Garrison Keillor. (photo: The Birchmere)
An ordinary late October day and the world is dense with stately trees in variations of reds and gold and orange that Crayola never contemplated — no need to shop around for magic mushrooms or give up your life as a good citizen for something involving incense and flutes — just walk down the street ignoring the Halloween skeletons and let your heart be lifted. I’m descended from stoics, our emotional range runs from A to D, once or twice we’ve hit L, never W for wonderment but here I am in New York where something in the water encourages self-expression and I see a man on the subway platform do some little dance moves he’d maybe seen in the theater the night before. He’s not a dancer but he doesn’t let that stop him.
A short woman approaches and speaks something to me and I see she’s holding a cardboard tray of candies and a little boy clutches her pant leg and I remember reading about the Ecuadoran refugees who’ve come to the city, the women earning money just this way, and I reach into my pocket and pull out a twenty, which is a lot to pay for a small bag of M&Ms but how do you put a value on the look in the boy’s eyes. He is three or four and very keen. A train is coming into the station. This must be all strange to him but he isn’t frightened thanks to his anchor. He studies me, then the crowd emerging from the open doors, a man with a handsome dog on a leash, a guitarist playing into a little amp on the platform, and I board the train. But those dark eyes stay with me.
The classic story: the elders make a desperate choice to spare their children the grief of history and put language and life story behind and become as children themselves in order to start anew. So you learn as much English as you need — “Please,” the woman said, and then “Thank you,” and soon the little boy’s English will race on ahead of hers, but you will always address your Creator in the old tongue, and so, the next Sunday, leaving my Episcopalians I walk through clouds of happy Spanish emerging from Our Lady down the street, women clustered around the priests, children orbiting around them, men smoking.
And then there’s me, a reverse refugee, returning to the Anglicans my evangelical forebears escaped from. They were serious scholars of doctrine, the ultraorthodox of Protestantism, disputatious, separatist, and in the end rather arid, choosing the deserts of correctness to the green pastures of love and mercy, and when I go to church I go to commune with my aunts. The uncles were the stoics, the aunts were generous, even lavish with affection, just as this October day is.
Some old liberal pals have thought about maybe finding a new country if the unthinkable happens next year but that’s silly. The MAGAticians have elected a Speaker, second in line to the Presidency, who upholds this country as a theocracy and believes Halloween is evil and who imagines the ghosts of children destroyed by Roe v. Wade, and since the stolen election has given us an outlaw government, I imagine he’d favor a constitutional convention that could give us the President for Life that so many people crave. This may sell in Shreveport but it’s heavy baggage to be trucking around to the talk shows.
A party that holds such reverence for the semiautomatic rifle that its reps are tongue-tied in the face of mass murder in Maine is lacking a heart, not to mention brain matter. All Republicans could do was say they were praying for the victims. The prayers of politicians tend to be pro forma. Prayer is not the best means of preserving peace. The FBI does not rely on prayer in searching for a lunatic SOB who grew up in a family of gun-lovers and decided to confront his demons in a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston.
If you think the Second Amendment guarantees terrorists a right to carry assault weapons, ballistic missiles, nuclear weaponry, then you need to find another country to live in and leave the rest of us to enjoy the woods of October. I pray that Speaker Johnson finds his mind; America is not a Southern Baptist country. It’s where Mike and I can be next-door neighbors, be amiable over the fence, watch over each other’s property, be a help when needed, he can hand out gospel tracts on Halloween, I can be a ghost, but if he shows me his collection of assault rifles, I’m moving to a better neighborhood.
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