined all the evidence for the existence of God, and concluded that that evidence is faulty. He can assert, with utter logic, that there is no reason to believe in god (capital omitted, since why bother?)

 

He can’t believe in God (damn, habits…) but he wasn’t an Atheist (justice!). 

 

He cannot prove that there is no God.

 

Enter….

 

 

Suppose that little Marc gets it into his head that a teapot is orbiting the moon. Granted, given the amount of junk we have thrust into outer space, there may extremely well be a teapot (as well as a lot of Tang wrappers) up there. But not the teapot above.

 

In the world, this sacred vessel contained only the libation of (English) life—tea. It served its purpose whilst on this mortal veil, but in the rarified atmosphere of the moon, its essential nature was revealed. The teapot contains the meaning of life, it pours both love AND justice generously from its spout. All time and all history dwell within its translucent, thin walls. The wisdom of the ancients, the joy of a toddler—it has all the emotions we can know, and some we must never know. Poets and law professors abide within, as do we all, in perfect amity, indeed love.

 

The Teapot (reverentially capitalized) is God.

 

I know.

 

I am little Marc, and can you prove I’m wrong?

 

HAH!

 

Well, you may be scoffing over there in the corner with Lord Russell, but neither one of you can prove that there is no 1851 Spode (think it was) teapot with sacred qualifications up there orbiting the moon. 

 

There is, of course, a little problem (which there wouldn’t be, if I could just live in that damn teapot).

 

I gotta prove the teapot—with all the wonders it contains—is really up there.

 

This is called “the burden of proof….”

 

Fortunately, I have the answer.

 

(I don’t, but I think I do, and that’s all that matters….)

 

As I dimly remember it, nobody can tell us exactly what was going on before the big bang (nah, Big Bang) blasted us all into this wretched state of affairs. True, the physicists may have been using their time in the last half century to do something other than daytime drinking…so maybe they have settled the ultimate question, but that’s no concern of mine.

 

I have my teapot.

 

Because whatever caused the Big Bang created both the physical world that we can see and that the good scientists (no irony here!) can beautifully explain but…

 

…the realm of the spirit as well.

 

Which dwells within the you-know-what.

 

That takes care of the little problem of my sister Jeanne, who professes no belief in God / Teapot, but did tell me that the love she has for Tyler, her son / my nephew, will never die.

 

The TP (and no, that’s not toilet paper….), of course.

 

She was basting the Thanksgiving turkey at the time, and so busy that I immediately believed her. 

 

It also takes care of the problem of little Marc, since really, did my addled brains get me sober? Or did it lead to that daytime drinking in the first place?

 

I love the teapot!

 

I address myself to the teapot, generally by speaking out loud to God (I drop the teapot nonsense when it gets serious). God speaks to me through a sol trunco, which is “a broken sun” in English, and also that architectural device through which light and air enter the room above a doorway. I showed you a teapot, so here is a sol trunco….

 

 Only now am I contemplating the phrase a couple of paragraphs back: an “architectural device through which light and air enter the room above a doorway.” A poet, which I am not, could run with the image of light and air which have been used as images for God / Teapots since we dreamed up the concept. Living in the sunlight of the spirit, I am a feather on the breath of God.

Sunlight…

 

Breath…

 

Illuminating the door—mystery, through which we may not pass.

 

And cannot help but do so.

 

Oh dear…

 

“What is the meaning of all this,” I demand of God / Teapot / Sol Trunco!

 

They’re all smarter than me, which means that they don’t speak. They know better than to try to argue with me. I’ll win that one.

 

(I won’t, of course, but I’ll sure think I will, since I am Lord Russell’s spiritual if not legal—dammit—heir).

 

They’ll turn on YouTube, and play me the tune that at last resigned me to heaven.

 

Tea, anyone?

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

  

Final Wrap

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 19^th 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  confessed, 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.