After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
---Wislawa Symborska
When I was a junior in high school, as a future editor of my school newspaper, I received a scholarship to a month-long journalism course at Catholic University in Washington along with the two other editors. We lived near CU in a spartan boardinghouse, in an area of DC called Brookland. The July course was intense and challenging, an experience unto itself, but we wanted to see the city. In every spare moment we boarded the downtown bus and took in everything we could—tramping around in the intense heat to the Capitol, all the museums, the White House, Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool, Georgetown---just glorying in striding amidst the stately government buildings around the Mall. We watched fireworks at the Washington Monument on July 4rth, spreading our borrowed blankets out on the lawn with hundreds of other joyful revelers. We even tried to fry the proverbial egg on a hot sidewalk one particularly sweltering day. Each moment was crystalline and special to those three young Connecticut girls.
I fell in love with Washington that summer.
When it came time to pick a college, my choices were narrowed to the women’s Catholic schools my parents and the nuns at my high school approved. I got into all four of them, but Trinity College in DC was my first pick. I would get to spend four years in that amazing city!
What made those years even more special, in addition to meeting my future and present husband, a Georgetown student a year ahead of me, was that they were bracketed by the inauguration and funeral of John F. Kennedy. A period often referred to as “Camelot,” was our Camelot too. My classmates have been exchanging email memories with each other of that time, prompted by Biden’s inauguration. Many of us watched the spectacle on that icy cold January day—I remember stuffing newspaper into my useless leather boots—it was thrilling, magical, to be a part of such huge history in the making. Some were lucky enough to get tickets to one of the inaugural balls—my roommate got one as a reward for writing postcards for an Iowa senator and dressed up in a blue tulle and lace gown with long kid gloves. I was so jealous!
And then, senior year, November 22, 1963—he was dead. I can remember right where I was sitting, in the student lounge we called “the smoker,” when someone shouted out the news. I and my friends waited for hours in the long lines to get into the Capitol Rotunda, that cathedral of democracy, to pay our respects. People had come from all over the country and we talked, shared snacks, and mourned together as we waited in the cold, one big family united by common grief over our beloved president’s death. The next day we lined Pennsylvania Avenue and watched the riderless horse, John John’s salute, Jackie in her dark veil clutching Bobby’s arm as they walked behind the hearse. We were again surrounded with crowds from all over the country, again shocked by someone’s transistor radio announcing that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, had been shot by Jack Ruby. We wept and hugged each other, connected with what felt like the entire world joined together by the worst tragedy our young lives could have imagined.
Washington was my city, our city. To this day it is my favorite city in the world. I’ve visited often, marched many times, returned to my college for an award in social outreach as well as class reunions, and thrilled to its new mission of educating young women of color who otherwise would not have had a chance at such an excellent education. I’ve been filled with pride at our classmate Nancy Pelosi’s brilliant reign as Speaker of the House, especially at her stunning ability to handle Trump’s dangerous lunacy with such grace and elegance. I’ve become a total political junkie, thanks to that city and in it, my birth as a woman, compelled by everything that happens there, sickened beyond belief at what it has become in the last four years.
So, January 6 was exceptionally anguishing for me. Along with the world, I watched disbelieving at what happened at the Capitol, its desecration unfolding in a shocking slow- motion horror show. Legions of Trump flags and banners, rioters in army gear, men in furs and feathers, shattered glass, gunshots, the Confederate flag waved inside the Rotunda, a hangman’s noose—a hangman’s noose? How could that have been?
Shouts of “Hang Mike Pence! Where’s Nancy? Invade the Capitol today!”
In Washington, DC? In my city? That sacred space?
I’m still taking it in—seeing Washington turned into an armed camp with tall fences and curls of barbed wire, soldiers instead of happy celebrating Americans lining the streets for Biden’s inauguration, Pennsylvania Avenue empty, senators and congressmen on our TV screens speaking of the fear they felt that day, how close they came to being killed.
Surreal. The word everyone’s been using.
And then, another inauguration, but with masks on all attendees, chairs spaced far from each other, no ceremonial, peaceful transfer of power but a petulant whiny child of a now ex-president warning us all that he’d be back, “in some form.”
After every war/someone has to straighten up.
The job is huge and possibly impossible, although I hate for those words to come off my computer keys. Competent, experienced men and women of all races and ages are filling out hollowed agencies left by the last administration, dogs are returning to the White House, authenticity and truth are back in the Brady Press Room, a pandemic plan is in place though available vaccines are not.
And a brilliant young African American woman wants to know where we can find light in this never-ending shade, tells us that quiet isn’t always peace, but that somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
After every war/someone has to straighten up.
Joe and Kamala, we’re right behind you, brooms, mops, shovels and cleaning cloths in hand.
Let’s do this.
*******
Thank you so much, everyone, for reading these posts. I so appreciate your responses. And please join me on February 11 at 7 for another library talk, this time at Scoville Library, in my hometown of Salisbury, CT. I hope to have some of “the girls” with us to add to the discussion. I’d so love to see you!
Register here:
SCOVILLE LIBRARY TALK REGISTER HERE