American Panorama

The Not Dead Yet Poets Society held its 4th annual reading at the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery in south Minneapolis. We sat on the graves of Civil War veterans and folks who crossed the big river in the 19th century to see what might be on the other side. Mind you, when they crossed over they had about as much understanding of what lay ahead as they had of the afterlife. But then, none of us knows when we turn off the light at night whether we’ll wake up in the morning. It’s all a crap shoot, isn’t it? I pulled my chair up to the flat gravestone where lay one William Dawson, 1833-1871. It occurred to me that I had no idea how an infantryman from Minnesota, shot down perhaps at Antietam, would get back from Maryland to be buried at home. It’s all a mystery, isn't it?  I sat back and listened to a keyboard and tenor sax duo and a dozen poets reading work dedicated to their ancestors. The carpet of American history rolled out to the horizon. 

Photo by John Kostyk on Unsplash

Almost exactly one year ago, I posted a piece entitled What Are Old Friends For? I had lived in Minnesota for a total of six months at that point and was really just getting the hang of it, the crowd of Norwegian faces sprinkled with Hmong and Somali; the endless suburbs sprouting up where the farms used to be. I yearned for my old friends, the ones who were more like me and kept me warm and cozy like ratty flannel pajamas I could curl up in. I wasn’t very brave about reaching out to new people. When I worked up the nerve to call someone and made a date for coffee, they sometimes cancelled, giving me the opportunity to feel aggrieved about someone else’s toothache. Everything was provisional, a crap shoot and a mystery. It was not that different from being a single woman trying to meet men. I couldn’t get the taste of vulnerability out of my mouth. When I did spend an afternoon with another person, we would have to get through the research phase. Where did you grow up? What kind of work did you do? Do your kids live here? I don’t even remember having comparable conversations in the Berkshires where a great many people came from New York. Everyone was so familiar that you could assume, by just a few common locutions, which subway line they took to which enormous broken-down outer borough public high school. The Berkshires seemed like a place where people from New York went when they discovered that tomatoes grow on vines. 

Now I feel like Columbus, settling in Minnesota. As if by showing up in the midwest, overflowing with chutzpah, I had discovered America. As if no one had every been here before. Just as a vast and complex indigenous culture flourished on this continent before the explorer set sail from Genoa, so people have miraculously led fully articulated lives without ever sipping an egg cream. People have different stories and the point, I’m beginning to understand, is not to find sameness in the new people I meet but to recognize and appreciate difference. To step back and get a panoramic view of the enormity of this country, the settlements in the now, above ground, and those in the before down below. You have to parachute into the heartland and open yourself up to a thousand life lines, a great many fierce Atlantic crossings and childhoods in families scraping by during the long winters on the farm. 

At the same time, it’s worth remembering, hanging out in the cemetery listening to the diversity of ancestor stories offered by the poets, that we are all headed there, into the cemetery or scattered in the great river. And further that we are all subject to the vagaries of public life at this tender moment in American history. For those of us in my age cohort, it is possible that we will spend our remaining time breathing the foul air of rancid populism run amok. To think that all those years of hardship, hurricanes and blizzards, losses too numerous to mention, failed crops, and world wars, as well as children learning to multiply, sitting on mothers’ laps warm as pies out of the oven, raspberries ripening on bushes, and plays at second base while the sun goes down, should lead to that Tuesday between trick or treating and turkey dinner. It’s too much. It gives me a fright and a brief ripple of envy for William Dawson, resting in peace under the holy ground. 

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