Obama on Television in Miami

Obama is on television in Miami and I am smiling. Ear to fucking ear.

The crowd are in their cars and honking in approval.

Reminds me of 2020 graduation. Parking lot of Fort Tuthill. The podium and the stage and those mountains on the horizon and the headlights and the masks . . . Kids I’d known since they were twelve who I couldn’t hug goodbye . . .

If I fanned my truly bad memories out on a table, this would not be among them.

But I don’t want to go back there, either. Can’t fathom a step of this year I’d press my foot into again.

Last good thing of 2020, in the front office with Jed, Tulasi, Mike. Might have been not yet Christmas.

It wasn’t.

This was the last good thing of the last truly good year you had (and if I’m being perfectly honest, 2019 was okayish at best): you were sitting in the front office. Someone was burning nag champa. Holiday break. We were talking shit. Talking about Needles, California.

After that, your life stepped off a fucking cliff.

You miss airports. You remember the last time you left Chicago to move to Flagstaff. You ate a Chicago dog, standing up in the terminal, poppy seeds, mustard and thought about how the next time you’d eat a Chicago dog you’d be married. So fucking weird. That was never part of the plan. Like, at all. But you decided after the first cancer bout that risks were worth it, that all the leftover risk was the baggage you were going to take to your grave.

What was the worst that was going to happen? You get a divorce. Like no one has ever done that?

This is still your primary question on the matter of risk. “What’s the worst that’s going to happen?”

And like if the worst is I have a massive stroke that renders me only able to blink as a form of communication, or like in excruciating, unrelenting, pain until “lights out” then I don’t take the risk.

If the risk is my knee hurts or I’ll have to lose some small part of my body like a nipple (check) or a toe or have a small, itchy rash, I’ll likely take the risk.

There is a lot I can take. A lot. I am a woman. A gender ambivalent lesbian. I was once a girl child. I have been in the company of good men and bad men.

Mostly, thankfully, good ones.

And mostly, thankfully, good women, too. Beautiful, all, but most importantly good.

I like how this election is forcing us to talk about character again. We’re still a little too squishy to say what we mean — that there is good character and bad character — but we’re poking at it, and that is encouraging.

Everyone has character. Even Trump.

Another way of looking at the matter of character?

Every cracker has flavor (pun intended, if you want it). Even those weird water crackers my grandparents always had for some reason even though no one seemed to like them. (I think they still sell those. Why?)

But The Bible and Dr. King and Obama don’t talk about character simply because it exists. (No. I’m not particularly religious, but if I had to pick one: Buddhism.)

Anyway all these holy texts and great artists and intellects and change makers bring up character because what matters about a character, what’s interesting and meaningful about character is not simply that it exists, but the foundation on which it has developed.

What matters about character is whether or not the scaffolding can BOTH hold AND fucking sway depending on the weather.

Last week my students and I were talking about missing each other.

We missed the classroom. Missed the “neighborhood” of our school. Some of us (me included) cried a little. It hurts, and it’s totally good and right and decent and natural to cry buckets about shit that hurts like that.

We’re not talking about worksheets or pencil sharpeners or desks (though I must admit I miss my whiteboard with an almost obscene ferocity). We just miss being in proximity to our characters which, when you get right down to it is the soul, right? And that’s real. That’s actual. Even a bit material.

Breaking: Woman With Stage Four Cancer Writes About Soul.

How novel, I know.

But I’m not talking about fucking ghosts and necromancy and shit that slurks (yes, I intended that spelling) in fog. I’m talking about the cosmic mud that makes us all. That character. That soul.

Here’s the hard truth about our mud: some of us have mud that’s been all fucked up by years of trauma and weird capitalist shit and colonialism and cancers that are way more fucking terrifying and pernicious than a nodule on the lung. Dead fucking serious.

But here’s the good truth: most of us have Midwestern mud. Good fucking mud. The kind where you can thoughtlessly drop a seed and grow a crop of heirloom tomatoes. The kind of mud where the worms are actually kind of cute and you’re sometimes sure they’re smiling at you in the dirt. The kind of mud that smells like the breath of the gods and looks like primordial refuse. Most of us have Midwestern Mud.

I’m taking a risk by believing this is true, but I’m feeling in the mood to gamble.

I fucking loved when Obama spoke today and asked the crowd “How many of you all have secret Chinese bank accounts?”

I fucking laughed out loud. Literal lol.

Felt like a very Chicago observation to me.

Something someone from Chicago would totally notice.

Like right away.

Somebody who’s grown up on mustard and poppy seeds and vinegar potato salad and Polish grocery stores and Jewish Delis and streetcart elotes from the guy outside the corner store and “We’re having a goddamn beach picnic. I don’t care that it’s fifty with a windchill of seven. I don’t have many days off” would totally notice that secret Chinese bank account. Instantly.

I don’t know. The lady said it’s somewhere over in Des Plaines where the old Chevron used to be, where they used to have all those, yeah that liquor store that burned — secret Chinese bank account?! What the fuck kind of shady ass person has a secret Chinese bank account?

Like, I say this as a girl who grew up in the suburbs but loves Chicago so much she says she grew up there because fuck the suburbs. I was the first of my family to grow up in suburbs. Mom grew up in the city. Dad grew up poor in rural Indiana. (I did live in Chicago for a long time as a young adult. City proper. Right on the blocks where my poor, exhausted, illiterate German Catholic family built “an American life” in the 1870s.) So I say this as someone who loves Chicago, but knows, too, its crooked heart and if someone from Chicago is calling something you’re doing “shady” — it’s shady. Chicagoans are generally forgiving people. We “overlook” a lot, if you know what I’m saying . . .

I looked at pictures of nachos on the internet today.

I cannot eat nachos right now. This kind of changes the narrative, I suppose. The dying lady is supposed to seize the day. You see? I’m supposed to spin in the air and kick up the leaves because I’m feeling better, but no. I’m looking at pictures of nachos on the internet.

I’m looking at digital squares of chips I cannot have.

I’m such a fucking American.

Vote.