The spangled web we weave.

This country breaks our hearts. What now?

1.

Many people I know struggled this past weekend to feel celebratory about the nation in which they’ve lived their whole lives. Others look gimlet-eyed at those of us who took so long to catch on.

The forces of oligarchy, kleptocracy, theocracy and white male supremacy have been at work forever here, and are a part of our founding. And yet so are the earnest attempts to defy and transcend those forces. Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s succinct remembrance of the Freedom Summer of 1964—the year before I was born—is a reminder that people of goodwill have made enormous if imperfect political strides in the right direction before.

Along with the “greed is good” era, Reagan’s presidency ushered in complacency and myopia—or maybe it was just sheer exhaustion. I’ve heard liberal Boomers and former activists of that era who, when faced with evidence of ongoing racism long after the civil rights era, say things like Didn’t we solve all that? or No one cares anymore! and throw up their hands.

Another case in point: if you’ve been following the abortion issue with even one eye open for the past several decades, you’ve known that in many parts of the country, and especially for the poorest and least powerful women, this essential part of healthcare and fundamental human right has been unavailable a long time already.

It’s not that last week’s fall of Roe v. Wade isn’t a horrific new development pushed forward by the Catholic ideologues now packing the Supreme Court—but it should not be surprising to anyone. Nor should anyone be surprised now by talk of the end of legal contraception, gay marriage, environmental protection, and all the other things hopeful progressives and business-friendly centrists have assumed could be taken for granted.

Nothing ever should be taken for granted. The eye can never be taken off the ball. It’s a terrible time to relax, really, but I hope you took one day off to enjoy your BBQ and beers. We will need sustenance for whatever’s to come.

2.

I had just enrolled as an adult student in an undergrad music program when those well-funded madmen took down the World Trade Center. I don’t remember what prompted me to turn on the television at home that morning; maybe Kevin, my then-husband, called me or I heard something on the radio. At first, it seemed like a horrific accident. Then the second plane hit the second tower and they both fell down one after the other. I gasped and shouted at the television.

The brain could not process what the eyes were watching. The bottom had dropped out of life itself. In a daze, I got in my car and drove to make my 11 o’clock music history class, which now seems utterly absurd. And yet there I was on the second floor of the arts building, and someone had pulled a television set on a high rolling cart out into the hallway. Everyone was crowded around it, crying and watching and waiting. One young man, an Army vet a bit older than most of the students, stood in the doorway of our classroom and caught my eye, leaning over toward me in a manly, solicitous manner. I said I have in-laws, my husband’s uncles, and one of them’s a firefighter who might be there right now. I have friends who work on Wall Street or nearby.

What I didn’t say out loud was That’s my city, my city, MY LOVE.

I’d been to the 107th floor of the North tower in Windows on the World for a classmate’s sweet sixteen party in 1981. I still remembered the uncanniness and thrill of standing at the clear glass walls, looking out as if from Olympus. In a few days I’d learn I’d lost no one close to me, but plenty of people I knew lost plenty of people they knew. Plenty saw things no one should ever see, plenty walked home to the Upper West Side or across the Brooklyn bridge while the skies billowed black metal dust and bone. 

Here in my new hometown, I was scared to go to the local blood banks. It would never have crossed my mind to hesitate in New York or New Jersey but in Maryland I seriously feared going to the Red Cross and encountering some young ignorant white bigot who’d decide I was an Arabic Muslim. I could see this make-believe boogeyman as clear as a hallucination. He wore a red bandana tied backward on his head and his thick arms are green-black with tattoos. He screamed vengeance in my face. He didn’t exist, maybe he was nothing more than the emblem of my own prejudices at the time—the only people in Baltimore who’d ever said anything outwardly racist to me were a couple of frail, elderly white ladies in innocuous pastel blouses and jewel-toned polyester pants—but he was real enough to keep me locked up inside my house on September 12 and several days after.

That Saturday, 9/15, Kevin and I went to D.C. for an adoption agency presentation. I blubbered in the car the whole way. What’s the point? Kev was his usual self, sympathetic and rational, gently talking me past despair. Honey, I know it’s hard to believe at this moment, but life will go on.

At the presentation, everybody was mournful and solemn: the social workers in charge and the several parents who’d shared their experiences. Yet when these parents spoke about their children—many of them playing on the floor at their feet—the contentment was palpable. There was a little girl in pigtails silently giving us strangers the big eye, and a little boy ignoring us while thumping plastic mallets against a small metal xylophone. Effortlessly enchanting beings, designed by nature to be lovable, for their own survival and for ours.

3.

I was a full-grown adult in music school because I needed to fill up an emotional black pit of doom, a personal darkness I’d carried with me since childhood among verbal abusers and religious bullies. My own superfund site, my brownfield reclaimed: cramming it full, topping it off, tamping it down, covering it over with melodies, rhythms, chord progressions, and expressive concepts. Stepping away from the black slippery edge of recent depression and loading it up with CDs, piano lessons, concert tickets, scale practice, big band rehearsals, and vocal warm-ups.

Thus would I make a whole from a hole. At the time I was still making a living as a freelance writer but I needed the music to help me save my own life. I lived and breathed the stuff. I went to bed at night dreaming of the chord changes to “Stella By Starlight” and hearing new melodies over the top, melodies I could sing to myself but not yet play instantly on the keyboard. This was the holy grail of jazz musicianship: to be able to play anything you could imagine the moment you imagined it, just by ear and memory. I was in hot pursuit of that prize. 

On a whim one day, I decided to work out the melody and chords of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It had been six years since I’d started studying classical piano again for the first time since college, two years since I began playing with the Howard Community College student jazz band, two semesters into my time at Towson. I sat at the piano and picked a key at random—Bb—and slowly forged my way through the melody, harmony, and bass line all at the same time, eyes closed, listening to my memory, feeling my way from one phrase to the next. It was hesitant and jerky, but my musical instincts were becoming stronger. 

Kevin was upstairs working on installing a pocket door for our hallway bathroom. (This had become a massively annoying effort, involving the demolition of a wall full of 100-year-old plaster and lathe, which crumbled and cascaded in huge, dusty piles onto the floor.) One moment I could hear him hammering, then next, he was bounding down the stairs with a bemused look on his face.

What’s happening? Are you regressing?

I gazed up at him, also somewhat baffled. What do you mean?

I mean, you’re playing like some child who doesn’t know how to play.

Oh, I said. See, I’m not playing from written music. I’m working this out by ear.

WHAT?! A surprised laugh crackled out of his mouth. You can DO that?!

I stared into his eyes. For a nanosecond I jumped out of my own mind and into his; instantly I could see how strange all this was to him, my consuming dedication, my compulsion to improve and improve, my belief that it would all come to something worthwhile. He simply didn’t know how capable I was. The person I was closest to in the world did not understand how far I’d come in such a short time, or how much farther I might go. But I wasn’t angry at him. How could I be? He had no more specific grasp of my musical abilities than I had of his high-end math skills.

In those days I often pondered what my own particular case meant about the world at large: so many human beings, so much suffering and deprivation. If I, with all my privilege and grand education, had not known my own capacities until well past childhood, imagine how much harder it was for those growing up without any such advantages. Imagine how very much unrecognized talent there was, out there in rural backwaters and juvenile prisons, tamped down hard under the flinty shell of a teenage neighborhood drug envoy or a too-young mother of three. To contemplate this perspective for a moment was to neutralize my self-absorption and instead find gratitude. I was fucking lucky.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

4.

A call came in late March about a newborn boy. We met the birth mother at the agency’s offices; we all talked and cried together. She said to us I didn’t want to come here today but I’m glad I did. I think you two will make great parents. A few weeks later we met the boy himself, the effortlessly lovable tiny thing, still in the care of foster parents until some legal details were finalized. We rushed home to buy an infant car seat, a box of diapers, and whatever else we could scramble to get. Then one day in April after a very long and traffic-filled rush-hour drive home from the agency HQ in northern Virginia—at one point we had to pull over in a church parking lot to change his diaper on the back of my Saturn station wagon—our child was home with us.  

Months earlier Kevin and I had come to an easy decision, another moment blessedly free of conflict. We’d looked at international adoptions, including the possibility of finding a child in India—an idea my mother was gaga over—but something wasn’t sitting right. We had no natural connection to any other country’s culture. We spoke no foreign languages. And even India, and my tenuous connection there? Truth be told, I had heard something about that country’s adoption system that made me angry. They apparently strongly favored desis, people of South Asian descent, even those who were several generations removed, who’d never once stepped foot on Indian soil. Despite the myopic and often violent Hindu nationalism that had taken over the country’s corridors of power, religion didn’t even seem to matter. It was pure genetic/ethnic favoritism. Or at least this was what we were hearing. Adoptive parent hopefuls of other backgrounds would have their files shuffled to the bottom of the pile while a person like me, who was about as culturally Indian as Björk, would get promoted to the top. 

Kev, I think I just want to adopt a healthy American-born baby, of whatever ethnic or racial background. He nodded without hesitation.

Like our flawed nation itself, with its imperfect attempt to live by rule of law rather than force of ethnic pride, our family would be an act of imagination. We would be one tribe because we said so. And soon after that, it’s exactly what came true. We were a family of three Americans, with three different identifiers to put before the putative hyphen, Indian Irish African. 

We knew there would be challenges, there’d be many things we’d have to learn and unlearn along the way. Things that our child would experience that we’d never fully understand no matter how much we tried. Yet for some reason we were optimistic. We believed we could raise a person who, whatever private identity issues or worldly injustices might disturb the flow of his days, would eventually become comfortable inside his own skin—the most any one of us can hope for, really.

We were being a bit naive. This was all before Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Philando Castle; before the flood of video evidence of atrocities that had been going on forever—shaming us for knowing next to nothing, for failing to listen to the people who knew all along.

Would I make the same choice today in 2022, after the Trump presidency and radical coup attempt have brought all the racist crazies out of the woodwork? Or would I be scared off the project of trying to raise a black son in this time and place? More to the point, would I agree to be anybody’s parent at all, to cement myself to humankind’s murky future via hopes and dreams for my child?

We were briefly the country of Freedom Summer 1964, and yet we’ve never stopped being the rapacious, thieving, born-in-terror country we were at the founding. We are now also the country that 9/11 made manifest. The white boogeyman of my cowardly imagination that day—bigoted, angry, vengeful, tribal, violent—has incarnated himself, multiplied by the millions, and grasped the reins of power. Nazis. Proud, self-identified Nazis. On the Hill, senators present witness after witness showing just how close we came to a violent overthrow of our government on January 6, 2021, by not just a born demagogue and his goons but also the greedy, power-mongering elite who’ve been waiting for this moment since at least 1964.

A few years ago, the infinite treadmill called social media was focused on the problem of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That troublesome, mostly unknown third stanza, with its reference to slavery—was Maryland native Francis Scott Key specifically maligning the freed slaves now fighting on the British side in 1812? Or did he mean it as a general epithet hurled against our wartime enemies, like calling them stooges or idiots? Self-styled experts on the Internet have come to no definitive conclusion. It gives me vertigo trying to figure out who to believe about what.

5.

KEVIN! I shouted. 

It was early May 2003. I was sitting on the couch with the baby in my lap. I had given my entire days and nights over to an exhausted, all-engulfing, almost hallucinogenic bliss. Despite my oppositional-defiant womb and massive doubts, it turned out I was, in fact, built for the job of motherhood. A few weeks later, I would do my jury for Reynaldo Reyes and two other piano faculty: Some Brahms, some Bach, and a beautifully strange, angular, almost-jazzy-sounding twentieth-century Toccata by Burrell Phillips. I would practice while the baby was napping on the floor just under the edge of my piano keyboard at home—newborns are accustomed to about 90 decibels of background noise in the womb, louder than even my most aggressive solo piano pieces. Then one day I would bring him with me in the car seat carrier and have a bassist friend take care of him in the green room just off the stage as I played through my repertoire.

KEVIN! I shouted. 

It came out sounding more urgent than I intended. He stopped halfway up the stairs and turned around to see the baby and me on the couch below. I locked eyes with my husband. Tears pooled in my bottom eyelids. He sighed, smiled, and shook his head. Mildly gobsmacked. For the moment my husband and I were as one again: bewildered, incredulous, and madly in love—not just with ourselves, but with the idea of a family, the idea of an American family, the idea of a future. Babies have a terrible tendency to turn us all into wild-eyed optimists.

KEVIN! I shouted, as if he didn’t already know. THIS IS OUR SON!

It’s nearly twenty years later. Love has changed. The marriage has ended (although a well-meaning familial friendship remains). The baby is grown. The wild-eyed optimism of new parenthood has given way to fraught realism. We were US citizens who chose to adopt a US citizen and be a US family. This is and was our identity. But these days I would like to tell this kleptocratic, theocratic, racist, patriarchal country of my birth to fuck all the way off. Instead of singing songs of national glory, I would like to shout anti-anthems.

And yet, my grown child has cemented me to the increasingly murky future of this nation and of humankind. I can’t tell the world to fuck all the way off. In this not very celebratory American era, I have to figure out what to do next besides watching congressional hearings, seething at the continued bad news emerging from the highest court in the land, and nursing my fear and rage. (Thanks for keeping us informed, Thom Hartmann.)

I’m not sure exactly what, yet. Do you? I am lucky. I am privileged. I was born to recent immigrants in 1965 when it seemed like being an American resident, an American citizen, was on balance a good thing. I’ve been complacent and myopic, maybe, but mostly just distracted. I took my eye off the ball. With wild-eyed optimism and in the vessel of a once-loving marriage, I raised a baby, a black son in this racist country, to the age of majority. Yesterday, I drank some beer and ate some BBQ with friends and neighbors. Today is Tuesday, July 5, and I have some thinking and planning to do while there’s still time.

All suggestions are welcome. Seriously. Tell me what we should be doing now.

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