Postcards from a Train, Part One

Speech and Silences, From Washington State to Oregon

I’ll tell you in the next few essays about my journey across the country by train.

But first, I’ll catch you up on the travel that led up to the start of my unexpected train trip.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

In one city, there had been speech; in another, silences.

I’d flown the prior week to Bellevue, Washington State, to speak to a group of conservative women: the Women of Washington. The event was a delight; as when I’d spoken to other groups of Western conservative women, the group made me feel a sharp pang of nostalgia for a better time, as well as giving me an acute sense of hope. Though Seattle had fallen into decay since my last visit a few years ago, and though Bellevue itself was being dramatically overbuilt — vast new commercial structures dwarfed the craggy granite outcroppings, and shadowed the fairy-tale estuary inlets studded with deep-green fir trees — this group of women, along with their network, seemed like an outpost of resilient good cheer and sanity.

The night before my speech, I’d joined a small group for dinner in a bustling local restaurant. Though I’d just met the women, they felt like old friends. They were savvy, focused, self-disciplined women, from all walks of life, who seemed to have had built fantastic lives for themselves. They seemed to be without self-pity. They were upbeat and entrepreneurial and civic-minded, and often hilarious.

The event the following day, in the ballroom of a local hotel, was uplifting as well. As at other meetings for conservative women at which I’d spoken, the agenda began with a community leader offering prayers. I was more used that tradition by now, but I remembered how startled I’d been the first time I’d watched that happen. Someone just gets up and — prays out loud? I’d mused at that time.

This time, being more accustomed to the habits of conservative cultures, I let myself be moved by the fact that I was in a community in which anyone at all, with no special divine credentials, could offer up prayer, on behalf of the group, to God.

When the woman at the podium said something like, “And God bless our nation’s leaders. God Bless President Donald Trump, and bless his nominees …” I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that a hotel staffer, positioned behind the bar, could take no more. The staffer held up both of her hands and placed them over her ears and shouted, “I can’t listen to another word of this!” Then she stormed out of the ballroom. Her fellow staffers scarcely reacted to her outburst.

It was striking to me that so much had broken down in our world — in our relationships, in our workplaces — with the intensity that that moment exposed.

But in spite of the staffer who had fled, the evening moved on. We shared honest conversations; I encountered people who have not given up on the primacy of the bonds of their friendships, on family, on their struggling cities, on civil free speech.

At one point I met a woman who was born as a result of her having survived an attempted abortion by her mother. I was astonished to meet someone with such a story, though I did know that a national group of adult survivors of attempted abortions, did exist.

I was signing books as we spoke. "I am so glad you’ve come out with your views on the abortion issue,” she said. I replied honestly, so that she was not misapprehending my views, that while I am tormented by the issue, I can’t yet call myself “pro-life” — I still support access to legal abortion, with many limitations. (By the way, if you are pro-choice, I recommend that you try having that discussion with someone who is alive because an abortion attempt on his or her life, failed. It makes our position excruciatingly painful, which perhaps it should be).

The woman who survived an abortion attempt, was no less kind to me after I had set out my views. The women who were hosting me heard me say this, and they too did not, that I could see at any rate, flinch away from me; nor did they scold or lecture or badger me. Some of the group probably did not agree with me on this important, divisive issue, but they were all able to remain friendly to me, and best of all, authentically connected.

Even though I am becoming habituated to this ability of many people on the Right to stay connected to someone with whom there is disagreement, to me still it is like a superpower.

In addition to the difference in tolerance between this group and a hypothetical left-wing counterpart, I could not help but consider the dramatic difference in energies between the conservative Women of Washington, and liberal groups of women at comparable events, of similar backgrounds and ages.

One difference in the vibe, if you will, it seemed to me, was that the conservative group of women was asking itself, “What can we do?” And even more: “What can I do?” Whereas a comparable liberal group, I knew from my own long experience, would have a collective emotional energy of asking, “What has happened to us? What has happened to others?” And then, the concluding action step or final question for the left-wing group of women would be: “To whom must we dictate additional or better controls?”

And: “ To whom do we issue even more effusive apologies?”

It no longer surprised me that conservative women’s groups with whom I meet, seem much happier personally, and even more emotionally healthy, than do comparable left-wing women’s groups; the former is, let us face facts, an emotionally healthier set of questions.

In my speech, I told the women and their partners and husbands that this venue felt like America - and I meant it.

*****

I then flew down to Eugene, Oregon, to spend a few days with my 80-something loved one, who lives not far away from there, in a tiny town in the Willamette Valley. Here, speech was less open, and many silences were being tended and cultivated, like treasured plants in a garden.

Day by day, it was a delightful, cozy visit; we had pedicures - why is it a thing to have pedicures in the run-up to Christmas? I don’t know, but we did; my loved one, defiantly, choosing a bright green shade — it was, indeed, almost Kermit-green — which she carried off, as usual, with elan. And, also as usual, by the time we were done with our spa treatments, my loved one knew the most fragile hopes and the most elevated dreams of her tattooed nail technician, and had filled the young woman with a sense of possibility and empowerment.

My loved one and I wandered the rainy, misty streets (only people who know the Pacific Northwest understand “rainy, misty’ in the same sentence), moving slowly. We looked at the curve of beautiful wet leaves, where a tree’s branches arch in a canopy over the sidewalk, a canopy through which the homeowners had cut a passage to allow for pedestrians. We stopped in the neighborhood Art Center, for her to choose a necklace made with deep-blue glass beads by a friend of hers — which she bestowed upon me, and which of course I shall wear devotedly — and we visited the studio, in a refurbished Art Deco warehouse, of the artist-friend.

Indeed, it is a deep-blue town. I had been gently encouraged, by someone who need not be identified, not to talk about politics, which, by the way, I don’t ever go out of my way to bring up in social settings. When I was asked just to not bring up my views, for the sake of social comity, though, I felt the incision like a penknife; just nicking me; coming just that close to my heart.

I felt yet again, with a sense of dismay that never seems to lessen, how eager the Left is to have its say, but at the same time, to restrict others’ voices. I felt yet again how painful it is to suffer, and indeed it seemed to me, to cultivate, these divisions still — divisions which truly can never heal if we are enjoined simply to suppress our views for the sake of a superficial peace.

But I love my loved one, and I respect my elders. I had tea, and more tea: green tea, chamomile tea, Celestial Seasons hibiscus tea. I admired the opaline necklaces, strung on gold wire; statement pieces which were beautiful indeed.

I was silent all over town.

Photo by Jael Rodriguez on Unsplash

I ducked with my loved one, our hair and shoes wet, into a melon-colored living room in a charming turn-of-the-last-century bungalow, and I admired hand-bound volumes of excellent local history.

I stepped, with my loved one, into another home, this one built in the 1890s; and I had more tea, in a room with twelve-foot ceilings whose lovely buff walls contrasted pleasingly with hallway and passageway walls of a deeper, delicate mauve. Art Nouveau pier lights shed bottle-green and dusty-rose patterns into the living room; a heavyset black cat would dance on the ottoman just past the corner of the tray on which lay fans of a delicious local goat cheese. Or the cat would shoot right over the ottoman, onto the sofa, to drape herself like a warm living shawl across its back.

In those rooms, we all talked about color, and art, and family, and weather.

The trip and its silences were bittersweet. One reason for the bitterness in the sweetness was that these were all extremely interesting people in their 70s and 80s, with fascinating lives, and with, no doubt, a lot to say; and I felt the difference between conversation that skated politely past what may have been a million unasked questions and observations, versus the conversations we used to have as Americans who did not always agree with each other; conversations that used to be real — if not always, then often enough; and I remembered open, heartfelt, difficult speech.

I did not even know whose parameters had been set; they may have longed as much as I did, for some authentic exchange. But I respect my loved one’s wishes. I stayed within the parameters set by my loved one.

One to one, though, at home, in the inner circle, “the issues” we were all avoiding, would suddenly erupt. “How can you have endorsed that lunatic?” was the essential question, asked of me in multiple oblique and direct ways. I tried to explain — the administration in power sold out the country, they locked us indoors for two years based on lies, they mandated poisons, the border is open — but no matter what I said, my remarks fell like rain on ground so dry that nothing can grow.

My listeners’ expressions were polite but neutral, emotionally unaffected.

Finally I’d burst out, “The ones I voted for tried to silence me! And they tried to destroy my life!” But even then — I’d see neutral, polite listening, without, it seemed, any emotion deeply registering.

Yes. That must have been terrible.

But — abortion. But — the environment.

Yes and yes.

But — can we have a real conversation?

*****

The thing is, this distance and these silences drain our relationships. As I walked with my loved one in the rainy mist, past the blossomless rosebushes and the now-bare shrubs of the rhododendrons, I tried hard to remember every detail of every moment, because we none of us ever knows how long we have, or when it is the last time that we are together.

Even comments that usually drive me crazy, I tried to cherish.

“That color washes you out,” she would say, observing me as I was doing something like typing an essay — something, that is, completely unrelated to color, or clothing, or appearances. “That’s the only color that washes you out,” she’d say reassuringly, and I would bite my lower lip and not mention, not on this visit anyway, that while yes, this beige probably does wash me out, she had also at other times observed that pale blue washes me out, and that daffodil yellow also washes me out.

Or she’d bring me a special conditioner for my hair — implying that it was dry and needed care — or else she’d notice and let me know if the cut of a sweater was unflattering. Or, inevitably, though she tries not to, she’ll observe my having, in her view, lost or gained weight. “Can we not discuss my weight please?” I’d request — again, and yet again. “I have no opinion about your weight,” she huffed. Then: “That’s a good weight for you,” she was not able to keep herself from adding, in a direct contradiction.

I practice saying nothing, and stepping into another room, and remind myself that I am a different person, with different anxieties and instincts, than my loved one.

A beautiful woman her entire life, I know that she brings me these criticisms out of a version of loving behavior that was set in stone in about 1964, from some performative past in which beautiful women such as she was, and still is, could not let down their vigilance for a moment; but I don’t want to live in that reality.

And all I want when I am with my loved one is to curl up on the couch in sweats like a puppy, home at last after a long car journey.

I am always slightly jealous of the young women, such as our tattooed nail technician, whom she goes through the world continually empowering. I love and admire no one more in the world than I do her; and also, and yet, no one is better able to deflate my confidence - and all within the space of a single heartbeat.

My point is, these are some of our real issues. We have real issues of our own. These real issues go back decades.

They go back to the deepest senses of self for her, and thus for me. It takes a lifetime to grapple with and unpack the real issues that life drills into us; that we pass down, intentionally or not, to the next generations.

My point is, the false gaps in the human dialectic caused by the “political” silencing and enforced lacunae of the last four — almost five — years, make it harder for us all to wrestle with our real loves, our real conflicts, our real issues, our authentic emotions.

I know that someday I will miss everything. I know I’ll even miss the comments about my washed-out complexion, and I will miss the offers of a better hair conditioner.

I’ll miss, someday, it all, and I will miss it forever.

But because of these silencings, that are not even organically our own; that were initially imposed upon us — that are now introjected, in some areas of the country into some communities’ very habits; incorporated into some people’s very reflexes -

Because of these,

Sometimes I miss it all

Even now.