Daily Archives: March 14, 2008

Family

A Dull Gray Day

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29 bar steep rise 29.87 0mph W windchill 29

      First Quarter Moon of Winds

Got to thinking about dull gray days.  Aunt Roberta days, as we used to call them.  Aunt Roberta would always begin her correspondence with, “It’s a dull gray day.”  Aunt Roberta, like my Aunt Barbara and my Aunt Marjorie suffered from bi-polar disorder.  It hit me yesterday or the day before, the day it was dull and gray, that dull, gray days are March days.  They signal a change in the weather.  The upper atmosphere gets filled with water, clouds form.  Later in the month it will rain and not long after, with the snow gone and the ground beginning to thaw, the first green shoots will head toward daylight.  The dull, gray days of March are a sign of a change in the weather, a change for the better.

Granted, the dull gray days of November presage the upcoming winter, but even in that instance the harvest has come in, the plants have died back and we’re ready for the white, fallow season.

Each one of them Aunt Roberta in Arlington, Aunt Marjorie in Muncie and my Aunt Barbara, often confined to the State Hospital in Richmond, Indiana were important to me as I grew up.  Aunt Roberta raised 5 wonderful girls, all my first cousins and I visited them often when I was young.  Aunt Marjorie was a great cook and a long suffering wife, married to my Uncle Ike who was a gambler and a hustler, and a hell of a good guy.  Aunt Barbara gave my Bullfinch’s Mythology when I was young.  She was my Mom’s favorite, I think.

These three women sisters, mothers and aunts affected in a positive way many lives.  Daughters and sons, nephews and nieces, sisters and husbands all benefitted from their love and direction.  No person is their diagnosis.  They are a person first and last. 

Each one of them, in their own way, succumbed to bipolar disorder.  Aunt Barbara lived the end of her life in a world of illusion.  Aunt Marjorie starved herself to death and Aunt Roberta was in and out of Richmond, too, and finally faded away.

I miss each one of them, as I miss my mom.   Yes, they are with me in spirit, but that isn’t the same as in person.  It just isn’t the same, yet it’s no less important.

When the weather turns dull and gray I’ll think of Aunt Roberta and her sisters, but now with the knowledge that after the dull and the gray comes the green or the white.  Glory and peace.

Politics

An Agnostic Bush Administration

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32  bar rises 29.72 4mph WNW windchill 32

       First Quarter Moon of Winds

On the Daily Show last night Jon Stewart asked Bush’s press secretary du jour, “Why doesn’t the press ask questions about Iraq anymore?  Why don’t we read about it?”  Her answer suggested that things have gotten a lot better since the surge and that was why the war had fallen from the news.

I don’t think so. 

There is a legitimate question that asks why the Greatest Protest generation hasn’t been more vocal during this war.  A part of the answer, of course, lies in our lives.  Many of us have worries about saving money for retirement, putting the kids through college and caring for ailing parents.  War doesn’t seem high on the list. 

An absence of a draft makes this war effort different, too.  Only volunteers in Iraq, so they tend to be folks our educated generation either does not know or chooses not to know.  Complacency and political drift has a place in the void, too.  We no longer march to different drummers, but to elevator music.

The steady drumbeat of mendacity, torture and rhetorical overreach engaged by the Bush administration explains most of it, I think.  In the sixties we could tell that the administrations heard us.  They didn’t always react the way we wanted, but, like God, they always answered in some way, even if it was to display wrath.  The Bush administration seems to be agnostic when it comes to the will of the people.  Yes, they seem to say, there may be an electorate out there, then again there may not.  In any case, we draw wisdom from our ideology, not from the average American.

Continuously unanswered prayer can extinguish faith from all but the most Job-like of spirits.  When it becomes evident that no one is listening, we get up off our knees and head to the ballot box, as millions have done this year.