Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring

When I was young, and not so young, I found a lot of comfort sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, in the maybe three feet between their bedframe and my father’s vinyl collection. I listened to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Little Feat and Leonard Cohen. Abbey Road and Sergeant Pepper. I danced with my father to Jesse Winchester at my wedding, Lay Down the Burden of Your Heart.

Someone at some point had painted the hardwoods of the upstairs of our house. Eventually, we sanded and resealed some of them, but we never got to parents’ room. The paint on the floor there was brown, but had started to wear away. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel like it needed to be changed, repainted or sanded down, polyurethaned to a glossy oak. It was a safe space. A cubby and a generation of singer-songwriters. It was your most comfortable, much-worn sweatshirt. The kind that you put on when life threatens to crush your spirit, and you just want to wrap comfort around you. But also the kind that you slip into when everything is going right, and you need no frills or trimmings to feel content. It’s soft, and faded and dependable. That nook in my parents’ room was soul affirming.

Right now, I’m so awfully tired. I cried myself to sleep Tuesday night. I almost worked from home on Wednesday, but decided that that was weak, and that I am weak, and I’d spend my day diving into too many commentaries and opinions and dire forecasts. So, I went to work, to my office where it is 85% male and military, and my political affiliation is probably just as uncommon as my gender.

I tried to keep it together. I didn’t completely fail, but I didn’t completely succeed, either. And no one said a single thing that was anything other than considerate, even though by and large, they didn’t feel the same despair. People with whom I had crossed swords throughout the last seemingly interminable few months were deferential, knowing it was a dark day for me. I had been so sure that I would be the one who would be gracious and respectful, restrained and tasteful in victory, that my vision for my country was the only one that would, could, win out in the end.

It didn’t work out that way, and I was – am – heartbroken. But unlike the online vitriol of the last 18 months, the click-bait and the partisanship, the actual people in my life whom I appreciate, but share little political common ground, those people were still my people first. There’s a lesson there, obviously, when everything hurts a little less, and I’m ready to start looking at lessons.

Ray Bradbury said, “Stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you.” Part of me thought, what is possibly left to say, and what’s the point? Many, many people said everything already, and much more succinctly, much more eloquently, much more powerfully than I could. People chose not to listen. And so a few more tears grew hot behind my eyes, tears of frustration and anger and disappointment. Aloud I said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I anticipated the news of a rise in hate crimes and felt darkly vindicated in my grief when they appeared, as expected. What did we expect? What words are there?

As as I processed the grief, as the initial shock began to wear off, I remembered that sometimes words aren’t for other people. Sometimes they are for us. Sometimes they are cathartic, sometimes cauterizing. Sometimes they’re just there, and ask to be let loose.

I rolled sentences around as I brushed my teeth. I composed introductions as I shampooed. I scribbled down thoughts at work. Despite the deference at work, I’m grieving and will be. I’ve lost a piece of my idealism, and it hurts. When something hurts, writing is my go-to to process that. Stage 2. Anger. “I was summarily fired 30 days after maternity leave,” I wanted to scream to the doubters who said that Clinton’s sex had nothing to do with her defeat, who somehow saw the race as a level playing field in a culture that still plays to archetypes. “Raise your hand if you’ve been assaulted by anonymous hands in a darkened bar, or a crowded street, or if you’ve stared down someone who you thought you knew, who touched you without permission.” Are we all raising our hands now? I know I am. And yet 42% of women still voted in the person who normalizes sexual assault culture as locker room banter, and demonizes the women who would dare to confront him. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, my tired, tired heart cried. Maybe I could understand not voting for Clinton. But how could people vote for a veritable caricature of patriarchal power? How?

What it comes down to is that I don’t understand. I probably won’t. I’m middle class and white, though. I’ll weather the next four years. But I’m afraid for women who are afraid to wear their hijab. I’m brokenhearted for Hispanic children who are taunted on playgrounds, “Build the wall, build the wall!” I wonder if we’re going to even have snow this year, as we enjoy another 70-degree day in November. Or if we’re going to have snowmaggedon in March as the pendulum swings.

And then Leonard Cohen died today.

That’s really piling it on, Universe. Could you maybe leave 2016 alone for the rest of the year?

And so I listened to my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. Suzanne. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. Dance Me to the End of Love. Hallelujah. Anthem. And then I listened to the entirety of the Jesse Winchester album, Let the Rough Side Drag. If I close my eyes, I can picture the yellow album cover of the vinyl record my dad still owns. I can hear the sound of the needle dropping onto the vinyl. I can picture the fading brown paint under my feet and the bedframe at my back. Even though that house no longer exists, the scared floors long gone, it feels so solid.

I still don’t understand how everything I hold so sacrosanct could be so fluid to someone else. I know it works both ways. I am an enigma to a solid handful of people in my life who do not understand how I came to my own immutable truths. They like me, anyway, and they are no more one-dimensional than I am. I want to be optimistic, but for me, it’s too soon for optimism. The future seems far less solid than I anticipated. I worry for those who have been promised disenfranchisement. My heart contracts painfully each time it thinks, SCOTUS. No, no, no. (Be well, RBG. Be well.)

In his final creative gift, Leonard Cohen gave me my favorite, well-worn much-loved sweatshirt to pull around me tonight. And though my world has otherwise been rocked this week, I’m going to take comfort in the fact that even when I don’t have the words, he does.

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.