Meditation for America

I wonder if it is comforting, to drive to the grocery store along a road named for a great uncle or grandfather? How must it feel to see a country lane, which led to a farm where your greats lived and tanned leather, and made shoes, ... or raised the cattle whose hides would do that work, and see the road sign that points to that place, and bears their name, ... Your name?

Do the names fade from...your mind as they might on a sign, disappearing in a scotoma that hides them from your awareness? Or is it a greater blessing to leave that place, and then come home again after generations, so that the signs are fresh and contain the magic that once was alive, that told a story of the people who made that place, those people, and me?

Perhaps it is both. My thanks to Vicky and Brian Sickler, Owners of Edward Sickler Monuments in Franklin, NY. Brian also serves as the Secretary for the Ouleout Valley Cemetery. How strange it must have seemed yesterday to have a Pennsylvanian in a "Kansas" tee shirt come to their shop, asking about family members, an uncle and aunt who both died in 1917, the very year their son was killed in the war. And how kind that they called me this morning to say they had found my folks after I had not. And those two, Abel and Jennie Stilson, rest not far from several Sicklers I had seen buried there in my walk at Ouleout Valley yesterday.

I wondered whether Vicky noticed those stones as well, or if she had gone to the cemetery so intent upon being kind to that stranger, to me, that she did not see her husband's family members at all. I did, and those folks become part of a bigger story in that lovely little town among other little towns in a green and kind county in New York.

I never knew Franklin, New York, when my grandfather was alive. I could not tell him how familiar it feels, and how the voices there sing with his accent, ... my mother's accent. I couldn't share that I was curious in which of those Georgian framed houses he had been born. I am still.

How typical my family is to every other here in America. 10% of Americans descend from those few on the Mayflower who survived, and the rest of what we are is derived from others who joined us other ways, ... and discovering the ports and rivers, and borders they crossed to join us, ... or to remain in place as the rest of us swarmed across a land they had forever lived upon and did not even understand, could be "owned" at all.

I love America best of all because of its folk ways. I like the parts that let you drive for fifteen minutes between towns. And I like the bustle of the Cities that were built by immigrants making trunks and suitcases, given loans by fellow countrymen, strangers, who had arrived before them. Survival is success. Sharing with strangers made us into America. They made us, ... just as we will all make what comes next.

I love this America. It shines by its diversity and its durability. It will last, I have no doubt. No single person can corrupt it forever, nor any of us, no matter what we believe She should become, can veer her sharply one way or the other, though we claim that to be our fear, and our hope.

I visit these family places and links to reassure myself that there is incredible continuity to who we are and to what we do. Time restores what TV steals from us at times like these. A drive along county roads brings sanity to me, that the overwhelming conventions and campaigns steal away.

That is great comfort, and an even greater strength we all can share, as we come to that moment when we should think not of the folks who demand our money and our vote, ... but who share the cities, factories, towns and villages with us.

I will be voting for them, and for Us.