Domestic Left #5: Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?
The first time I heard Richard Shindell’s song “Last Fare of the Day” was fifteen years ago today, at a solo show he did at a small venue in Waitsfield, VT. It was my father’s 63rd birthday, but he had, with his characteristic generosity, offered to watch the kids — we must have celebrated earlier in the day, or the day before.
The next time I heard the song was maybe five or six weeks later, on Robert Resnik's Sunday-afternoon folk-music show on Vermont Public Radio. I remember it as a gray fall day. My father was in the hospital and it was looking increasingly clear that he wasn’t going to be leaving; I was pacing around the kitchen listening to the radio. Something about the song’s evocation of cycles of death and birth — even when the death is not “natural,” is tragic, unnecessary — helped some kind of acceptance click into place for me.
I still have dreams occasionally where I’m talking with my father. It’s not that he’s alive in those dreams; it’s just that, well, we can talk.
Many people develop a love of words from poetry, or from novels. I developed mine from what might be two of the most luxuriously edited publications in the English language — the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. I once read an interview with a writer (quite possibly in a New Yorker article about the Review of Books) who said that the greatest reward for being published in the Review of Books was not the exposure or the pay but the experience of being so carefully and attentively edited.
My parents subscribed to both, and they accumulated in two distinct piles — the New York Review of Books on the bookshelf next to my father’s chair at the kitchen table (one of his favorite reading locations), and the New Yorkers on a shelf in the walk-in pantry. I appreciated the covers of the New Yorker, of course, but as a teenager was more drawn to reading the Review of Books — it was a little more serious, perhaps, and also my father would often leave issues open to a particular article which would pique my interest. To this day, I have an almost pavlovian reaction, whetting my intellectual appetite, when I see a piece of writing that lists multiple books, their authors, publishers, price and pages, at the top.
I got my own subscription to the Review of Books shortly after leaving home — sometime during my college years, I think. I don’t remember where the piles accumulated. I finally let my subscription lapse in 2000 or 2001, when I could no longer take the increasing (or at least increasingly noticeable to me) tone of smug liberal elite condescension to critics of globalization.
Nowadays, the New Yorker is the only publication I read in print. For many years, my mother would pass them along to me after she was done with them; when I moved to Pittsburgh she bought me my own subscription. It piles up visibly, by my bedside, quietly demands to be “caught up on,” and occasionally reminds me of a kitchen on Crescent Road in Lawrence, Kansas.
My father’s birthday is also St. Crispin’s Day, although I didn’t realize that until many years after his passing. One of my favorite scenes in all of film (as well as probably my favorite passage from Shakespeare) is the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.
I saw the film in the theater when it first came out in the early 90s, but must have re-watched it about ten years ago, because I distinctly remember the role it played in my own development as an organizer. After a dozen years as somewhat of a list-work and structure-test fundamentalist, with a distrust and dislike of charisma and speech-making, I began reintegrating an appreciation of rhetoric and inspiration into my understanding of social movements and political strategy.
The St. Crispin’s Day speech was in my mind as the Vermont Workers’ Center was organizing a “Day One” demonstration for the opening day of the state legislature, a few years into our (nearly successful) campaign to win single-payer health care legislation. The very framing of “Day One” was informed by the speech, to give participants (and potential participants) that the story of how Vermont led the way on healthcare reform would indeed be a story that “the good man [shall] teach his son,” that joining the demonstration was an opportunity to be one of the “happy few” who would make history.
Around the time I sent out the last issue of this newsletter, I decided to try to learn to draw. At some point I will probably buy some kind of “how to draw” book (I may be one of the last people on earth who prefers to learn how to do things from a book instead of a YouTube video), but before investing in that, or in fancy pens or sketchbooks, I figured I would first see if I can establish a daily practice of drawing, with the pens at hand, on scrap paper (mostly the “yesterdays” of my tear-off Dilbert calendar).
This effort was initially inspired by a friend who had been posting on Instagram and using the hashtag #drawingeveryday but it really took when another friend starting doing the #inktober challenge (also on Instagram) of drawing in ink every day. Even though it wasn't until halfway through the month that I realized there are prompts you're supposed to follow (oops), I've been doing them consistently myself.
Daily practices are extremely helpful to me, even if I'm generally pretty poor at sticking to them. And being forced to switch from pencil to ink has been good, too. A lot of my self-consciousness about drawing over the past, um, three decades has been because I don't have the eye and steady hand (yet) to be able to see (or imagine) something and confidently draw a line that captures it. Perhaps I will learn how to do that with practice, but for now I've been pleasantly surprised with the results of just putting pen to paper, accepting the shortcomings of what I've done, and building on them with more doing. It had led to a kind of expressionistic style that I wouldn't put in the UE NEWS, but which I'm happy with.
One of my favorites of what I've done so far was from the prompt “Treasure”:
The spring that I turned 18, I lived for a couple of months in Vienna with my parents and sister. For me, it was the end of what is now called a “gap year,” and my father was there for the spring semester on a professor-exchange program with the University of Vienna.
The professor he exchanged with was a single woman who lived alone in a small apartment, so the four of us kind of camped out — I think my sister had a pull-out bed and I had a cot, both in the living room, or perhaps the kitchen. It was cramped, but also had beautiful high ceilings and was near the city center.
If memory serves, there wasn’t much in the apartment beyond books (in all four languages our host spoke, one of which was English) and classical-music records. I spent much of those months exploring her collections and taking advantage of the $5 stand-in-the-back tickets at the opera.
My other favorite drawing was in response to the prompt “ghost” — imagining my father and our cat Oscar still conversing on Crescent Road:
Here's your Spotify playlist for this issue. If you're not familiar with "Last Fare of the Day," which is referenced at the beginning of the newsletter, it's on here, and so are a variety of songs that are also in the newsletter, if not explicitly.