The Morning It Looked Like Biden Won

I was talking to my friend Pam this morning as I went to feed the chickens.

“Did you hear?” she said. Her tone was light, and so I said, “Did he win?”

“Not yet,” she said, “but it looks like it’s going to happen.”

 This week I had steeled myself for another four years of Trump. Really what I am saying is that I numbed hope and joy and mentally flew to Canada or went groundhog, saw my shadow and fled underground. 

I want to understand what it is inside the Trump supporters that have the Secret Service surrounding Biden’s house, that has store owners in towns boarding up their windows. It’s so much easier to be relational when you understand the heart of the other. The best I can come up with is that what is inside what feels like the other to me is what is inside me—the part of me that talks about killing Trump and seeing his supporters as first-grade dropouts. The part of me that is convinced I know better about what is right and good and that these things are necessary for my family and my friends and myself to be safe.

I fed the girls and then I went to check on the garden, and I looked at the spriggy baby kale and radiccio plants I’d put into the ground yesterday, and suddenly I was sobbing. Sort of wailing, in a what-the-heck-is-happening kind of way. 

My brother and my daughter are mixed race, and racism is the most awful thing I know of. To hate another is to hate the self, and this sickness that makes the world a divisive, cold, cruel place is hard to carry. It hurts to hate the self, and while it can feel like a relief to hate another, at the end of the day it is poison to the spirit. No one can carry hate and manifest the brightness of love and life we are born with as babies.

There is a dullness I feel when I shop at Target. Maybe if I buy a bag of big paperclips I’ll feel better. Maybe a king-sized container of Flaming Hot Cheetos will ease the unnamable dullness in my gut, the unfillable hole. I feel particularly American at these times.

 When my mom died, I had the word love tattooed on my wrist. I imitated her writing, the way she wrote the word at the conclusion of every letter she had ever written to me. I had wanted more of my mom’s love. I had wanted all of it, clear of her own self-hatred and self-disregard. I tattooed love on my wrist to hold myself accountable. Be love, Anne. You can do it. 

Isn’t it funny how scary it can be to open your heart? I think about living with an open heart and it feels like turning myself into a target.

This is crazy thinking.

Really I am a driver with a dirty windshield. I’ve had glimpses of the lighted, glorious world, and so I know it’s there, but what I focus on is the blur in front of me, the darkness, the troubled smear of what could be washed away. 

When I teach Write or Die, I feel like I’m helping people to wash their windshields so they can see clearly the love and magic in the world around them and their bodies and minds. 

You teach what you need.

It’s 6:58 AM, and the rising sun is in my eyes.

I had called my dad when I was done crying. This is a guy who in his eighties had walked door to door to ask people to vote for Biden. My dad had sounded so down the other day, and it was excruciating to think of my dad, who in the 1960s as a young lawyer had gone to the South to help fight for desegregation, possibly dying during the second term of a man who represented vital threats to all core tenants of my dad’s belief system. I’m not saying the belief system of a middle-class white man is the right one: what I’m saying is that I want my dad to die feeling the efforts of his life had contributed something to the well-being of the planet. Anyway, what I want to tell you is that my dad sounded open on the phone, happy to have this day.

“I love you,” he said as we were hanging up. I heard it, heard the love, in ways that I often miss. My dad loves. My dad loves me.

I love you, too, I said.

And then I hung up and started crying all over again.

I love my dad.

Baby steps. 

We can start over. We can love it all. 

What do we have to lose? 

Please, sweet Jesus, keep them safe. Everyone. The babies. The children. The adults. The old and infirm. Please let us remember the preciousness of the flower, the tree, the sky, the wind that is blowing through Spirit Hill Farm just now and is knocking things to the ground.