Today’s New York Times broke my heart by informing me (can you believe it? — A Newspaper!) that while the electors in the Electoral College will vote tomorrow (Monday, December 19), we won’t actually know the results until January 6. Shit.
UPDATE!
I was wrong. I misunderstood. Perhaps I read the Russian rules.
Trump just now went over the 270 needed to become the 45th (and possibly last) President of the United States.
WE’RE OFFICIALLY SCREWED.
Now back to my original post which is now completely irrelevant:
Still, I want to take just one more opportunity to beg:
Dear Electors:
Please don’t let Donald Trump actually become President of the United States. He’s cray-cray. And could you possibly imagine listening to that 6th grade speaking style for 4 years? Not to mention the fact that he’s already pissed off most of Asia.
Oh and there is that whole bit about Russia interfering with our election.
Google Image
So please, please, vote carefully. Vote as if the future of the world is in your hands. Because it is.
My old friend Ray died this past Monday. Suicide. She leapt to her death from a parking garage. I don’t know any more than that as yet. But Ray has been troubled for many years. There will be a memorial service next month.
***
Ray and I laughed and cried together since 7th grade, when serendipity moved me from one seat in Homeroom to one across the table from her. To be honest, I was terrified of her. You see, Ray was cool, she was popular, she was fun and funny. Everybody wanted to be her friend in 7th grade. But she wanted to be my friend. I’ve always felt that she changed my life with that action; she raised my social status in school. I was no longer a non-desirable. I was a “Friend of Ray’s.” And that was something special.
For the last 18 hours since I got home after learning the news, I’ve tried to write my feelings, my memories, my heartbreak. But I’m failing. How do you put a life — anyone’s life, but especially such a complex life into a few words?
Each relationship is a jar full of fragments of memories and laughter and tears. With Ray, the edges of them were sometimes jagged, and it was never clear when you’d reach into that jar and slice into something painful for her.
Because Ray’s life was full of disappointment and pain. But it was also full of laughter and memories that she held onto and didn’t let go. She was smart and funny. A talented actress in high school. A beautiful writer who wanted us all to write and once had a party where she gave us blue notebooks and we all spent the entire night writing.
Mostly, she wanted love. Craved it. Begged for it.
Still, she frequently acted to push love away. She alienated family and friends alike, especially by middle of the night phone calls – that continued in spite of constant requests, tears, anger, etc. Often, she just wanted to chat about old times. She didn’t show up when she was supposed to meetings with friends. Couldn’t stand to be in groups. Made many poor choices in life. She frankly pissed everybody off a lot. It made her a hard person to put up with. I along with everybody who cared about her became exasperated and felt helpless. We went in and out of her life. After the last time she called me in the middle of the night, I blocked her from my home phone; she had only my cell.
Friends and family tried to help, but helping is sometimes easier said than done. Certainly than done successfully.
For the last 12 years until about a year ago, Ray worked customer service in a Bed, Bath and Beyond. I learned of the difficulties of retail workers through her – how schedules were never firmed up, so workers who couldn’t survive on those low retail wages could get a second job.
She told the most wonderful stories she told of the people who came to her counter for returns. She could tell the stories so that the incredibly foolish mistakes of customers were endearing. As if each silly error were a personal gift to Ray. I’d been trying to talk her into writing a book.
One story stands out, though.
A man placed an oscillating fan on the counter, its head bent down at the hinge, facing the floor. Looking awkward.
“It doesn’t work,” he said (Ray imitating his voice). “It’s broken. Its neck is broken.”
The man had clearly never lifted the head of the fan from its packing position. So when he plugged it in and turned it on, it turned in a jerky motion like a Rocke ‘em, Sock ‘em Robot.
Ray straightened the neck, plugged it in, and showed him that it worked just fine. She sent the customer away, happily with his fan, somehow without making him feel foolish.
Since yesterday, I have been thinking that Ray herself was a lot like that fan. Her head was always bent incorrectly, awkwardly. In her case, it was towards the past – towards her (our) wonderful childhood. Sadly, there was no friendly customer service representative of life to help straighten her towards a life built more on the present and the future.
Good bye, Ray. I love you. I miss you. I will always hold you dear to my heart.
May you rest in the peace that always alluded you in life. But may your heart be ever full of love and laughter as it always was.
***
Many of us have thought about or attempted suicide, or know someone who is in crisis. There is help.
She told the story every year with a warm smile on her face. Sometimes her eyes got a little bit misty.
“It was 1943, and the War was on, and your father was in the Navy, on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. We never knew where he was. Like all the other boys I knew, he was in danger every day. We lived for the mail, we were terrified of unfamiliar visitors in uniform. A telegram sent us into a panic. And ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ had just been recorded by Bing Crosby. It was Number One on the Hit Parade.”
That’s how Mom started the story every time.
Of course I’ll Be Home For Christmas was Number One that year. Everyone, or just about, was hoping that someone they loved would, in fact, be home for Christmas. That all the boys would be home for good. But all too many people were disappointed. I doubt there were many dry eyes when that song came on the radio that year or for the next few.
Mom and Dad got engaged right around Pearl Harbor Day, but the War lengthened their courtship significantly because Dad enlisted shortly after the attack. It was to be a long war, and a long engagement. But Mom was in love with her handsome man. But Dad was even more so.
Mom, Circa 1943
My Dad was drop-dead gorgeous, and I have heard that in his single days, he was a bit of a ladies’ man. Every girl in town, it seemed, had a crush on Dad.
Dad, Circa 1943
In fact, my Aunt Sally once told me that she had been manning a booth at a church bizarre one Saturday in about 1995, when an elderly woman came up to talk to her.
“Are you Freddie E’s sister?” the woman asked Aunt Sal.
“Yes I am. Do you know my brother?” Aunt Sal responded.
“I did,” she sighed. “I haven’t seen him since we graduated from high school in 1935. Sixty years ago. He was,” she stopped to think of just the right word, “… He was dream-my.”
“He still is,” Sally quipped.
One day not long after after Mom had passed, Dad and I were looking at some pictures I hadn’t seen before.
“Dad,” I told him with wonder looking at a particularly good shot, “You should have gone to Hollywood. You’d have been a star.”
“Nah,” Dad said. “Mom would never have gone with me. And once the war was over, well, I wasn’t going anywhere else without her.”
Dad circa 1935
Dad never quite got over feeling lucky that he had Mom. And he never stopped loving her.
But back to Mom’s story.
“It was Christmas morning, 1943, and I went over to visit Dad’s mom and dad. Grammy E’d had symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease for seven or eight years at that point. She could still move around (she was later, when I knew her, almost completely paralyzed), but she could barely talk.”
Mom continued. “But your Dad’s mom was singing ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ Well, she was trying to sing it, any how. She kept repeating that one line, over and over again. ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ I thought she was crazy.”
“You see,” Mom would say, “Your father had somehow managed to get Christmas leave – he was coming home! He wanted to surprise me and wouldn’t let anyone tell me he was coming. He was expected any minute, and there I was, trying to leave. But I couldn’t stay. That song made me cry; Freddie was so far away, and in so much danger. I couldn’t bear hearing it.”
So Mom left after a while, she had other people and her own family to see. Later Dad caught up with her and they spent most of Christmas together. Both of them always smiled at the memory. Dad was home for Christmas that year, just like in the song. It was a magical year for them both.
Mom was always touched by Dad’s surprise and by his mother’s loving gesture in fighting back the paralysis that was taking over her body to try to get her son’s girl to stay. To sing when she could barely speak.
“I’ve always wished I’d stayed.”
We lost Mom on Easter of 1997, and Dad really never got over her passing.
The song and Mom’s story took on an even more poignant meaning in 2000. Because on Christmas of that year, Dad joined Mom again for the holiday. He went “home” to Mom for Christmas again, joining her in the afterlife.
Even through the sadness of losing Dad on Christmas, I always have to smile when I hear that song. Because I can just see the warmth in Mom’s eyes now as she welcomed Dad home. This time, I’m sure she was waiting for him with open arms.
***
I re-post this story every year, because it makes my heart feel a little bit merrier.
What the hell. Do this. It is just one of the ways we can express our feelings about the fact — yes FACT — that the Russians influenced the 2016 American election.
The entire reason that the Electoral College exists is to protect our nation from an unqualified candidate. Sooo….
Call the White House: Brief the Electoral College on Russia’s sabotage before December 19
The CIA has said that the Russian government sabotaged this election with the express purpose of aiding Donald Trump. Such foreign interference is exactly what the Founding Fathers feared when they set up the Electoral College—as a final buffer before electing the President of the United States.
Before the Electoral College meets on Monday December 19, President Obama must declassify any and all relevant intelligence to Russia’s interference—and officials must brief the electors before they make this decision.
Please call the White House at 1-855-999-1663 and leave this message to President Obama:
I am requesting that President Obama declassify any and all intelligence related to Russia’s interference of the presidential election—and to brief all members of the Electoral College before they meet on Monday, December 19.
Daily Kos wants you to let them know how it went. But frankly, I’m only asking you to make the one call to the White House.
Do I think this will work?
Do I think that enough electors will change their votes?
Do I think that Hillary will become president?
Sadly “No” is the answer to all of these.
But I don’t know about you, but I must speak up (while I still can). For all the things that are important to me that I yammer on about all the time on this blog.
Again and again — we all must speak up. It’s time to get used to using our loudest, most effective protest voices — not our inside voices. We’re going to be calling this number a whole lot in the next few years.
Image from IMBd. I’m pretty sure that Putin and his Pals are not the nice Russians that arrived on our shores in this 1968 movie. Positive.
The Russians hacked into both the DNC and the RNC, did nothing with the RNC but used selected information gleaned from the DNC to attempt (and obviously succeed) in tilting the election towards Donald Trump
The Obama Administration convened a meeting to fully disclose this frightening intelligence during which, REPUBLICAN Mitch McConnell downplayed the information, claiming that it was too political to disclose prior to the election;
The FBI Director, James Comey, agreed that the intelligence regarding the Russian attempt to influence the U.S. election was not conclusive and full information should not be disclosed;
The FBI Director, James Comey, did not disclose that the Russians were trying to tilt the election towards Donald Trump, but tilted the election towards Donald Trump significantly by disclosing — 11 days prior to the election — the existence of Anthony Weiner emails that had no bearing on Hillary Clinton or her candidacy for president and that, two days prior to the election, said “never mind.”
“President-elect” Donald Trump announces that his choice for Secretary of State is a man who received the “Order of Friendship,” one of the highest honors a foreigner may be awarded from Russia.
Yet, there are no calls to postpone the vote of the Electoral College. Or the Inauguration. No calls to question the legitimacy of Trump’s “Victory.”
FiftyFourandAHalf 