Say America

The cataclysmic changes are hard to survive. It is not just the skyscrapers and the heartbreaking tv, but rather the mental changes that affect me the most. My America just up and became something else, a new thing I can hardly recognize. Most it is the people I find hard to communicate with. I speak and think a different language, have a being in me they don't.

The matter may be phrased best with alternating views of the same place. I show old views of our place America and news ones right after. Ostensibly the same place. The country that is mine to live in and write in. I just have to adjust or perish with not a glance. The sense I have is that I am not important in any sense so I have the freedom to do anything I wish. I think that is a good thing, so I can choose and pick.

The country has its vision people, the ones who tell us where we are and where we are going. I look to them to guide me and they never fail me. (Here get the list of the fund tape from Eric.) The ones who have special vision can instruct us in the way the future may unfold.

This future has the following capacities if we wish it to. We can create families once more instead of loading the responsibilities on a single person, usually the mother. The village is sure to come to us in a new and powerful form. Then we will learn how to create more artists, historians, ceramic makers. Vid makers and farmers too. There is the possibility to make our people be something other than paper pushers in hermetically sealed buildings, looking at the clock for relief. I mean to say we are about to set loose an army of artists of all ages. I cannot accept that those of forty and more years are less valuable than the young we spend so much time controlling and molding with bells and strictures in the public schools.

We are to make a grand connection too, to the deity and start relying less on organized religions for meaning, turning to a more diffuse concept of the deities that may govern us. I have no quarrel with the big four or big three religions here in this country. They seem to me to do more good than harm. It is just that I have another view. That we are governed by a god or gods that lives or live outside and reside in the trees and the waters. For the sake of simplicity I can well explain it by saying the tao reigns. It is a mysterious little religion that has the three precepts which underly the big religions. Gentleness first. This is the tough one for me. It is required to be gentle which for me is hard as trying to walk by something I want to eat that has sugar in it. I feel angry, mad or vindictive so much, but God knows I try to be gentle. The other two things you are supposed ta be are frugal and one who avoids precedence over others. I have never been competitive or foolish with money. I don't want or need much. Never have and always just wanna have fun, by myself in my head or with farmers, Bob Briggs or Bill Phipps up at Shady Oaks farm or I wanna go see the fall flowers at the Natick Community organic farm where I went last week to get eggs I gave to Kristin Donahoo who works with my daughter in a fancy office.

I mean I just wanna have fun. That is all and the base religion I follow says ok. Just don't hurt anybody in the doing of life. Try to love a lot and take Wednesday off to visit someone who might want to see you. Write a letter the old way and send it via the bird, with a stamp. Put it in a mail box and wish it on its magic way to Jo in West Virginia, David in Hawaii or Elizabeth in Winchester, Massachusetts. Mr. Fryer, my Dover friend, used to find some meaning in trees he raised, water he brought in for the residents of the town. He found a lot of his religion outside. The idea that we think god rather than always talk about this or that thing that god wants of us or that we go to church on Saturday or Sunday and expect to find Him or Her or it, there.

It is such a golden, glorious place, this big ol' nation. With its schoolbuses, so yellow and its seagulls. With the blue heron that lives at the base of my street and governs the pond that is almost empty of water. It has been so dry. It is a place where young people have so much going for them they need but dream of being and going anyplace they want in their lives and it can come true. To have good teeth and a few pairs of shoes. The things we have access to, are so inexpensive really. The lovely fabrics, the clothes, the ceramic figures at Bob's. The computer-driven cars that break down less than they used to. The roads that are smooth and we know how to repair and patch them more efficiently than we used to. The doctors who often care. More of them than we deserve probably.

It is a magic place if we see it thus. The thing is to walk the universe we inhabit like the bottle lady and her shopping cart up in Revere where I hang out. With firm step and resolve every day of our lives. Imagine there is hope and act on that possibility. Learn every day if possible some new thing that may be of help to oneself and to others. Look up and not down. That is how I try to be, although I fail a lot and despair on occasion.

Say America from shining sea. Celebrate the artists we have and that we import from abroad and above. See the universe expanded by the computer and marvel. I think how it can make my village Dover a better place for us all. I wonder how my family expanded by the grandchildren will do without me. Damm well, I am sure in this fairyland.

I look for you, America in the window of the donut shop that cannot compete with the juggernaut, Dunkin Donuts. I seek for an old building that is weary and peeling its paint. Seeking a savior. I wonder, America what goes on behind the big fronts of the houses in the suburban town. I wonder why the people in Revere put statues of all kinds in front of their houses, marvel at the way they decorate the walk, festoon the trees with baubles, plant the arbor with the trellise to approximate Italy, how the arrange their yards in distinctive fashion to mirror their soul. All in this weird place, Revere, by the sea.

Not that anything goes with anything else here in America. It is a jumble, like the supermarket with all sort of thing under the same roof. Yet we accept the anarchy of things. We watch all five hundred channels and want more. Eat a vast variety of cuisine and think about how fat we are. The American must dream in technicolor about a wide range of topics if it is true that our dream resembles reality. We never get away from the America we see. We dream it every darn night and then get up and do it all again as if it is the most natural thing to live in this paradise of sensation from tv to the supermarket to the signs on the buildings to the uniforms people wear, on to the flea markets, designer drugs, alcohol and other soporifics. The cars we drive and often wear are varied. The human may sit over an hour as he goes to work as she wanders out the door to make a living and the human manipulates the huge beast, has it play music to him or her and can heat or cool the body at will by switching on or off a switch. The thing is a miracle and the greatest thing is the person takes it as a regular thing. Deems it normal. Does not get excited at all. It is possible to write to someone and actually have them receive a letter. Forget the internet or the cdrom or fax. The darn letter is a miracle, how it flies to Denver or in my case how it gets over to David in Hawaii with my greeting. I just can't figure it as it must be a miracle that is happening.

I choose to be old-fashioned and stand in the past. I like what is so slow and easy best. I have to say I don't really need the new. It needs me. I am about to experience the fax. I never dealt with one before but in my office, the new place I work, they have them and I will somehow, maybe next week, gain the confidence, to say to Lynda Rubin, my new friend, whose grandfather was Jack Stern, "Linda will you show me how a fax works." All I now know is it is a gray box, that looks like a phone. The one on top of the file cabinet in the other Linda's office where I work, periodically righteously rings a bell and then like a tongue coming out, deposits a lithe piece of paper in a red tray. I go on filing in front of this miracle thing and think how amazing that someone somewhere is sending some kind of communication to Linda. A poem? I doubt it as Linda does payroll which is so much more crucial to us all than a Poem, with a capital p.

It's just kinda fun to contemplate the new thing as my heart fled one day to the eyes of the sheep and the shape of the goat I saw at the Natick Community organic farm. I can see the eyes all the time and the darn thing just looks at me and says to me ain't it grand to have enough to eat and live in such a paradise as the Natick farm with Lynda , the head farmer and other people who care for the chickens, and the rest of the residents. My heart fled to the sheep and the goat and the trees changing colors but a piece remains to contemplate the humans who toil with the fax on the side of the great highway, the beast we can call a number, 128. Such a lyrical thing to work aside this vast engine, the highway, not the low way but the highway that deposits the people in their working spot from Fitchburg, Pepperill, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Mansfield and on.