The Big Dying

It’s winter now. Fall came and went, but not without incident. The good news... I discovered the reason for my fascination with Fall colors, especially the leaves of Maine maples – Sugar, Silver, Striped, Red, and Mountain. Their greens-to-purple, pail/light yellows, reds, and oranges where the colors of my favorite, foods, drinks, and pastimes, like pink sunsets in Florida caused by African dust; a New York Strip Steak, bloody and rare; a glass of Spanish Rioja; a baked sweet potato dripping with butter and a dash of brown sugar….

On my walks, I collected fallen leaves, brought them home, and placed them on my window seat. They felt like leather -- bathed, tanned, brined, and softened -- and they smelled like oxygen. When I looked out my window, they continued falling, diving, and turning onto rooftops and the concrete below where they gathered like piles of confetti. Nature was in party-mode: spring, summer, and fall were given a bon voyage in fireworks of flaming leaves, littering streets, car windows, parks, and porches. They blew all over town, crossing highways, roaming driveways, and sitting on the front steps of offices buildings downtown. But their dying didn’t end there. Sometimes, I stepped on their crunchy, fading piles just for fun or walked on their softening, mossy textures after a rainfall.

When the tree branches were stripped of most of their leaves, landscape men blew them into organized piles to be raked for trash collection later on. But I wasn’t in town for their pickup. I left for New York City to visit my mother and ended up at my sister’s apartment on the night of the election. Trump won and Fall no longer seemed important.

That night, my sister, her husband, and I did not sleep. My sister’s husband was morose and withdrawn while watching election results on the television; he worried about immigrant students he taught at a high school in Brooklyn who were exempt from deportation under the DACA policy and who weren’t guaranteed that same protection under the new administration. My sister, who like me is Hispanic, went into a tirade about not tolerating any racist comments when she visited her husband’s family in Texas that coming Christmas. “Now, it’s every man for himself,” I managed to blurt out at some point that night. 

My shock gave way to sarcastic one-liners. When a friend called horrified about a tweet by the new President-Elect I told her I didn’t want to hear it. “Just call me 10 minutes before they nuke us so I can make my confessions,” I said. When another friend dismissed the new administration as a bad joke, I managed to say that at least we know where the devil and his helpers can be found.

The next day at the Brooklyn Commune, a small restaurant around the corner from my sister’s building, I stopped for coffee and a scone. They were discussing the election results on the radio. “Do you want us to slash our wrists with your plastic knives,” I told the waiter, who quickly changed the station. New Yorkers were in shock. On the streets, I overhead what others said: “It feels like a funeral”; “there should be a special place in hell for any woman who voted for Trump:” and “God bless us all.” In the city, despondency was mutual, regardless of race, color, creed, religion or social status.  (There is no greater feeling in the world than being in NYC in times of great victories or upheavals, a city where the large arms of a diverse humanity embrace all in its collective experience and sentiment.)

When I asked a Buddhist friend how to handle the election results, she recommended I step back and watch. This was karma. I thought about what Lincoln said at Gettysburg: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I had never considered myself much of patriot or a politico; that is until Trump won the presidency and I realized how much I loved my country. Suddenly, my safety and stability felt tenuous: I could no longer go about my day with no concerns for governance or an inherent sense of relief that those in power were doing their best to practice responsible, wise decision-making under the watchful eyes of other institutions that weighed and balanced such outcomes. I felt alone and vulnerable I found some relief in Joseph Campbell who said, "Suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain and life is suffering, and life is horror, but, my god, you are alive, and it's spectacular.

My shock gave way to an overwhelming awareness and gratitude for men like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King… A friend who voted for Trump said that at least his presidency would be entertaining. I had no reply.  We had taken a wrong turn and as William Holden’s character said in Sydney Lumet’s Network, “All of life was reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death were all the same… as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life [was] a corrupt comedy.” Already, I missed America.

I partly blamed the election of this new president on political correctness, an exhausting exercise of sharing the acceptable mode of expression about race, culture, ethnicity, and gender that hid the truth about individual feeling and experience, and replaced a genuine conversation with a language that required a Ph.d. in appropriateness. Well, Trump, with several months of dialogue so rude and inappropriate blew the lid of correctness, and, most were relieved.  And still most were shocked that under its lid so much hate had waited to be unleashed.   

The next morning, I returned to the Brooklyn Commune for coffee and a scone. Leonard Cohen had died the night before and the waiter was playing his music on the radio. I was the only customer in the restaurant, and I sat in a table looking at cars speed by the interstate across the street. It was around 7:00 a.m. and I was due to take a bus back to Maine at 9:00 a.m., but I was in no hurry to get to the bus depot at Times Square; instead, I , sipped my coffee, savored my scone, and along with the waiter, who stood behind the pastry counter also gazing out, I listened to Leonard Cohen’s“The Tower of Song,” “Hallelujah,” “If It Be Your Will”….  Twenty-five minutes later, other customers walked in. The waiter changed the station and started serving them.

After several tumultuous and horrible days, I had shared a moment with a New York City stranger, and it felt like grace. “Thank you,” I said to the waiter before I left. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t ask you if you wanted me change the station” (this was the same server I requested he change the election result coverage the day before), he said with a sweet smile while the bangs of his Beatles' haircut strayed into his brown eyes. “It was perfect,” I said. “Only Cohen makes sense now," I continued, before walking out of the restaurant into a changed world.