Phew? – Reggie Morrisey

It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
Mary Oliver

Beginning November 3, I detected my anxiety dialing down a notch. Each fresh morning, relief floods my being, assuring me the threat of annihilation we've experienced since November 2016 ended with the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. On November 7, Americans danced in the streets.

A month later I felt the anxiety dialing up. Republicans said nothing about thugs protesting at the home of Michigan Secretary of State as she decorated a Christmas tree with her four-year-old son. Hawks voiced no alarm as Trump loyalists commandeered the Pentagon. The G.O.P. urged denial election results. Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe wrote: “It had looked as though we dodged a bullet with Trump’s defeat. Turns out there were more in the gun.”

The GOP is not merely cowering until the Twitterer-in-Chief leaves office. It shelters a cabal brewing his drip, drip coup. Attorneys generals for 18 states took a sledgehammer to the law on the steps of the Supreme Court and 126 members of Congress signed on. Proud Boys roamed D.C. streets menacing hapless pedestrians. What does the radical right intend to do with the Republic they seem bent on destroying?

Writing a Wrong

I have yet to decide if I'm on Twitter or Fritter appealing to Georgians to flip the U.S. Senate by electing Jon Ossoff and Rev. Warnock. My sidekick of 30 years, Vincent Mancuso, handwrites postcards to Georgia voters and permits use of his art images in my campaigning tweets. Georgia, which ranks 42nd of 50 states in the poverty rate, deserves a fair shake and the U.S. economy a stimulus for all struggling citizens.

If Stepford Senator Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue prevail in their perverted American Dream of sweeping up all the marbles while reportedly profiting from shares in manufacturing body bags, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will still soldier on. This household will join the campaign to retire Senator Marco Rubio in 2022, leaving him time to reflect on the bible he quotes while disdaining the poor and downtrodden.

Creation Inspires

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Mary Oliver

In the midst of 2020 comes an unveiling of a model of one human cell. It is billed as:

"The most detailed model of one human cell to date, obtained using x-rays, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryoelectron microscopy data sets... Transformation of the Cellular Landscape through a Eukaryotic Cell, by Evan Ingersoll Ingersoll Gael McGill ~ Digizyme's Custom Maya Molecular Software Biología Al Instante"

Scientists portray one intricate cell among 37.2 trillion that constitute a human being. Turns out we are gorgeous to the core!

Gorgeous is as gorgeous does:

Intelligence

President Barack Obama got 29 hours worth as my attention as I listened to his recently released memoir A Promised Land. Obama conveys the uphill story without whining, a triumph in itself. He is gracious in acknowledging those who stood by him, and he manages to see the humor in life.

Self Knowledge

Thomas Butler-Bowden's 50 Psychology Classics develops snapshots of 20th Century thinkers who moved beyond Sigmund Freud to explore human developmental stages, social influences and behavioral conditioning. Research into abhorrent behavior revealed the seduction of gory authoritarianism we see playing out on streets today.

Courage

Novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, who is a British-Caribbean London transplant living in New York City, presents six essays written about the female condition, her biracial experience and the implications of the global pandemic in Intimations.

She writes:

If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it’s because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people.

Humor

In the 2020 book Is this Anything?, Jerry Seinfeld dips into 45 years of jokes he wrote. His childhood acceptance of the Superman television show left me admitting I too failed to question why Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen never guessed Clark Kent's identity, eyeglasses the only disguise and red vinyl Superman socks a staple of his street clothes. What a brilliant life form.

Compassion

Curiouser is the book Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons ... by Heather Lende. The obituary writer for the newspaper of an Alaskan town of 2,000 takes a journalistic approach to obituaries, seeking the significance in individual lives. Full disclosure: I never before thought about people living in an Alaskan town. Among the most telling obituaries is the drowning death of a fisherman that prompted the town's people to purchase and hand out to the fishing fleet $2,000 worth life-preserver suspenders. Some stalwarts refused to wear it, thinking maybe the life savers were for sissies.

Writing Excellence

Julian Barnes intrigues with the nonfiction The Man in the Red Coat, that being the figure in the John Singer Sargent full-length portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918). The doctor hobnobbed with royalty in Belle Epoque circles. Barnes approaches the topic with a style to make for exquisite reading.

Belle Epoque Etched

I just learned my paternal grandmother Bridget Delia Harrington (1886-1914) of County Cork, Ireland, lived during Belle Epoque. Her name appears on a 1901 census of Marino Street, Bantry. At age 15, Bridget, who spoke Irish and English and could read and write, boarded in the house headed of a hotel porter and his dressmaker wife, parents of two young children. Bridget's occupation was listed as dressmaker. Four young dressmakers lived there.

This genealogy tidbit led me to recall a gown that stopped me in my tracks at the 1982 La Belle Epoque costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As with the image of one dazzling human cell, I could not take my eyes off the gown's Irish crochet lace. What it must have taken forgotten laborers to create such a work of art? Someone treasured and preserved it. Like gorgeous us and democracy.