bleak morning

You don’t remember those, oh let’s call them thingamabobs between the sidewalk and the front lawn? They weren’t everywhere. Our house didn’t have one of them. We did have a sticker bush right by the sidewalk, and the threat among the neighborhood kids was not, I’ll kick your ass, but I’ll push you into the sticker bush. But further on south, towards Tonti, they had them. I don’t know where else they were, or if, for some reason, like those rare newts that live only in some isolated valley and therefore the golf course cannot be built, the only place in the whole world they existed was on the east side of Homan Avenue between 56th and 57th street. How do you do internet research on ‘thingamabob’?

But you know, that was our world when we were tots, the sidewalk. The grownups walked along it, and they even watered the lawns and tended to the gardens, but they never explored it the way we did, never knew every inch of the land, didn’t notice the way the leaves dappled the sidewalks in shifting shadows all summer long, or the way the snow, piled up on the parkways and front part of the front yards, was a rough mountainous terrain complete with peaks and river valleys.

Well I wax poetic and nostalgic because I do not want to face the world this morning. Last night I had hurried through my supper and poured myself a beer in eager anticipation of watching the returns turn in, because I knew it couldn’t possibly be as bad as all the pundits were saying it was going to be.

Oh they’ll never take the senate I thought, the American people are too smart to fall for that republican boogie joogie. They are too kind to want to treat their fellow Americans down on their luck in such a harsh and unforgiving way. They are too perceptive to see kindly uncle Obama as some kind of boogeyman taking this country to ruin.

But right off, right off the bat at seven when I tuned into CNN, there was Mitch McConnell, Mr Turtle Wax, sitting pretty, not even close, his bloody talons outstretched, ready to pluck the senate leadership like a ripe apple. Oh there were a few good moments, a few little hopeful blossoms, rising from the wintry ground, only to be crushed, utterly crushed, beneath the broad hooves of the pachyderm.

Oh somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, Beagles is going wherever he gets his news and when he finds it his heart will be light. Well not all that light, because, though he favors the republicans, the republicans that won were not of that tea party ilk that he favors. He holds the whole thing a bit at a distance, it is all the business of them, who is everybody but him, and they seldom come up to his ideal standards, so he smiles a bit, whistles perhaps, but he doesn’t do like back flips in the rye field for example.

But Uncle Ken weeps this morning. He knows the dems can be an unsavory crowd, but he feels a kinship with them, likes to think of himself as a face in the democratic crowd, smells always that whiff of brimstone from the tailored suits and high silk hats of the repubs.

But this happens right? Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. We had eight years of Mr Blarney and eight more years of the dimwit, and still the world more or less goes on.

The day Obama won I sat on my balcony and watched the crowds trundle happily home across the Michigan Avenue bridge. It would be a long walk, and they could have taken a train, or a bus, or a cab, but they wanted to continue walking, walking in comradeship with their fellow celebrants because it would be a new day, all the crap of the past would be swept away.

Stupid animals we humans, we Americans, every two years we think the whole world will change, when we win, we will save it, when we lose, we are all doomed.

I’ll have a better perspective in the morrow.