A Night at the Theater (plus poetry by Julie A. Sellers and a thriller by Michael Corrigan)

Poppy, Adria, and Nana post-performance

The evening of Thursday, July 21 was one of the truly joyous moments in my life as an old-geezer slash retired-school-teacher. It was the opening night of the Actors Community Theatre’s production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical, at the Jasper Arts Center in Jasper, Indiana. It featured, in one of the ensemble roles (anonymous children at Miss Agatha Trunchbull’s school of horrors), Anita’s and my granddaughter Adria’s theatrical debut.

Need I say that Adria – who just turned thirteen and had been thwarted from a singing part in her school’s planned spring 2020 performance of Jack and the Beanstalk, by the emergence of, you guessed it! the Covid pandemic –  was absolutely brilliant in her performance?

I know I am a biased reporter, but in my years as teacher, writer, and literary translator, I think I’ve developed the critical skills – like Cervantes with his “misbegotten” child, Don Quixote, as he quipped in the introduction to Book One – to recognize an only adequate or even poor performance from a relative of mine.

As when Anita, who when she sang more than she does these days, would occasionally strike a flat note (as I would kindly point out in our practices), though the fault was clearly my mediocre skills as an accompanist on the guitar; when supported by more competent musical artists, she was always spot on. She stole the show at her five-year high school reunion when she asked the band if she could sing “Proud Mary”; skeptically, they said yes, and were then amazed at her professional performance.

Then there was Jonathan, my not-at-all misbegotten son, now a pretty decent writer and music journalist. But in my Spanish class he perfected the art of sleeping with head up and eyes open (I would always call on him at such moments and enjoy, with the rest of the class, his startled awakening). He took home B’s and later, C’s, proving that the teacher’s kid does not always get the high marks. Though my daughters’ more envious classmates still assumed that their A’s were the product of paternal favoritism.

But I digress.

Adria, in any case, performed with apparent ease and confidence and even delivered her one spoken solo line with all the Adria attitude that the role required and that we have become so familiar with. Nadina, who had been present as a parent assistant, says that Adria was at first shy but gained confidence through the almost nightly practices over the weeks preceding her public debut. She occupied her role quite convincingly, performing all of the choreography with precision and belting out the group songs with her companions, no sign of her previous shyness or anxiety.

But, speaking of Cervantes and his misbegotten child, I must mention the completely unexpected incident that made the night more remarkably joyous than could even have been anticipated. First, to orient those of you who aren’t familiar with Roald Dahl’s highly literate and witty children’s books (which were richly appreciated as much by me and Anita as by our children), a brief sketch of Matilda’s storyline:

Matilda is something of a child prodigy, who while growing up in the home of parents supremely ill-equipped to appreciate her gifts, has taught herself to read … and to read the Classics! … before starting school. Her favorite book is, improbably for a kindergartner or even first-grader, Moby Dick. Her father, Mr. Wormwood, is an ethically challenged used-car salesman who changes his phone number, every so often, to keep ahead of customers he’s cheated; and Mrs. Wormwood is in the thrall of fashion, beauty and fitness, and TV culture. To them, Matilda is a misbegotten “bookworm,” incomprehensible and embarrassing non-entity.  Then at school there is the ridiculously demoniacal Miss Trunchbull, tyrannical headmistress, to deal with. But it is  also at Trunchbull’s school that she meets Miss Honey, her teacher and champion. Between the two of them, and a bit of necessary magic, they become more than a match for the evil Trunchbull.

So, back to the story of my incomparably joyous evening. After the intermission, the uncommonly (?) thick-headed Harry Wormwood, who plans to get rich by his schemes, who has no use for his daughter the bookworm, comes out in front of the curtain to harangue his audience about the madness of reading in the age of this great wonder called TV.

(Okay, so this was written before the computer age.)

How many of you, he asks, have read a book?

I was one of those ingenuous souls who dared raise my hand. Seated in the middle section, a bit to my left of the short row of four chairs in the front row, I was an open and easy target. So he points to “the guy in the checkered shirt” (I had to look down at mine to confirm that he might mean me) and asked my name.

Brett, I said.

What? (I am a bit soft-spoken.)

Brett (a bit louder).

Still can’t make it out; or so he said, he was clearly going to come down anyway. So now he’s standing in front of me.

So, he asks, of all the books you’ve read, what is your absolute favorite.

Of course, everyone in my family who was present knew what I was going to say. Even the former student, friend of my youngest daughter and a particular favorite of mine, who I was surprised to have seen wave at me earlier, had to have known.

Every teacher, even the most introverted like me, has to become something of a performer before his classroom, and I was known for particular madnesses in my presentation of the story of my favorite knight-errant; plus, at home, for my prodigious ability to see a type of that superlative paladin in almost any point of conversation.

Don Quixote, I said.

Oh, you mean that Man of La Mancha guy?

Yes, that’s the one.

How long did it take you to read that book?

Oh, a few weeks.

Well, you know, they have a play about that. You can go and watch it in two hours and never have to read the book.

At which point, he hands me a copy of his business card (Wormwood Motors; Harry Wormwood, Founder/CEO; cautioning me to use the new phone number on the back) and invites me to stand with him in front of the stage, facing the audience. Then he leads the audience in a chorus of taunts such as he and Mrs. Wormwood liked to direct at poor Matilda.

You are a bookworm

You are a bookworm.

A stupid, filthy bookworm.

A stupid …

Well, you get the point. I don’t recall the exact words, but it went something like that. Then he asked if I was uncomfortable with those insults.

Oh, no, I said. Not at all.

And he let me sit down, thanking me for being such a good sport. After the last curtain, as we made our way to congratulate a particular member of the cast (and some others in the process), I found that I had become something of an accidental celebrity. My daughter-in-law to be, Stephanie’s partner, keeps reminding me:

You’re the bookworm, right? Or words to that effect.

So that’s the story of my wonderful, fantastic, incredible, truly joyous evening at the theater. Though a mere worm, in comparison to our beautiful granddaughter, I gave my best performance and took my figurative bows.

My friend Julie A. Sellers, whose scholarly book Merengue and Dominican Identity had previously intrigued me, has recently published a book of poems about her favorite literary figure: Anne Shirley, of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s series of Anne of Green Gables books, which Julie came to love when she was around Adria’s age. The new book, Kindred Verses: Poems Inspired by Anne of Green Gables, was published last year by the Blue Cedar Press in Wichita, Kansas. I had intended to review it back in February after I had just read the book, but time got away from me and now, these five or six months later, I will try to atone.

Anita and I met Julie back in 1996 when we and my parents were chaperoning a group of my high school students in Cuernavaca, Mexico. We were all in a homestay situation and had morning classes at the Centro Bilingüe where Julie was an instructor. She was boarding in the same house as Anita and I, and I have fond memories of her teaching us a Spanish-language version of the “Hokey-Pokey” song-and-dance. She had us dancing to that in our host couple’s dining room and then, all of us, around and around that long table, to some genuinely Latin rhythms.

I already knew, before reading these poems, that Anne Shirley is Julie’s Don Quixote. I was delighted not too long ago to read a draft of an essay she had written about Anne as a Quixotic figure. I have also been an Anne of Green Gables fan, though I came to know it by watching a very engaging public-television version back in the Eighties, when our children were just starting on their journeys in this world; after which, I read at least part of the first volume, amidst the deluge of university reading at the time, just to see that the writing was as engaging as the dramatization. Perhaps Mr. Wormwood would be pleased that I didn’t “waste my time” reading the whole series, though I doubt that this would have been his preferred type of programing (anymore than he, unlike the actor in his play, would have even heard of Man of La Mancha).

 Anyway, my favorites here are the prose poems, particularly the two long ones: “Looking for Anne: Postcard from Prince Edward Island” and “The Enchanted Forest.” And the verse is varied, from free verse to haiku; from a very nice sonnet, “Dancing Wings,” to a few written according to invented patterns, some more simple than others. Of those, I most enjoyed the two Golden Shovel poems after the form created by Terrance Hayes, an African American poet whose name I recognize from browsing through old and recent issues of The Boston Review (where I was planning to send a review of a different book; a revised draft will be appearing, instead, in a Canadian journal; but I digress).

In that poetic form, the last words of each line combine, when read from top to bottom, to form a line from an already existing poem. For instance, in “Windows,” the last words say, in descending order, “by the little gable window of that cottage far away”; the other, in “A New Day,” a line that forms a sentiment that I seem to remember as a lesson gratefully learned by Anne, who quite innocent of intention was always getting into loads of trouble: “tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.”

The sonnet, which I also quite like, goes by an abab, cdcd, efef, gg pattern, the rhymes in each stanza and in the closing couplet being different than any other: pane, morn, rain, born; tail, shreds, wail, threads; rays, lane, days, pain. And this attractive couplet: “Outside, within a tapestry of light, / And brilliant notes on dancing wings take flight.”

As a mediocre poet myself, I can’t fathom how she coordinates those acrobatics with the descending words at the end of each line, and somehow making them correspond so well! And I have to admire the natural smoothness of the sonnet: nothing in it sounds archaic or stilted.

Originally, in the following review, I had erroneously reported a swastika on the side of a plane that flew over a reservation; in fact, it was a Confederate flag. My apologies for the error.

My friend Michael Corrigan’s latest book, In the River Bottoms (2021), is not for children. It, like his his previous one (Brewer’s Odyssey, 2019), is a thriller – a literary thriller, I am tempted to say, given its many allusions to literature, film, and song, but by any standard a good read. It was hard to put down once I got started.

The brunt of it takes place between Pocatello, Idaho (home of Idaho State University, where Corrigan used to teach) and the adjoining Fort Hall Indian Reservation. The protagonist, Max Gibson, was an adjunct Communications teacher until that position was eliminated due to budget cuts, and is now an insurance claims adjuster in Pocatello. The plot is set in motion when a group of white supremacists provocatively fly a plane over the reservation – the plane emblazoned with a Confederate flag – and a pair of inebriated Indians shoot at it; when the plane circles back and buzzes them, a third person, Irish Indian Colleen O’Connor, who is not inebriated and was trying to prevent the others from shooting, is handed a gun and takes a shot in a self-defensive posture; and, after rising and moving away from them, the plane crashes, killing all on board, including the father and a cousin of Jack Garth, who had been on board but was ejected (with parachute) prior to the shooting and crash – and survived.

Colleen and Jack are both Max’s former students; Colleen’s father, Seamus, is a former IRA “terrorist” wanted for his crimes in England, and who married an Indian woman years earlier and stayed to live on the reservation. Colleen asks Max to be her attorney, and he asks her to give herself up to the reservation police commissioner. She says she’ll think about it, but that night is ambushed, severely beaten, and possibly shot and drowned in the Snake River, her or her corpse’s whereabouts still unknown. Seamus, who was already reclusive, goes further into hiding and proceeds to go after his daughter’s attackers. When he hacks the computer of the white supremacist club house in Pocatello, then blows the place up and snipes and kills two or three of them, all hell breaks loose.

I won’t tell you any more of the story. Given the tense nature and stark divisions of these times, though, which it seems to me have grown increasingly and steadily worse (more visible, at least) since before Obama’s election and through the ongoing madness of Trump’s Presidency and the January 6 hearings, I will say that I have found this novel particularly compelling and timely.  In this moment when it seems more and more clear that our democratic institutions, and those of us who value them, are at war with white supremacists and other reactionary forces – whether Aryan Nation (in disguise) and various militias, or Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, etc. – the portrayal of these lunatics in “The Republic of Idaho” is deeply unnerving. The truth is, frankly, that it scared the hell out of me, and events since then have done nothing to put me at my ease.

I think Michael Corrigan’s thriller is quite good, in any case, and I will add, for any filmmakers who might be reading this, eminently filmable. The characters are well-drawn and, even in the case of some in the enemy camp, not unsympathetic. I was glad that at least one of them, the former student of Max’s met in the second paragraph of chapter one, at which time he speaks courteously and even warmly to his former teacher, is redeemed in the end. I trust that my saying so is not too much of a spoiler.

A pandemic-related satire, with afterword

If I had ever read the dark “fantasy” called “The Mask of the Red Death,” it might have been in junior high in one of those Scholastic Book anthologies: Tales of Dread and Mystery by the Inimitable Poe,” or something of the sort. Be that as it may, I didn’t really remember the story when I encountered some citations from it in a pandemic-related commentary on the Consortium News website a couple of weeks ago, more or less.

The commentary and the allusion were compelling enough to me that I immediately rushed downstairs, grabbed my copy of The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe, and browsing the Table of Contents swiftly located it. Turns out that, while the story itself has been consigned to the shadows and cobwebs of my cluttered literary memory, the title had once sounded familiar enough to underline.

So: “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country,” Poe begins rather promisingly. But, if I may skip over the gory details and speed things along a bit, only when “his dominions were half depopulated” did the “happy and dauntless and sagacious” Prince Prospero finally do something about it.

And so what did he do about it, you ask? Did he, in his great and wise sagacity, send forth all the resources at his command – to tardily succor and assist the suffering masses? Well, no, of course not. No one, in those benighted times would have known what to do about it anyway. So let them die, if they must. Culling the heard, you know. Let them eat cake.

No, instead he “summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

A gated community, you might call it, stop-gap on the road (enter Jules Verne, here) to first settlement on Mars, which surely the novel red-death virus could not penetrate.

“The abbey was amply provisioned,” Poe writes. “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori …”

Stand-up comedians: “Two phantoms walked into a bar …”

“… there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were theirs. Without was the ‘Red Death.’”

Until, of course, it was not. And of all times the phantom might have chosen to make his bloody appearance (“bloody” in every sense of the word, British oath included), it was the great masked ball which was to have been everyone’s delight. And was, until the uninvited presence of another masked figure was noted, and “at length” produced a general reaction “first of disapprobation and surprise – then, finally, of horror, of disgust.

In a gathering of ghastly phantoms such as Poe’s narrator paints (the description of which, with the layout of the great chambers, I hasten to pass over), you might well think that anything would be allowed. And so it would have seemed to everyone present, had this intruder not gone too far.

The figure “was tall and gaunt and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave,” we are told, the face-concealing mask “made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse” that you couldn’t have told the difference had you come right up against it. And yet still, all might have been almost forgiven had he not had the audacity to dress up as the Red Death himself, clothing “dabbled in blood” and face all “bespeckled with the scarlet horror.”

Allow me to pause, dear reader, while I gather my bated breath and give you the space to gather yours. And while doing so, perhaps we can all stop and consider who this masked invader might be.

Some illegal pilgrim, perhaps, foul cockroach from one of those pestiferous regions outside the Insurmountable Walls built up along our borders – who somehow found the means of over-leaping or under-tunneling them?

And how, pray tell, will the ever “happy and dauntless and sagacious” host respond when he beholds the sight?

“‘Who dares?’ he demanded hoarsely – ‘who dares to make mockery of our woes? –’”

Wait, whose woes? Aren’t all the woeful ones outside in that “external world,” somehow fending for themselves?

“‘ – Uncase the varlet – that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements. Will no one stir at my bidding – stop and strip him, I say, of those reddened vestures of sacrilege!’”

But no one dare touch him. Until the prince, embarrassed by “his own momentary cowardice,” rushes at him with drawn dagger. But confronted with the reality that, only appearing to flee, suddenly turns to face him, our Naked Emperor – (oh, pardon! I’m dipping into someone else’s fantasy, mixing metaphors) – I mean, our not-so-dauntless prince screams, drops the drawn dagger, and falls prostrate in bloody death.

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death,” our undaunted narrator concludes. “He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall…. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

*

Thus endeth our dreadful tale. But without beating the horse dead, if you will, a brief afterword:

Am I hallucinating, or did the U.S. government just hand an almost bottomless slush fund to the same financial institutions who tanked the economy a dozen or so years past? With the Foreclosure King himself, Wall Street criminal extraordinaire, in charge of the Treasure? With toothless oversight by a token watchdog assigned from the Naked Emperor’s own court?

So, a dozen years ago we bail out the Top Dogs, the same ones whose greed and predation crashed the economy in the first place – and that worked out so well that we’re doing it again, only on steroids?

And how much of that ill-gained lucre trickled down to you? How much of it’s in your wallet?

Wait. Isn’t that the Naked Emperor, Himself, cozied up to the Socialist Trough? He and his emperors- and empress-in-training, looking after the bottom line of their Imperial Emoluments Foundation? (And why didn’t the opposition party’s leadership impeach a year or two earlier on the utterly obvious violations of that Constitutional clause?)

But we can’t direct the nation’s factories to mass-produce some protective gear and other important stuff for our nurses and doctors because that’s – what’s the word – Socialist? And we can’t have healthcare for all (whether we want it or not) because that’s Socialist, too?

Isn’t it funny how the ones who get shaken down and accused of theivery are always the ones on the bottom – the underdogs; los de abajo, as they say south of that Beautiful, “Bloody,” Border Wall –while those at the top make out like bandidos?

And how the ones leading the way and helping their neighbor- and even distant-countries in these times of pandemic are poor and/or Socialist ones like Cuba and Venezuela, or Iran and China? While the United States of America remain in various states of confusion, denial, and unpreparedness?

How is it, again, that my “Honorary Uncle” Bernie can’t be President because he refuses to say how he’ll pay for his Socialist programs? Even though he’s had a list of options up on his website for, like, ever?

And why can’t we let some lowly American workers get away with being paid a few dollars more on pandemic-related unemployment than they earned on the job? Or why can’t we spare a couple thousand per person per month until all the dust on this crisis has clearly settled?

Forfend that we even speak of canceling mortgage or rent payments and student loan debt and anything else that might make the average Jane’s and Joe’s lives easier!

Yet no one asks how we’ll pay to continue bombing foreign countries into submission for decades and decades on end? Or how we’ll pay for that Great Tax Cut for the Plutocrats? Oh, and that other one? And the one coming up? And …

Maybe it’s just a matter of “survival of the fittest,” of “culling the herd,” as leaders from our own Naked Emperor to his friend across the Pond have been heard whispering? And even some of our European partners on the Continent – inevitable deaths and all, but what’s to be done about it?

And how is it that we tell when a Socialist experiment has failed – like Venezuela’s, say; or Chile’s – when we kill it in the cradle and fight it in the jungles and choke it off with our brutal economic sanctions and blockades (which, pandemic or not, we only ever hunker down on!) and raise obscure opposition leaders to the throne – sorry, I mean seat of government?– well, you get the drift.

Is that how we build democratic nations, too? Is that what our planes or our drones are doing when they drop missiles on weddings in Afghanistan or finance the bombing by Saudi murderers of schools and hospitals and orphanages in Yemen?

Oh, and from the vantage point of that kid whose whole family perished in that drone attack in Afghanistan, who would you say are the terrorists and who the freedom fighters?

Have I left anything out?

Anyway, just asking. Because in the era of fact-free governance and timid, corporatist journalism, it may seem that we have no answers.But it’s the questions, then, that really matter, right?

Asking the right ones, I mean – “rude” as they might sometimes seem to Naked and/or Oblivious Power.

Iphigenia and Her Sisters: On the Crisis of Perpetual War and Sacrifice

Shortly after my essay “On the Rights, Dignity, and Independence of Women” appeared in this space a few weeks ago, I received an email response from Mónica Prandi, who said that she had enjoyed it and would I mind writing another essay on the same subject for the Spanish-language journal Letra Urbana. I am happy to report that the new essay, “Ipigenia y mis hijas en los tiempos de Kavanaugh,” is online now in issue #40 of that journal (a previous essay appeared in issue #33). Those of my readers who are conversant in Spanish and would enjoy reading it can find it at letraurbana.com – just scroll to the bottom of the page where the link to my article appears.

While much of this essay is adapted fairly closely from its predecessor, I have structured it around my recent visit – with daughter, Stephanie and her wife, Rachel – to a small theater at the University of Evansville (Indiana) where we saw a production of Ellen McLaughlin’s play, Iphigenia and Other Daughters. Without going into detail here, it is a feminist interpretation of the episode of the sacrifice of King Agamemnon’s young daughter so that the winds would blow again and he and his famous crew could proceed to their bloody conquest of Troy. In this version, the men are mere shadows; what matters takes place in the private thoughts and words of the women, including those of the virginal sacrifice in the before and the hereafter of that crucial event. Iphigenia’s ultimate triumph lies in her conscious rejection – echoing her sister, Chrysothemis’s well-articulated resistance to Electra’s planned vengeance against their mother for the murder of their father – of the patriarchal logic of perpetual war and sacrifice.

A principal advantage of using Iphigenia’s story is that it brings the ugly patriarchal bullying of the Kavanaugh hearings into direct conversation with our own bloody spectacle of a now seventeen-year war against terrorism. There Iphigenia is, alongside the hundreds of thousands of murdered children in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen.

Not that anyone over here is counting. But if we were counting, how many times over have we avenged ourselves for the three thousand dead in the crashing of those planes into the Twin Towers? If the fruits of our sowing of democracy in the Middle East is ruin and the spawning of new terrorists to replace the old (not to mention the further enrichment of our war profiteers), isn’t it perhaps time to bring our experiment in “benevolent” imperialism home? And shrink our military budget by some hundreds of million dollars – at least.

And this without mentioning all the havoc we have wreaked in Latin America, where in the name of democracy we have put down numerous democratic movements over the last century. This is nowhere more evident than in Central America, where we have intervened against democratic movements and installed or bolstered the regimes of militarists, gangsters, and autocrats numerous times over the past hundred years. Hence those threatening “caravans” of poor brown people heading for our land of promise, to save their own or their children’s lives; like the displaced Mexican farmers and their families who came, after NAFTA, to re-build their lives (or to die in our deserts).

The racism also strikes closer to the national heart, as illustrated by the Charleston church massacre in June of 2015 and the more recent murder of two Black shoppers in a supermarket in nearby Louisville, Kentucky – by a man who had just been trying to get into a Black church to shoot it up. I have just read Jesse Hagopian’s interview with Louisville teacher Michelle Randolph (for Common Dreams: “A Climate of Racism Took Two Lives at My Kroger,” 11/19/18: www.commondreams.org). One thing that startled me was the discussion of HB 169, “the gang bill,” which allows Kentucky police to classify any group of youth walking through a mall (or elsewhere) as a gang – I say “any group of youth,” but as happened in Mississippi after the passage of a similar law, the primary target (especially for the enhanced sentences that it allows) is bound to be those Black youth who, just by walking around like any of our own children, make so many white people uncomfortable just for the fact of their being.

I recommend that article to any of my readers who might still believe that we have no race problem in America. We do, and we have had it since before the American Revolution when we brought African slaves to this land. It is embedded in the Founders’ “Originalist” Constitution and has survived in changing forms, over the century and a half since the Civil War, in our criminal justice system.

Plenty of other evidence exists to establish the point, but the obstacles to knowing are great. It is not that the haters are monsters; the truth is more complex, more close to the bone. A man who was helping to save the life of the recent shooter at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh – a Jewish man, member of that very synagogue – observed that it was not evil he saw in his eyes but ignorance, fear, and confusion.

Who has been stoking the flames of that fear and confusion?

Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders may call this fake news, but hateful words do have consequences. And while the Stoker-in-Chief and his Messenger are hardly alone, they bear a tremendous deal of responsibility for the deteriorating state of our present union.

Small Graces in the Valley of the Shadow of Trump (with malice for none, if you’ll pardon the pun)

“We won’t be silenced.”–Jorge Ramos, Univision journalist and newscaster

In an essay still forthcoming in Hourglass Literary Magazine (see 8/17/16 blog), I speak of certain “small graces” that help us wade through whatever intervening darkness might otherwise engulf and drag us down in life. Indeed, for those readers accustomed to these occasional scribblings of mine, it will come as no surprise that the electoral results of November 8 did send me into one of those spirals toward the Land of Despond, although my intuition had been warning me all along that it might well happen. When it did, I was more disheartened than really surprised.

Trump to Ramos as he signals to his people to have him removed from the premises

So I ask those of my readers who might have voted for Herr Trump—for whatever variety of motives; with hopeful heart or held nose—to indulge me any signs of that honest discontent while I give thanks for the small graces that do continue appearing to me. Which give me reason, as well as strength, to struggle on.

First, to those closest to me who were my initial support:

• Anita, near tears of her own and startled by mine, who hurried to notify our daughters and son that their father needed comforting (I had been trying to express in words the sadness I felt for all the children who were already so fearful of the wall that might soon separate them from their parents—all the more since watching Jorge Ramos’s documentary, Hate Rising, on my computer the previous night: his interview with a classroom of those children, in particular; and also with some white supremacists just up the road from me inPaoli, Indiana—the virulence and unreason of their hatred, pre-existent but newly vindicated by authoritarian demagoguery, so overwhelming);

• My daughters, both of whom answered, for my sake, their mother’s call to share a dinner out with us the following evening: Stephanie, conscientious and empathetic social-work therapist, who also cried that night thinking of her own unorthodox family (two wives/mothers, one teenage son), the struggling people she counsels, and so many others, known to her and unknown; and her sister, Nadina, who marveled at the ubiquitous and vindictive Facebook rants of otherwise kind, generous, loving, even upright and church-going people;

• Their brother, Jonathan, who called me on the phone from his home three hours north in Indianapolis; and who sent a card bearing a message about love—received a couple of days later—from that radical dreamer John Lennon;

• My vivacious and good-hearted cousin, Jeri Lynn, to whom Jonathan had confided on Facebook that I was feeling low, who also sent me a card with her own personal sentiments of shared commiseration and condolence; as well as the women of the Southern Indiana Writers group who, whatever the content of their individual perspectives and politics, lifted my spirits at our weekly Thursday-evening meeting—

L to R: Brett Alan Sanders, Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Ana Ona

But then, on November 29, the event I have been leading up to: on a stage on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus (IUPUI)—I, American-Argentine poet  Luis Alberto Ambroggio, and fellow translator Ana Ona—in front of an auditorium full of almost two hundred people, mostly students, where we discussed and read from two of Ambroggio’s recent books; as my readers may know, the one that I translated for him (who I met that evening in person for the first time) is Todos somos Whitman/We Are All Whitman, his Latin American response to the “Song of Myself” and tribute to that Great Bearded Bard, published this year by Arte Público Press in Houston, Texas.

I had been to the Lilly Auditorium before, visiting it about five years ago with Buenos Aires writer María Rosa Lojo to discuss and read from both versions of her novel La pasión de los nómades, or Passionate Nomads (Aliform Publications, 2011). And now, for this second time, I was invited by Professor Rosa Tezanos-Pinto, whose published work includes a separate anthology of literary criticism about each of those writers’ work; and who also edited an impressively thick volume of roughly thirty years of Ambroggio’s poetic production.

To say that this was a moment of no small grace for me is perhaps an understatement. I would say, in fact, that no single book event that I have participated in has been a bigger one.

Dr. Rosa Tezanos-Pinto (front, in dark suit); Dr. Ambroggio, (behind her), and students

Why? For the gracious enthusiasm of this group of students, for one thing, several of whom shook my hand and thanked me effusively for my contribution and for even being there; and who later, after the meal that they had prepared in honor of the three of us (each dish representing the country of their families’ origins), were among those purchasing the Whitman book and asking for mine and Luis Alberto’s autographs.

And then—not to mention the usual graciousness of Dr. Tezanos-Pinto and her husband, José Vargas-Vila—there was Liz Goodfellow, friendly university employee (and non-Spanish speaker) who had arranged our hotel accommodations; and who also asked me, with credible signs of having been touched by my translations, if I wouldn’t also sign her copy.

Ambroggio and Sanders, the Whitman reading

So with all of that, in particular hers and others’ repeated and insistent praises, like Don Quixote after an unexpected victory I may have gotten a slightly inflated head. But not to worry: it was only a mildly intoxicating feeling, not on the whole unhealthy and, if I may say so, quite delightful. When I fell asleep a short time later in its fragrant mists, just imagine that it was into the most pleasant dreams of literary glory; and which appear, after all, to have done me no lasting harm.

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Speaking of unlikely Quixotic victories, can it be possible that, as I was composing the rough draft of these words last night, the Standing Rock Sioux scored at least a temporary victory against my good knight’s evil magicians and the determined capitalists and enforcers of the Dakota Access Pipeline? Who had so lately taken to showering them—water protectors, or agitators, or “bad, bad people,” as I seem to recall our triumphant president-elect having characteristically dismissed them—with blasts of icy water in already sub-freezing temperatures? Blowing off an arm, here, with a concussion grenade, and taking out an eye, there, with a rubber bullet, for good measure?

Militarized police drenching peaceful water protectors in freezing weather, during a protest against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. November 20, 2016. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

To protect them from the ravages of hypothermia, I suppose; so that now, to prevent that from happening to them (or for whatever official reasons or unofficial intentions), the Army Corps of Engineers decides to call for the environmental study that may or may not force the “big snake” of the oil barons to direct its path around Native lands—as it had already been re-routed before from Bismarck, with far less spectacle and show of force, when the good and respectably white residents of that city had previously petitioned.

For such graces large and small, in any case, let us rejoice! And lay praises on the brave community of nonviolent resisters who fought on in the great tradition of their ancestors—as well as of Henry David Thoreau, the Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Palestinian support for Standing Rock Sioux protesting DAPL.

And, from however near or far they came, those others from the populous and diverse United States of America and beyond, including those who just sent money, made phone calls, or wrote letters; but none more so than the courageous American veterans of foreign wars, whether of Native or Immigrant stock, who came this time by the thousands to really defend the freedoms (for perhaps their first time) of the American people.

So let’s not allow the dividers to divide us, my good neighbors and kith and kin, from those who might become our faithful allies. Together with whom, if we dare imagine it, through whatever darkness may lie ahead, we might still become the more united … mutually reliant and peaceable … and truly democratic people that our better angels would have us be.

Blessèd, as scripture says, be the uniters and the peacemakers!

“Vict’ry?” said Don Quixote to Sancho Panza. “Vict’ry!”