I drove past someone today whose expression was one of utter and abject defeat. Not so much that I was compelled to stop and ask her why she looked the way she did, but so much so that had I done all the stopping and asking, she wouldn't have told me.
We see people like this everyday and I'm not sure in the almost seventeen years I've been back in the Land of the Round Doorknobs that I'm not seeing more of them now than I did when the wheels went down at JFK on Columbus Day all those years ago. Now the hardness of this world slowly grinds your dreams away and the day dawns when we realize there are two things we do alone, be born and die.
We are social beings who form acquaintanceships, friendships, alliances with others so our kind sometimes so the days don't seem so long or the nights so lonely. I can still remember the total joy of holding my new-born son practically directly over my head with both hands in the delivery room. He was, moments into his life, my deal with God though my perception and belief in the latter (or should I capitalize Latter?) has shifted in the course of the last twenty-six years. My faith in my son, and later, at her birth, in my daughter, is complete and all-encompassing. As I told them at various (and countless) times as they were growing up, things they do I may (and do) find hateful or hurtful, but that could never change how I feel about them, ever.
The look in this woman's eyes this morning was beyond weariness and wariness. It was cold and abiding hatred-somewhere, somehow the things we could and should do for one another, even casual strangers, did not happen for her. We have been weighed and found wanting and I wondered, for the amount of time it took me to pass her by and watch her eyes take my full measure and then dismiss me, how we two could share the planet, and in our case, the same city of residence.
I had an idle thought on what she must have been thinking while watching the Democratic Party National Convention and then realized she, like so many, in Norwich, in New London County, in Connecticut, on the Eastern Seaboard, in the United States, in North America, in the Western Hemisphere, on Earth (I always loved Eugene O'Neill and that micro to macro recitation. He's basically a home boy from down the road in New London. If you've read any reasonable amount of his work you'd agree that drawing the line between heredity and environment is a dicey proposition.) didn't watch television such as this because so little of it has any relevance or meaning in, or to, her life.
Surviving is triumph enough for those whom we rarely see on a daily basis, but who exist nevertheless, whether we see them or not. Once every four years, we fire all of the guns at once and explode into space, but for more and more of us less and less of our system of government, our social conventions and support systems make any sense. For them, and by extension, us, we've lost our way and no amount of balloons falling to a convention hall floor, no endless playing of Happy Days Are Here again (it got us through The Great Depression, why not another?) is going to right the ship of our lives. Instead we end up with Nilsson's anthem, though never a hit, and we discover it's so easy to sing along even when we don't know the words.
-bill kenny
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