Hidden soundtrack

The cicadas are chirping, sounding the alarm on another sweltering day. Their drone is a vibrating metallic noise that shakes the trees. It rings in my ears, like a thousand whistles or a bow drawn slowly across the strings of a violin. It reminds me of a bicycle chain before it breaks free from its toothy ring.I rarely see these annual minstrels. But their symphony is unmistakable.

Harmless, like a benign tinnitus, their low and ever-present song plays in the background of my mind until my thoughts go silent.

The insects filter the world's soundtrack almost to distraction, making me pine for the churning of air conditioning and the cool, dry air of the indoors.

I feel guilty hiding here. Having banished my children into the sauna outside. They have to stretch their atrophied education muscles. Visit the library. Practice getting out of the house in the morning like it's on fire.

Schooling has already started in my house, though classes won't resume for another week or so. The noise of postponed summer projects has finally cut through the din of other distractions.

I want to rail against the last-minute-ness of this preseason panic. But I can't muster any enthusiasm for I-told-you-so.

Such a gloat would backfire anyhow. I told them next to nothing as they plodded along with their mostly unencumbered summer days. I prefer to think of myself as more of a workhorse than a nag.

The last year of high school for one; the first year for the other.

Both suddenly realizing the stakes. Though they seem like two sides of one coin.

One shuts off the world for a bit to focus while the other opens up to its many avenues of assistance. Then, like a coin toss, they flip.

Nature seems at play, even here.

The one who insists on courting perfection never leaves any room for the subsequent disappointments to morph into happy accidents. While the other reaches only for the low-hanging fruit, not exercising gumption until the effortless supply is exhausted.

I've forced myself not to worry. Not to take on the weight of a future I can't know, not to celebrate too loudly. Instead, I just plod along, trying to do my best. It doesn't feel like work when you are just standing there, lightly pushing back. And even in the perfect moments — the ones where you witness success, or progress, or just a little extra effort — the moments where it is possible for pride to drown out the low drone of life, it still feels wrong to harbor it. I'm not proud like I thought I'd be.

It's tempting to think they've won this for the team. In the soundtrack of your mind, the song of cicadas changes to the roar of a crowd. But it seems like tempting fate. 

Best to be humble and to keep plodding along with the low drone of the work at hand. Just as their failures are not entirely mine, neither are their successes. 

The struggle may be real, but it's hidden.

The summer before our discontent

My son was on a mission to find the perfect back-to-school backpack, and he was willing to comb through countless stores, be they outlet or otherwise, to find it. He finally found what he was looking for in the corner of a boutique, the name of which we couldn't pronounce despite ample force-smiled pronunciations from the sales clerk.

But one thing was clear: this bag was exactly the thing a newly minted ninth-grader needed for the year ahead. 

It wasn't flashy -- just a slim rectangle constructed of heavy-duty black canvas with brown leather accents that could be expanded twice its width by one extra track of zipper -- but it was expensive.

His father wasn't convinced that it would be big enough to tote books and binders back and forth and suggested we keep looking. 

But it was those brown leather accents - and my insistence that not all heavy textbooks need to make a daily commute - that sold it.

I wasn't quite prepared for the sight of him: all stretched out by an abrupt summer growth spurt, ready, willing, and able to do whatever it takes to get back to school.

He was finally a big kid.

And as my eyes welled with tears at the presence of my last-born child, who stood before me with a brand new backpack as if this were just another summer day before school starts.  

If his sly grin and bedraggled hair weren't enough to show me the time for grieving had passed, his misaligned socks and properly-fitted mask let me believe that we have the ability (and the peer pressure) needed to soldier on.

As we look forward to another school year in pandemic land, I want to wish us all the fortitude to withstand the shrieks and rantings of a few angry voices.

We've heard you rage, bare-faced, into the microphones insisting you will not be inoculated by common sense; nor masked by common decency; nor silenced by common knowledge. 

We know no experience from your many years upon this earth can dissuade you from blindly following your terrible intuition to its final resting place. 

But restrictions can save the rest of us.

Don't want to get vaccinated? That's fine but you won't be able to get on a plane. Or go to a restaurant. In time, there may not be room for you at the hospital.

Don't want to wear a mask? Sure, you still have that choice, but you won't be allowed into school. Or the library or your doctor's office. 

Because we do still hold some truths to be self-evident: That vaccines are still our best hope for an end to this suffering and that mask-wearing, like its predecessor, hand-washing, is an effective way to minimize the spread of infection. 

We know that when ICUs are filled with COVID patients, there's little room for heart patients, or cancer patients, or any other emergencies.

We know that children with curable diseases will be put at greater risk of death. 

And we know that our healthcare system is already strained beyond a sustainable capacity. 

At some point ... this dam protecting us will break where it has not been maintained and the floodwaters may drown us all. 

We need to use the only tools we have in our proverbial backpacks. Get vaccinated. Wear your mask. 

It is the very least thing we can do to protect each other. 

Small worlds

 My father had been taking a breather on a park bench while his grandchildren shopped for summer treasures on this unusually hot-for-Maine day. He heard the announcement before I did. I had been herding one generation of vacationland wanderers towards another and hadn't noticed my phone alerts going wild.

"I just can't believe it,” dad exclaimed after I had circled back to him. “I was sitting next to this guy from Boulder who was talking to a girl from Boston, and they were asking me where I was from and when I told them 'New York' they said, 'well, your governor just quit'."

The phones around us started to crow with the news and I handed mine to my dad so he could read the bulletin for himself.

Despite being a life-long Democrat, Cuomo-the-younger wasn't my dad's favorite. It didn't matter to him what malfeasance finally caught up with the state's highest-ranking official.

"Well, good riddance to bad rubbish."

Dad's beef with the governor wasn't about the man's treatment of women. It was about taxes, and the shady ways they are levied. And it focused on one tax in particular: He had asked a question about a charge on my mother's nursing home bill — a fully-refundable gross receipts tax only private-pay nursing home patients were charged — and it pulled a string that unraveled one of the underhanded ways the state silently slips its hand in a pocket.

"Why would you give the state a no-interest loan if it wasn't intended to be a swindle?"

The next year, when the refund was capped at two percentage points below what he had paid, my father sued for the difference. He won, but the judgment was again only personal. All the other private-pay nursing home residents that were assessed the tax would have to file lawsuits of their own to get their due.

It may not seem like much — a few hundred dollars tacked onto a bill — but to him, an elderly man watching his wife slowly fade away, it was crime more insidious than armed robbery. 

And then when the state misrepresented the numbers of nursing home deaths as a result of COVID last year, he cursed Cuomo and thanked God for taking her before a time when all these souls passed alone.

So I was a bit surprised when my father handed back my phone after reading the news and promptly changed the subject.

"Ok, do you think it looks like rain?"

That's when I realized what I dreaded most was not the noise, but the silence. 

My Twitter feed became a feeding frenzy of expectations as people opined about all the worse crimes they would attribute to the Cuomo name, it seemed clear that sexual harassment is the mail fraud of the modern era. They may not get you on murder, but it's the charge with teeth.  

We seem unable or unwilling to make a distinction between the unpleasantness of an awkward exchange, that should lead to an apology and a behavior change, and the undue difficulty of handling an abuser who exploits those same awkward moments, turning them into a pattern of abuse.

Staying quiet is safer. Abusers know secrecy works to their advantage, too. Rarely do those who speak out find their situations improve. Instead, they enter battles they might be unprepared or ill-equipped to fight. It's usually easier and safer to stay quiet and move along.

I'm grateful for people who find the strength to speak out. I'm grateful for people who do the thankless job of going against the expectation of silence and the pressure to move on. And I am ultimately hopeful that support for truth and accountability will be harder to suppress in the light of this new day.

Two paths diverged in the wood

We stopped near a small, windowed gatehouse and waited as a man arose from a folding chair and made his way to our car. 

The ginger-haired trustee adjusted his spectacles and smiled as he recited the basics we should know: there is no fee for trail use, but donations are always appreciated. So too would be any efforts on our part to park our vehicles just as conservatively, leaving as much room as possible to accommodate other motorists, since the small parking lot is likely to fill up by midday.

He didn't bother with the "thou shall nots," which are prominently displayed elsewhere though they are widely understood by most day hike enthusiasts despite their varying levels of enthusiasm.

1) thou shall not camp

2) thou shall not build fires

3) thou shall not litter

4) thou shall not bring dogs

5) thou shall not tread off of the pathway

The instructions were as familiar to me as the paper-clip-shaped gate that closed the trail to traffic but opened the parking lot to at least 20 more cars. 

Eighteen if you count ours.

The eight of us - roughly two families' worth (give and take) - had arrived in tandem. 

But the familiarity didn't lessen the dread that had kept a steady, elevating rhythm in my chest.

It was a beautiful day and the two-mile trail to the beachfront was easier than expected since the trail was a literal road in only recent-seeming disrepair. 

I wasn't sure what to expect as we headed toward our hiking destination, the least of which was how we would find it. Literally or figuratively.

Oh sure, I knew the place would be beautiful and surprising. It had come highly recommended. It would require only moderate effort but would yield maximum return for the investment. 

I knew at the midway point, there would be the prize of a long, sandy beach. We would rest there and be soothed by gentle ocean waves as we ate our packed lunches. We wouldn't even have to contend with wind gusts that might threaten to make sand an actual ingredient of the sandwiches. 

I could also guess that sunscreen would be less evenly or liberally applied since the sun hid behind clouds of murderous mosquitoes and green-headed biting flies. All of which would inflict damage to be reckoned with later. 

Before this worry, though, I had worried we wouldn't even find the place. It wasn't a foregone conclusion that someone in programming had already alerted GPS maps to be on the lookout for a small sign posted near a small road, tucked between a dense thicket of pine trees, that would lead us to the trailhead. 

A part of me even hoped we'd wind up lost. 

Expectations are like this. The things you remember later, and it doesn't necessarily matter how they measure up or how fond one is of the memory. 

My mind always goes to the problems we will encounter mostly from internal forces, like in the angry, scrunched up faces our children - not to be confused with the other children amongst us who are always more amenable - would rather do anything else but walk through a wooded path with their parents. 

Doesn't matter if that path leads to a beach of uncanny beauty or not. 

No, mostly I wondered if the familial bond would tether or fray as we enjoyed and endured the exploration together. As we silently compare ourselves and sit in our own hazy clouds of burning judgment. 

Except this time we weren't together. 

Illness and infirmity had splintered our family group ever so slightly. Free will had also been part of the calculation for the first time in my recollection. It was no longer a foregone conclusion that everyone would be expected to participate in everything.

Thus, our son -- whose sour stomach gave cover for his more usual sour experience of the great outdoors -- elected to stay home.

This was a new experience for which I wasn't entirely ready. And the fact that no matter how beautiful the trees were behind the veil of fog on that island in the distance, they were so much less because my son was not there to complain about the long car ride or the uphill climb to a beach or the relentless nature of biting insects. 

And he was happily home, resting up for his quest to lead us all down a bowling lane.

The epiphany

Elise Stefanik's incredulous statements in response to the opening day of testimony during the House select committee's investigation of the criminal events of January 6 don't deserve a reaction. 

As we see her and her colleagues twisting uncomfortably under the supposed magnifying glass of plain sight, we should all understand what’s happening. Namely deflection.

Victim blaming is nothing new. But transferring blame with such cognitive dissonance has become the ultra-conservative power play that, up until recently, has worked in their favor. 

Try to bring your mind back to all those “Pelosi” flags waving as the Stop the Steal Tourists erected gallows, broke windows, dragged police officers, and hunted down certain members of Congress who were proponents of counting votes. 

Stefanik is on stage playing a part that has been lucrative for her. The telegraphing taunts make for good headlines and blood pressure-raising retorts by a plethora of pundits, but the only purpose they serve should be deeply disturbing to us all. 

I'd caution that her sophomoric provocations directed at Democrats -- which seem slapped together with the same spittle and mud favored by the bloated, candy-floss coiffed talking head she turned by carrying bucketloads of his fetid water -- are nothing more than theater. 

But our nation seems immovably transfixed by this Debauchery Show whether it plays live or in syndication.

Little by little, trained as we are to chant along with the refrain, too many of us would sell our souls for the click counts. 

We all watched into the night as she came back from an office bunker after riding out an attempted insurrection and stood up to loudly and proudly continue pushing a bad-faith case for the subverting of our democracy.

And with this slime, she was anointed.

Stefanik soon replaced Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference after Cheney upset the applecart by voting to impeach the party's golden goose.

She knows this script as well as anyone. Deny and deflect. Take the inconvenient burden of guilt and toilet paper the nation's house with it. People will always be willing to blame the occupants for scrimping on the candy. 

I could rant forever about Stefanik and those like her whose public disservice is gerrymandered into seemingly infinite revolving terms. 

But I won't.

For far too long we have been blinded by our own brutality and acceptance of inequality because of the thin layer of politeness on the surface.

And that politeness, now stripped away, shows the ugly truth we need to address.

Stefanik represents a problem that can only be solved when the rest of us become better citizens. We the People have to demand more than this particular dog and pony show from those we elect as our representatives. We have to demand decency, accountability, and the seeking of fact and truth before it’s too late. Our leaders, the people we entrust with power, have to be more principled because when they aren't, as we can plainly see, the laws are rarely applied. 


It's time we recognize the game and refuse to play it with folks whose only strategy is to upend the table.