Breathing a little easier

I had been driving around Sunday afternoon with only my thoughts for company. This isn’t an unusual occurrence, especially on brief trips and local errands. It’s a holdover from many years of owning a car with a blank space where the sound system should be. But just before I reached my final destination at 1:47 p.m., I had the impulse to switch on the radio. What I’d hoped would be music was instead a tangle of words as regular broadcasting had been interrupted by a special report that was already in progress.

I drove past my house to circle the block to catch up on the context I had missed: President Biden had officially ended his bid for reelection.

It was done.

By the time I’d parked and gone in the house, the president had given his running mate, Kamala Harris, his endorsement for the Democratic nomination.

You might recall a few weeks ago in this space I advocated for unity around President Biden. I had held out hope that the polls would shift and the electorate would sway back into some semblance of comfort. I held firmly to the belief that one more unprecedented occurrence in this journey could sink the ship.

The candidate’s “Age,” I opined at the top of my voice (while waving my arms at all the other Trump-rages that went under-scrutinized) is just another baseless spin akin to “Her Emails.”

In my daily life, as my husband can attest, I could not ignore what had become an increasingly common belief in my circle of friends: That Biden was too old and had to go.

My Pavlovian response amounted to a minutes-long rant about primary voters and the built-in backup president who was already on the ticket. In my estimation, this was a knee-jerk reaction to a non-issue with a simultaneous attempt to erase Kamala Harris from the line of succession.

If people were beginning to avoid me, I can assure them, I have no hard feelings.

Now that it was over and Biden was out, I felt remarkably calm.

I stood silently watching a steady stream of television analysts breathlessly reporting what they knew and guessing about what they didn’t. All of the things that were still possible at that moment were the worst and the best thing possible at the same time: Schrodinger’s Election.

What came next – a smooth cascade of support for a Harris ascendence as the presumptive nominee – surprised and delighted me. Watching it happen over the course of 24 hours seemed like a bit of luck if not strategic brilliance or outright magic.

Yet the gravity of the place we find ourselves as a country, with individual rights across vast demographics in jeopardy, may have guided more than strategic sleight-of-hand.

In his address to the American people on Wendsday, Biden told us he was passing the torch but that his fire wasn’t extinguished. He reminded us that we have the power within us to meet this moment when our choices matter the most.

I truly believe that we have witnessed our democracy in action in all its messy glory during these last few weeks. And with Aaron-Sorkin-like hindsight, I hope it will see how our job in all of this is to use our votes to choose hope over hate.

In doing so we may come to understand that two things can be true of the Democrat’s 11th-hour substitution: that Joe Biden is still a sharp and masterful leader and that we are ready for a change.

Mission Impossible

 It’s 11:30 on a Thursday morning when I knock once and open his bedroom door. I have been awake since dawn flitting between duties of home and office. Drumming my fingers. Waiting and watching for his door to open. For water to pulse through drains. For his car to leave its parking space.

I am here now because there has been no movement whatsoever. My texts go unanswered and unread. He’s had all week to do nothing.

The temperature has reached 80 degrees outside and the relative humidity feels like a hundred and eighty percent, but my son’s room is frosty. I open the door wider and fan into the swampy air of the hallway.

He is tangled in a blanket, still asleep, one foot and one arm hanging akimbo from the bed.

I am playing the Good Cop today since his father strained his voice reading the riot act last night. But at the sight of him, I sense my good nature slipping.

I rap on the wall to rouse him.

“What’s the plan, Stan?”

“Huuuuh,” he answers slowly, lifting his head and raising himself on his elbows, causing me to repeat myself, louder, so he can hear me over the the roar of his ancient air conditioning unit.

WHAT. ARE. YOUR. PLANS. FOR. TODAY!?

“Same thing I do every day, Pinkie: Taking over the world ….”

But he recounts his list … he will fulfill the requirements of his college-level course for the day, he will apply for a job somewhere, and he will pull some weeds from the garden and mow the lawn if I ask him at least twice. 

It feels like the best deal I will get. And maybe it’s for the best.

I had read that the summer job – a right of passage for American teens – has been on a steady decline for decades. 

I know what you’re thinking: “Kid’s today!”  My husband, who is particularly prone to reciting all of the hardships of his not-so-misspent youth, is also particularly sensitive to the fears that without a summer job, our kids will never be able to learn responsibility, the importance of having a good work ethic or how to make change?

And so it happens that we join all of our ancestors in wringing hands and declaring the youth of today in their demographic’s entirety as being uniquely problematic.

We remember the summer jobs we had “in our day” – working in hot kitchens washing dishes, scraping and painting exterior walls – with some sense of nostalgia. Perhaps merely because it was the one time in our lives we had money that wasn’t already spent on living.

 However, perhaps we don’t realize that the teen workforce has been declining since our so-called salad days began. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that figure has dropped from a rate of 60 percent in 1970 to 35 percent in 2016. And while it may seem dismal, it can be explained by the steady push toward expanding education. The summer job had essentially turned into summer learning, with many students even getting a jump on college credits before they even graduate high school. Privilege kids may have kept their jobs scooping ice cream at their local parlors but less advantaged ones found respite in increased access to school programs.

The shift has meant graduation rates rose to 90 percent in 2019 from where they were in 1975 hovering around 65 percent.

 Teen labor numbers are increasing, however. In recent years the rate has risen to nearly 38 percent of teens ages 16-19 engaged in paid summer employment. This year is on track to increase again, according to Pew Research. Economists surmise the increase has to do with stronger wages and the costs of higher education. 

Still, unemployment among teens is higher than for other demographics, potentially the result of teens competing with adults for the same entry-level jobs. This is something my son is happy to tell me as he rummages through the refrigerator for his brunch.

 “Your assignment should you choose to accept it, is written on the To Do List on the refrigerator door. 

And as he leans back with a mouthful of fruit to grab the list, I realize it’s probably going to work out for the best.

Sweating the small stuff

Why is everything such a chore? I ask myself this at least twice a day usually while I’m doing something exasperating like  … a chore. 

“How many half-lives does this thin line of dog hair and sand have?” I wonder aloud each time I pull the dustpan away from my successive and futile attempts at a clean sweep. 

Occasionally I consider all the labor-intensive solutions I might employ – a lint roller, a microfiber towel, luring the dog over and crossing my fingers that something will appeal to her discerning taste buds mixed within its granular composition.

I shrug my shoulders, figuring that even if I am successful, she’d turn my dust bowl into a mud puddle and then I’d have another task: to fill up a bucket and find the mop. 

A shine forms on my upper lip as I lean more heavily on the brush, flinging the finicky particles in the opposite direction of the pan toward the great outdoors, where they stubbornly catch on a threshold.

Droplets of perspiration reach their tipping points as I reach for the vacuum to end this battle once and for all. When I slip in my own sweaty puddles I realize I’d lost any economy I’d tried to endeavor through one simple task. 

As I fill the bucket with warm sudsy water, I wonder about how many steps I add each time I try to pare them down.

Like … after I’d dragged our luggage to the porch and tidied the kitchen

of our “summer rental,” my brain ticked off the box near the words “IDIOT CHECK” at the bottom of my “To Do” list. 

I would have surely noticed any personal items left there, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, and charging cords as I was giving the countertop one last scrub. Certainly, I would have ferried them off to the porch to await their connecting passage to the car. 

This is why my brain told me as I dropped the last bag of trash into the receptacle on the curb and dusted my hands.

“Done! We are ready to go!”

Of course, I didn’t think about my historical failures of multitasking until the day after we’d arrived home and the watch on my wrist started to vibrate with its semi-weekly plea for recharging. 

As I pawed through the bags I had yet to unpack, I could only retrieve the memory of unplugging, coiling, and packing one charging cord, not two.

Ugggggh. 

“Do you want me to call and see if it’s there? Maybe they could mail it to us,” my husband said, trying to be helpful. 

He even threw himself under the “final checks” bus, assuring me HE had been the last one to leave, having dragged his eagle eyes over every surface looking for any absentminded abandonments. 

But I don’t want to put anyone out. 

I briefly consider using this as an excuse to purchase a new watch when the brain I couldn’t rely on to do the idiot check regains its senses.

“Search for a replacement cord, you dolt. Use the power Amazon gave you.”

So, just a few mouse clicks later I had purchased a replacement cord listed for less than it would have cost to ship the original to me by post, (and free at that because of the sleight of hand known as credit card points). 

But I also have the same feeling of perplexity of this chore. Why does this

seem too easy?

Out on our ice floes

There was no denying it; President Biden’s debate performance was less than ideal. He looked haggard and sounded flustered. His age was on full display.

His voice lacked the forceful clarity of his opponent, who, evidently, had unhinged his mouth and rambled off a whitewater-rapids’ force stream of lies capable of capsizing rational thought.

Faced with Trump’s tirade of

untruths, Biden came across as a boat adrift. This is understandable, but also frightening to those of us who remain “popular” voters worried about clean air, potable water, equality, and the ability to access any level of justice now that the Supreme Court has ruled our president is officially above the law.

The faces in the room with me that evening registered a gamut of reactions from confusion to horror. I nodded in what I thought was commiseration. 

I thought we understood the assignment. The threats we face as a nation are coming from within our own borders and perpetrated by people who call themselves patriots. People who want to see the chaos that ensues as they strip away basic human rights one by one. 

In recent years, a Supreme Court built by minority gamesmanship has wrested an unimaginable amount of power from the people and taken it for itself. This week it proved its supreme illegitimacy by officially rendering itself unto a Caesar.

Yet as the understanding that nothing we want for our children or our children’s children will survive a nation that splinters into hateful factions, we propose instead to sink the ship that is keeping us afloat. 

But I did not see equal rivals. 

I saw a good man with trouble extracting words become speechless after his opponent built a wall of lies out of thin air. 

And when it was over, I wasn’t prepared for the family to erupt into a figurative fistfight: a virtual blow-by-blow, slamming the only candidate standing between a convicted felon and the democracy he is hellbent on destroying. 

A man who, we all seem to discount, is currently employed in that exact role, and has enlisted a deep bench of qualified cabinet and staff members to serve in his administration: People who will be accountable to the nation rather than loyal to sycophants and grifters. 

It pains me to listen as the people I love turn on a good man who has dedicated his entire career to public service, for so little while a lying scoundrel remains protected and able to continue his deceit and treachery, turning the office of the presidency into a dangerous dictatorship.

We have to make some hard choices including reeling back power that has gone unchecked. But choosing Biden and the norms he represents shouldn’t be one of them. Standing up to authoritarians is the job at hand if we are to retrieve any of the ideals we set forth for ourselves as a nation. 

The cost of kindness certainly has risen in this new economy, but the cost of not standing together in this moment will morally bankrupt us all if it hasn’t already.