Morality Issue

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and confound the other. “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves,” says Eleanor Roosevelt. “The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” Author Stephen Covey  challenges, “Look at the word responsibility – “response-ability” – the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.” 

Here at Sisyphus, we thought a great deal about the shifting landscape of morality and ethics–the gaslighting in the political arena, climate disruption and the generational divide, religion v. women’s rights, species loss, and the future on this planet. It seems that values and belief systems shouldn’t morph, but greed has superseded common sense.  The authors on these pages explore the new world as we are coming to know it.

If ever the time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. -Samuel Adams, revolutionary (27 Sep 1722-1803)

Grifter. Con artist. Trickster. Shark. Gaslighter. “Is there a word for ‘fucking with your sense of reality and undermining your sanity by saying something is not happening when it absolutely is?’” Nora Samaran.

DEFINITION & BACKGROUND

The term gaslight has been bandied about in the press a fair amount lately. The talking heads on the news broadcasts offer definitions that are at once both varying and unhelpfully indefinite.  “Gaslighting is psychological manipulation with the aim of getting the victim to doubt their memory or sanity,” says the Oxford English Dictionary. At its most malicious, gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse where the abuser manipulates situations repeatedly to trick the victim into distrusting his or her own memory, perceptions and sanity, to destroy the victim’s sense of reality.  Why? The need for power and control fueled by a sense of insecurity. The term was introduced into colloquial vernacular in the 1960s and psychoanalytic literature in the 1970s. Where did it arise? And why has it migrated from a psychological definition to a Twitter talking point?

It was re-introduced in Europe via Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play “Gaslight” (“Angel Street” in the United States) and popularized by its 1944 George Cukor film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton, and introducing Angela Lansbury. 

A world-famous opera singer has just been murdered at her home in 19^th century London, but the subsequent robbery is interrupted by the victim’s orphaned fourteen-year-old niece, who is thereafter sent to Italy to train to become an opera star herself. Years later, after a two-week-long whirlwind romance, she marries a husband (Boyer) intent on moving to the long-vacant townhouse. The sleight-of-hand and manipulation that the character uses in his attempt to destabilize the wife’s sanity (causing the gaslights to flicker, etc.) to regain the stolen jewelry is the origin of the term as it is used in psychology, politics, and emotional abuse diagnoses today. 

Of course, that implies that everyone knows how gaslights worked in the 19th century.

Gaslights are a quaint throwback to an era of iceboxes and steam trains. Commercial natural gas became available to power businesses, homes, shops and streets. Series of pipes were installed in cities and towns that fundamentally changed the way we lit our lives. “One of the first pipelines to bring natural gas from a gas field to a city was completed in 1821. That pipeline brought natural gas from fields in Indiana to the city of Chicago.” says Bill Lewis in The Spruce. This method was wildly more convenient than candles, but still dangerous and notoriously unstable. When a gaslight was ignited in one portion of a home, it would lower the pressure in other fixtures, much the same way flushing a toilet will drop the water pressure in a shower. As gaslights were replaced by electricity, the term fell out of use except as a mental health diagnosis.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMINOLOGY

A gaslighter suffers from a personality disorder—narcissistic or antisocial. Personality disorders are stable maladaptive patterns whose diagnoses involve at least two of four dysfunctions: cognitive, affective, interpersonal, or impulse-based. “They create an impairment in how people function in their lives and affect an estimated 10% of the population of the US,” says Elizabeth Scott.  Think of that: The US population is 329 million people. NPD could affect 32 million people. It is important to remember that these types of psychological diagnoses appear on a spectrum of behavior—from benign grandiosity to a person with a disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. It varies from person to person, but, according to Psychology Today, narcissism tends to be recognized by specific behaviors:

• Care quite a bit about their appearance and can come across as quite charming
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it, and will discount any evidence that doesn’t support their belief in their own superiority
• Exaggerate their own achievements and talents, even to the point of lying
• Are often preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
• Are highly manipulative
• Tend to project their bad behavior onto others, meaning they may accuse you of the very behavior they are conducting
• Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
• Aren’t opposed to taking advantage of others to get what they want
• Fail to see or value the needs and feelings of others
• Have no remorse for hurting others and rarely apologize unless it will benefit them in some way
• Insist on having the best of everything and believe that they deserve this
• Aren’t able to handle criticism and lash out if they feel slighted in any way
• Have a poor sense of self and weak ability to regulate their feelings and actions
• Secretly feel insecure

Gaslighting is a particularly effective tool of the manipulative personality. “Even if a person is practicing gaslighting behavior without being consciously aware of it, they may get a ‘payoff’ when their victim becomes more dependent on them. And then the cycle continues,” says Stephanie Sarkis in Psychology Today. “The gaslighter also gets a ‘boost’ when there are no checks and balances in place—no one holding them accountable for their behavior. For example, a cult leader may exile or kill anyone who tells others that the leader is not treating followers fairly. Subsequently, further followers may not speak out for fear of their lives. Keep in mind that dependency is one of the goals of gaslighters.”

Gaslighters aren’t out to destroy you; they’re out to make things easier for themselves.

GASLIGHTING IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

This is the traditional use of the term. Think about what it means, for a moment, that someone might consciously attempt to manipulate another’s sanity. It can be a particularly subtle and insidious way to undermine a person’s trust in their own capacities. Clearly, gaslighting is a powerful tool for both the sociopath and narcissist and there are plenty of fictional examples to prove it.  “The effects of having people we trust, people we count on to help strengthen us, undermine reality, are serious, and deeply damaging,” says Samaran.

Generally, the movies and books that employ this psychological abuse as a storytelling device portray extreme personal relationships.  There are several sites that discuss the modern use of the term and Psychology Today published a list to recognize the behavior in real-life scenarios. “A major and probably universal motive … is the victimizer’s need to regulate his/her feeling states by controlling interactions with other individuals,” says T.L. Dorpat.

RECOGNITION AND SIGNS

• Do they try to persuade you to doubt the evidence of your senses and what you are thinking and feeling?
• Do they try to convince you that what you believe is wrong, and what they believe is right?
• Do they react badly if you do not accept their version of the truth?
• Are they extremely persistent and sometimes keep the argument going long after you have asked them to please drop the issue?
• Do they attempt to bully you into admitting that they are 100 percent right, and you are completely wrong?
• Are the facts always twisted so that they are the victim, and you are always at fault?
• Do they twist and turn the truth and make such long and complicated arguments to prove their points that, after a while, you become thoroughly confused?

GASLIGHTING IN POLITICS AND SOCIETY

It seems the pervasive use of the word has escalated in the post-Obama era. Many had never heard it before the current administration, but the phenomenon entered our societal vernacular and social perceptions long before. It is the driving force of psychological thrillers — The Girl on the Train, The Changling, Rosemary’s Baby, Doll House, The Truman Show, Matilda, Amelie, 1984, Colossal, The Yellow Wallpaper – whose plots are based on the notion that the main characters/victims are led to mistrust themselves and question their perceptions.

Think about some of the topics of the whirlwind news cycle. “[A] campaign to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a ‘denial machine’ organized by industrial, political and ideological interests [climate skeptics], and supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers to manufacture uncertainty about global warming,” claims Riley Dunlap in American Behavioral Scientist.  Advertorials—advertisements subtly disguised as editorial content—regularly employ deceptive tactics. Product placement is a not-too-subtle manipulation. The mud-slinging political campaigns that manufacture disinformation created a new campaign term: “swift boating.”  Vilifying the media— #FakeNews—undermines the national conversation. DJT responded to his impeachment proceedings on his TwitterFeed, “… more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!” The next trend has already begun: manipulating the internet conversation with deep fakes (see Nancy Pelosi being attacked here) and AI-generated media (here). “It’s a blog where every article is fabricated completely out of thin air, including the photo of the ‘journalist,’ says Mitja Trampus, PhD. “A human only provides the article title, the rest is autogenerated. What is impressive is the coherence of the generated text. It does not live up to close scrutiny, but it takes much more than a quick glance to notice that something is off …” The New York Times reported that an Oxford University study finds at least 70 countries currently engaged in disinformation campaigns.

“Far from acting alone …  gaslighters seek to employ the apathy and uncaring of others to help them …  A conception of ‘might makes right’ underlies the process whereby those who are deemed weak are left defenseless when they have the temerity to rely on the truth and on justice while the gaslighters seek to control reality by their use of lies and distortions.  Appeals to the truth are often disregarded by others as merely lunatic ravings,” claims David Shasha.

“The problem of gaslighting is now endemic to the American political processes and Americans cannot ‘vote it out of office’ in any single election simply by dispatching a particular political party. To say gaslighting was started by the Bushes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Fox News, or any other extant person or group is not simply wrong, it also misses an important point. Gaslighting comes directly from blending modern communications, marketing, and advertising techniques with long-standing methods of propaganda. They were simply waiting to be discovered by those with sufficient ambition and psychological makeup to use them.” says Bryant Welch in State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind. “Once the genie is unleashed, no one can put him back in the bottle.”

STEPS TO HEALING

“In order to defeat the gaslighter,” opines Shasha, “We are forced to refuse these manipulations and risk the disdain and incredulity of others.  It means standing up for what is right in spite of what others may think, do or say.  It means not giving up or losing faith in the dignity of what we believe …” Easier said than done. By the time the manipulation is recognizable, sometimes it becomes difficult to trust your own judgment. Being uncertain about your own perception of reality is a terrifying feeling.

RECOGNITION

The first step to healing is becoming aware of emotional abuse, recognizing that you do not need to be complicit in the machinations of the gaslighter. It is not an individual moment of abuse—gaslighting is recognizable only as a toxic pattern of deception. There is a real tendency to normalize the behavior because gaslighting can seem unintentional and, like all illness, it is a spectrum—the gaslighter need not be intentionally malicious to be damaging to a victim’s psyche. A psychologist would tell a victim to terminate a toxic relationship. But what about when the tactic is used in the political arena? 

“You can’t tackle a problem until you know exactly what it is,” says Amanda Carpenter about the current Administration. “You recognize what he’s doing now. You have felt crazy, confused, fed up, flustered, and all bejiggety for a reason. It’s not you, it’s him. Truly. Now the hard part (Take a deep breath.) Accept the fact that Trump’s gaslighting cannot be stopped. Yes, that’s right. The. Gaslighting. Cannot. Be. Stopped…[E]ven if Trump is impeached…he is not going to give up his media megaphone. Doesn’t matter if he is impeached, censured, or if  he loses his 2020 re-election in a landslide; he is not going to go away… There is no way he is giving up the power and influence he has gained since becoming president.

“There is no 24/7 media anymore,” she continues. “It is now ‘the 86,400 second, 1440 minute, 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week’ media. Network TV, cable TV, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, newspapers, radio, magazines, websites, blogs, and podcasts are churning out political commentary second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.”  

Turn it off.

PRACTICE MINDFULNESS

Without training in mindfulness, it is easy to become prey to the viruses around us, the virus of hate and the promulgation of propaganda. Mindfulness  prevents the practitioner from becoming a victim of someone hijacking your mind.

“Mindfulness is defined as the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us,” says Emily Desanctis. “Whereas gaslighting distorts reality, mindfulness helps you stay aware of what’s really going on. As a powerful tool to clear and protect the mind, mindfulness cultivates your attention muscle—the key to trusting yourself and your experience. When you’re fully present, a gaslighter will have a harder time distracting you from their malicious behavior, convincing you that you’re to blame, or manipulating you into believing their distorted truth.” 

Meditation is using the technique of mindfulness to train attention and awareness. To quote Ivor Hansen, meditation is a practice of “mental hygiene” to focus attention in the present. Hansen paraphrases a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel—brain brushing (like teeth brushing)—to illustrate that mindfulness is not an added practice to change who we are, but a daily tool to remind us to cultivate our awareness of who we are in the world around us. The reason you meditate is to look inside and begin to know yourself.

“The Four Foundations of Mindfulness … are key things that we should practice being mindful of. These are: our bodies, our feelings, our minds themselves, and phenomena / the world around us. By training in mindfulness of these four foundations, we see, more and more, how all of these things really are, outside [of] our conceptual ideas of them. …[M]indfulness is training in seeing reality with more clarity and equanimity,” says Lion’s Roar.

“[M]indfulness is about cultivating,” as the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein has written, “the quality and power of mind that is aware of what is happening, without judgment and without interference.”

DEVELOP EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

There is a difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is the ability to feel what another is feeling. Compassion is the cognitive ability to understand another’s feelings.  The distinction is important because psychological research shows that each response lights up a different region of the brain and that focus groups practicing the two types of training had “very different emotions and attitudes toward action,” says Dr. Tara Well.

Compassion is based on a non-dual understanding that everything is part of everything else. While the gaslighter’s lack of empathic feeling is considered a maladaptive social trait, empathy—essential and exalted–can also be a trait that impoverishes a potential gaslightee.  According to Psychology Today there is evidence that compassion is a more useful emotional tool. “The art of empathy requires paying attention to another’s needs without sacrificing one’s own. It demands the mental dexterity to switch attunement from other to self. What turns empathy into a true high-wire act is that its beneficiaries find the attention deeply rewarding. That puts the onus on us to know when to extract ourselves from someone else’s shoes—and how…. Reigning in over-empathy requires emotional intelligence; its underlying skill is self-awareness.”

Compassion lets you see that the problem exists and that the dysfunction doesn’t reside within you, but in the gaslighter. “The idea that there can actually be too much empathy can be traced back to early Buddhist teachings. Instead of focusing on empathy to the point of draining ourselves emotionally, Buddhism teaches the practice of compassion, called karuna. This is the idea of sharing in suffering, having concern for another, but essentially ‘feeling for and not feeling with the other.’” says Dr. Robin Stern.

HOLISTIC INTERPRETATION

“Emotional intelligence always requires being empathic with yourself. And that paradoxically allows you to be even more present for those you love,” says Stern. “Take a cue from a temple, Sanjūsangen-dō, in Kyoto. There, a thousand boddhisattvas of compassion are guarded by 28 fierce deities. The ancients knew that empathy, compassion, and loving kindness need special protections.”

Mindfulness isn’t inherently Buddhist, but all Buddhism is practiced mindfully. “We suffer, according to Buddhism, not because there’s anything inherently wrong with us but simply because we misunderstand the nature of reality. Buddhist practice helps us come to terms with reality by cultivating our awareness of the ‘three characteristics of experience,’ also known as ‘the three marks of existence.’ These are: impermanence, suffering, and insight—words that will likely be familiar to anyone who’s read about Buddhism more than a little. Contemplating them, Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “can help liberate us from fear and suffering. Living mindfully and with concentration, we see a deeper reality and are able to witness impermanence without fear, anger, or despair.” 

This is important in dealing with gaslighting because the nature of the manipulation is the undermining of reality.

“Living life on purpose can help our responses to situations to be more in line with our deeper intentions for ourselves and the sort of society we wish to inhabit,” says Dan Nixon. “Another Conservative politician, a former cabinet minister, said to us recently that the culture within parliament, within politics, needs to change and that mindfulness could be a part of that change because it can help us to listen better. Not just to others, but to ourselves: to examine more closely what our values are and what’s most important to us … Another reason why we might view mindfulness as a foundational human capacity stems from the fact that it cultivates our ability to pay attention on purpose to our experience. Being present, whatever we’re doing, seems particularly valuable in today’s ‘age of distractions.’” As the saga of impeachment unfurls in the 21st century and each partisan side accuses the other of gaslighting and whatabout-ism leading up to the next election, we can guide the outcome and future by recognizing manipulation, living in the present, and being examples of trust to our communities.  

My love for plants is a legacy from my maternal grandmother, Belle Dunaway Payne, Belle D. to all who loved her. She is the central character in my memories of the first seven years of my life in Siluria, Alabama. After my family moved twenty-five miles north to Birmingham, I spent several weeks each summer with her in a house on a large corner lot that, except for the northwest side, was washed in sunlight throughout the day.

Early each morning, Belle D. and I walked down the steps from the back porch and over a small patch of damp grass to my Uncle Bill’s vegetable garden, where we filled dishpans with field peas, runner beans, squash, corn, okra, and my favorite, speckled butter beans. The soles of my bare feet turned black with mud made of dew and tilled earth that I washed away under a hydrant by the steps.  Near the end of the day, before settling into the front porch swing to shell peas or snap beans, we filled the white enamel bucket that sat on the back porch with water, as many times as necessary, to visit containers of purple verbena, petunias in many shades of pink, and red and yellow zinnias around the yard and bless each one with a dipperful or two. The only flowers planted in the ground were four o’clocks in a narrow bed along the length of the western side of the house. We visited it last and emptied the bucket over it.

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My interest in politics is a gift from my father, who gave me two rules for life: (1) Never cross a picket line; and (2) pull the Democratic Party lever in the voting booth. I believe my “lower case d” democratic politics came from him too with some help from my mother’s “do unto others philosophy,” reinforced by eighteen years of Sunday School. From the age of twelve, when he was forced to leave school to help his large family, my father did a man’s work, collecting cans of milk from independent dairymen in north Jefferson County and delivering them to Consolidated Dairies.  He believed everyone should pull his weight, which he did until whiskey got the better of him, and that everybody should have a fair share, which he never did as far as I could see, though he did not complain. A union man through and through, he hated Alabama’s open shop law that allowed each worker to join or not after a union was certified and enjoy the benefits of a union contract without paying dues.

In 1973 at the age of fifty-five my father died. I cannot know whether his party loyalty would have extended to Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.  He was certainly a racist during my growing up years, but I believe time would have tempered his views. I like to believe that he would not have opposed a woman president; he always expressed pride in his daughters.  Speculation is beside the point; before I left his household I had become a yellow dog Democrat.  You know the kind – one who would rather vote for “an ole yeller dog” than a Republican.

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In third grade I brought home a box of flower seed packets to sell for a school fund-raiser. My family lived in an apartment complex on a rocky hillside with very little space between buildings, so the neighbors were hardly good sales prospects. I liked to shuffle through the crisp, colorful envelopes, letting the marigolds, nasturtiums, hollyhocks, and bachelor buttons kaleidoscope past my eyes, as I tried to decide which ones I would buy with my own saved coins. When the deadline for returning unsold seeds passed, I had to pay the cost of the entire box, about five dollars, which required a loan from my mother.

After my father broke up the ground, wielding a pick I could not lift, I hoed a shallow bed, maybe three feet by five, along the edge of our sloping front yard.  I dumped the entire contents of the box into the bed and raked them through the coal-black topsoil.  I watered every day. Less than half of the seeds sprouted, but they were enough to crowd my very first garden with color and overcome a visitor with perfume.

I did not have my own garden again until just after I completed law school at the University of Mississippi, where my husband Tom had taught psychology for four years, and we decided to return to Birmingham, Alabama, where both of us had grown up. We bought our first house in the small, contiguous town of Homewood. The house and lot were small, and I contented myself with blooming shrubs, an herb garden, and one bed of four o’clocks, which I planted along the western side of the house in remembrance of Belle. D.

When Tom and I moved into my current house in Vestavia Hills, most of the yard was lawn.  Two giant trees, a maple in the center and an oak near the street behind the mailbox, shaded most of the front yard but allowed a healthy mat of zoysia. The back lawn was not as lush, as it was shaded by another giant oak, three eastern hemlocks along the neighbors’ tall fence on the south and a thick copse of cherry laurel and privet lining both sides of a power company right of way across the back.  Various evergreens and blooming shrubs surrounded the house. For the first ten years I lived here, gardening was limited to caring for the existing shrubs, beating back the wonderful purple wisteria that cascaded from the trees in back each spring, making an herb garden where I had found oregano and mint, and placing tomatoes and peppers in pots wherever there was sun.

After I retired I met Alice, a single mother of two teenage girls who had made a living for several years gardening and doing other household jobs for women in my neighborhood. If you ask Alice what she does, she answers, “I plant flowers,” but over several years she and I turned the back yard into a park-like area with graveled paths, odd garden ornaments, and my thinking bench. When both of the large trees in front died, we started digging up lawn to make more shrub and flower gardens.

Every political season the yards of the house in Homewood, then Vestavia, grew a crop of political signs, expressing support for the Democratic nominee for president as well as other national and state offices. Our signs were like rare plants in our Homewood neighborhood, the subject of friendly bemusement.  On the day after George McGovern’s defeat, we opened our front door to an effigy made of a stuffed pillowcase with a frowning cat’s face and the message: “Your fat cat neighbors say they’re sorry.” As is to be expected with exotic plants, some did not survive. During the week before the 2008 election my Obama sign disappeared and was replaced by an empty folding chair.

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In spite of my love for growing things, I sometimes experience a brief flagging of the spirit when spring arrives, usually around mid-February in recent years in central Alabama. I love the winter dark almost as much as the light of the rest of the year in this southern climate. It gives permission to shut down early each day, to rest, not to laze but to hum along at a steadfast but leisurely pace. I am rarely ready to let it go; I wonder if I will be able to summon the energy for another cycle of life.

Spring, 2016, overwhelmed me. The mild, wet winter had allowed constant growth, and, by the time an eighty- degree day arrived in the first week of March, my rear garden was a jungle of weeds and untamed tree limbs. The sculpted beds and natural areas in front of the house were filled with weeds, intruding grass, and shrub colonies sent out underground. I felt no inspiration to go for the clippers or my wonderful circle hoe that makes short work of wild onions. In an instant the outdoor jungle symbolized all the clutter and unfinished business of my life – closets stuffed with clothes, boxes of paper not looked at since brought into the house twenty years ago, and writing unfinished.  Dynamo Alice, unable to work in the warm fall due to illness of a family member, was still unavailable.

Looking back on that time I wonder if, even then, my lethargy was due in part to the advent of a new political season that would prove to be disastrous.

My March madness did not last long. I took a deep breath and called a landscaper who had worked for me occasionally and would tolerate my idiosyncrasies – no herbicide except on poison ivy, cat brier, and thorned honey locust and no pesticide on fire ant hills. It seemed a good time to renovate with new shrubs and transplants, repair some drains, and repave the crumbling front section of driveway where I had fallen a year before. The work was completed in early June. “Remember these are new plants,” John called out as he backed out of the driveway. “Water them every day it does not rain.”             

In mid-August the rain dwindled, then stopped, I began dragging three heavy-duty hoses  around to all the new plantings every day. After the first restrictions on outdoor watering went into effect in September, the roots of one of the newly planted shrubs received an additional dousing from a bucket of water collected during my morning shower.

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While my garden thirsted, political rhetoric rained from the presidential election campaigns in a continuous downpour that Belle D. would have called a toad-strangler.  For everybody in both camps, this election was different; more than the usual was at stake. My own feelings and opinions certainly went far beyond ordinary party loyalty.  I was convinced that the election of a reality television personality, who did not read, who could not hold one thought long enough to make a complete sentence before jumping to something else, who said whatever popped into his mind without regard for the truth of it, and who showed no knowledge of world affairs would bring on the end of the world as I had always known it. And I feared that he would be elected. I am not claiming any prescience.  I told myself even then that I was being unduly pessimistic, influenced by living in a state Donald Trump was bound to carry.

My dying garden and the political atmosphere brought back the anxiety and depression of the spring. Dread as heavy as those buckets hauled from my shower moved in and sat on my shoulders.

“Something strange is happening to me,” I told my sister Mary. “Everything hurts my feelings; I’m downright weepy.”

“Have a good cry, then.”  She sounded impatient.  We had talked before about the fact that I had stopped crying several years ago, that the last time I remember crying is the day I saw my mother in a hospital emergency room just a few minutes after she had died.

 I used to cry a lot, and it always made me feel better. I did not decide to stop; I just dried up.

“Can’t,” I snapped back. “The weepiness is always a false alarm.” I did not tell her that I suspected one reason for the weepiness was knowing that she and my other sister and many good people were supporting Trump.

I found comfort by finalizing a plan I had made early in the year to spend November at the beach near my son Noel and his family in Pensacola.  I rented a condo and began to count the days until I could vote and leave town.

On November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, I woke at first light as usual in spite of a late bedtime and fatigue resulting from packing all that I would need for a month away from home.  I rose immediately and turned on my computer to see if some late returns had changed the result that had seemed inevitable when I went to bed, but there had been no miracle. When it was light enough, I took a second cup of coffee outside and toured my little patch of earth that I call a garden because it holds too many hours of sweat and pain to be called a yard. No miracle had occurred there either.

All my knockout rose bushes, which in a usual year might be ablaze with late autumn blooms, were in serious trouble along with the miniature hawthorns around the mailbox and every French and lace cap hydrangea, new and old, throughout the yard.  The perennials- cone flowers, bee balm, and milkweed – planted in beds along the driveway to attract goldfinches and monarchs had disappeared. My fig tree was leafy and green, but all the figs had fallen off after reaching thumb size.

Without rain for three months, my front lawn of thick zoysia, often the subject of wonderment from my neighbors because I do not “treat” it with anything, was brown thatch with black streaks. I have never watered lawn, and all my outside watering allowance since October 9 – one hour by hose with nozzle two days per week before 8 a.m. and after 8 p.m. – had gone to the June plantings.  On November 4 the Birmingham Water Works Board had declared an “Extreme Drought Emergency” and implemented Stage Four restrictions, cutting the allowance to one day a week, Fridays for me. My watering days were over; I had only to decide which plant would receive the day’s shower water, the last drink until December 5 unless it rained.

I felt sad about deserting, but recalling my experience at the polling place the day before erased everything except the desire to escape. 

I felt sad about deserting, but recalling my experience at the polling place the day before erased everything except the desire to escape.  At first, I had felt somewhat encouraged at Horizon Church; unlike 2012, there were plenty of open parking spaces and my wait outside ten minutes instead of the hour four years ago.  The stand-up tables divided into four private cubbies for marking ballots were occupied, so I sat down at a round table as far as possible from the elderly couple already seated there. The man was telling his very frail wife not to bother reading the names or looking at the races. “That will take all day,” he said. “We are going to vote a straight ticket, so we only have to mark Republican box at the top.”  Even that was hard; her hand hovered shakily over the ballot until he closed his hand around hers and lowered it to the page. I was voting a straight ticket too, but I like to read the list of candidates, especially in the minor races where I might recognize a name that will challenge my resolve to stick strictly with my party.

Back outside, displaying my “I voted” sticker, the first person I saw was Tricia; she grinned big. We realized that we were about to reenact the scene of four years ago on this sidewalk.

Tricia went first. “I’m here to cancel your vote again.”

“There may have been a few ahead of you this year,” I replied, trying to convey a lightness I did not feel. I walked over and hugged her; she kissed my cheek.

Tricia has been a friend for forty years. She had helped Tom, also a committed Democrat, in a successful campaign for a seat in the state legislature and two terms on the city council of Homewood. I never mentioned politics after she began to display a photo of herself with George and Laura Bush behind the counter in her business. What is important is that we know and carry each other’s deepest hurts.

I realized that avoiding more of the Tricias in my life would be a benefit of the beach trip. I have a wide circle of friends in Birmingham who share my political opinions; we had been propping each other up throughout the election campaign.  But among Trump voters there are many with whom I have had long, valued friendships.  There are some I love dearly. I needed time to decide how to continue these relationships with integrity and perspective. I packed my car and was on the road to Perdido Key by ten o’clock, leaving my garden to fate.

Escambia County, Florida, was almost as dry as Alabama, but the beach humidity prevented a feeling of drought.  I could not escape worry for my garden or the state of the nation, however. The first was self-inflicted. Every morning, sometimes before taking my coffee onto the deck to watch streaks of rose and pink inch across the sky and sand and sea, I turned on my computer and checked the weather in Birmingham, hoping for rain that never came. My email was full of pleas that I petition my state electors to vote for Clinton or support a demand for a recount or some other plan to avoid a Trump presidency. Without energy for tilting at windmills; I ignored them all.

After coffee and gauging my need for a sweater by whether the man who fished every morning in front of my balcony was wearing his red jacket, I walked to the beach.  We waved each morning before I turned west, but he was usually packing his gear when I returned, so I sat on a log, and we talked about fishing and the weather and how drought improves the clarity of the water and, consequently, the fishing.

I worked on two writing projects every morning before driving to a restaurant for lunch.  If I was listless, I drove further, once across sparkling Pensacola Bay all the way to Fort Walton, twice out to Fort Morgan, once thirty miles to the Piggly Wiggly in Fairhope for the particular brand of ham I wanted for Thanksgiving dinner, before returning home for another beach walk and supper, usually alone. I had a standing invitation from Noel’s family, but he and my daughter-in-law work long days, and their son Sellers had soccer practice or games almost every day after school. They usually ate late, when my energy for social interaction was shutting down.

Sellers called on his way home several evenings to ask if I wanted to go out to dinner or whether he could pick something up for us to eat together. This little bit of private time with my grandson in his last year of high school was a special gift. A good friend from Panama City joined Noel’s family, including Moira, home from college, and me for the first Thanksgiving dinner I had cooked in a dozen years.

By the time rain started to fall in Pensacola on the Monday after Thanksgiving, I was feeling renewed. On the same Monday, rain blew violently into Alabama on the heels of tornados that killed three people and injured more.

It was still raining on the beach when I headed home. I thought about whether and how much it was raining at my house for most of three hundred miles, but I refused to let it hurry my trip.  I stopped twice at roadside stands for satsumas, once for a smoked turkey sandwich at Bates House of Turkey in Greenville, and at Durbin Farms just south of Clanton to load up on any butterbeans, field peas, and corn cut from the cob that might be left in their freezers from the summer crop. The rainy afternoon was dimming when I turned into my driveway where wide, swiftly-flowing rivulets greeted me. Everything I could see, including the row of tea olives added in June, appeared freshly washed. Shorn of all its leaves, the fig tree looked like a giant candelabra ready to be filled and lighted for the holiday season.

My mailbox was hanging open, stuffed with damp mail that was supposed to have been held until my return. Standing at the recycling bin, throwing in most of the mess, I noticed an unusual white envelope, addressed only to “Neighbor,” with a hand-drawn heart on the outside. Here’s the hand printed message:

I walk my dog past your house almost every day. I was so happy to see
your Clinton/Kaine sign! I had one too! Just wanted you to know you have
a friend in the neighborhood – and we’re not the only ones. Stay Strong in
these dark times – I’m with you too.

Stronger together
(I walk the large apricot labradoodle if you ever want to say Hi)

Heavy rains continued in Birmingham throughout December and January. After a quick tour the day after I arrived home to check for any emergency situations, I left my garden alone.  I also neglected the political news, but two events broke through the holiday cheer.

In mid-December I received a note from Devin, a friend close in age to my sons, whom I met fifteen years ago in Iowa City.  We have been exchanging visits and letters about books and life ever since. I had been on her mind, she wrote, “because I feel it’s women like you who have made things good for people like me” and “I have a huge fear that Donald Trump is going to ruin everyone’s work.” She had read two books about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and wanted to know if I had ever met the Associate Justice. “I’d think you two would be friends.” Then she closed: “We’ll all be ok. Right, Ina?”

While I was thinking about how to answer, Trump visited Mobile on his victory tour. The hastily made plans included a one-hundred foot, fully decorated Christmas tree behind him on the stage. The enthusiastic crowd made me sick, but I enjoyed the ruckus many citizens put up when it was disclosed that the beautiful tree had been cut from a downtown public park.

The enthusiastic crowd made me sick, but I enjoyed the ruckus many citizens put up when it was disclosed that the beautiful tree had been cut from a downtown public park.

On Monday, January 23, 2017, the Birmingham Water Works Board removed Stage Four Drought Restrictions. My journal entry the next day was essentially a damage list.

South side of the house. Thick with waxy green leaves and red berries, the roof-high hollies seem healthy. Too cruel to gardeners’ hands to be loved, they anchor the soil here, protecting the foundation, so I am relieved. The grass between the hollies and the low stone wall along the property line has died completely, and the soil has washed away, exposing a section of the terra cotta pipe that drains the back yard. Repair will require expert help.

New plantings. All except the hydrangeas and the gardenia seemed to have survived.

Deceased. One dwarf magnolia in the shade garden at the end of the drive has succumbed along with the giant aucuba in the right of way behind the shade garden that shielded from my view the never-retrieved red and yellow plastic balls and blue rafts that regularly drift down the rise from my neighbor’s pool. Other dark brown trees and shrubs along the back fence will leave gaps in my privacy if removed. Three dwarf Japanese maples, my treasured Red Dragons, appear dead.

Herb garden. Only the rosemary and one brown patch of lemon thyme are visible. Soil looks scorched; mint may be sending out runners.

What a whiner you are, my friends in California, not to mention their neighbors, the almond farmers, heading into their fifth year of drought, would say.  They are right; it was a puny drought – this time. According to the Alabama Fact Page on the EPA’s web site, the average annual rainfall is not expected to drop soon, but the soil will become drier each year because more of the rain will come in heavy downpours and wash into rivers.

On the day I made my damage list I turned on “All Things Considered” while driving home from an appointment. Ari Shapiro’s voice began:

The writer and activist Mark Baumer posted this thought about his 94^th day crossing America barefoot.  “It’s amazing how often we all forget this is the only opportunity we are ever going to have to live this life.”  Baumer was raising money to raise awareness about climate change. He blogged and posted about everything from canned beans to politics.

With dramatic effect, Robert Siegel took over: “On his 101^st day, Saturday, January 21, he was killed when an SUV swerved off the road onto the shoulder and hit him.  He was 33 years old.”

I burst into tears. I turned into a small shopping center parking lot to compose myself and listen to Baumer’s father and friends talk about their loss. When Mark’s father’s voice broke while he tried to say how the sympathy expressed by strangers had helped him and his wife, tears overflowed again, and, when they stopped, one look in the mirror told me my planned stop at the grocery store was impossible.

Days later I read an on-line report of the accident and watched one of Baumer’s last video posts. Mark wore aviator glasses like those my son Tom had worn; he had brown, shoulder-length hair like my son Clay. The accident happened on U.S. 90 at Mossy Head, near De Funiak Springs, Florida. I know that town and have driven that stretch between Pensacola and Panama City. It is town after town, requiring an almost constant thirty-five mile per hour speed limit. How and why did this happen? I cried some more.

Across town, perhaps while I was walking around my yard or grieving about Mark Baumer, seniors in an American history class at Tarrant High School were composing letters to the new president, telling him about their lives and what they expected of him. Five of the letters were published in the Birmingham News with the authors’ permissions. Two of the five identified themselves as Mexican-Americans; four of them made it clear that their families struggle economically. Here is a sample of what they said:

“I ask you to be trustworthy, be honest, and have integrity.

“I assume you will keep hope alive in our country.”

“Our school is poor and education is very low just like other schools around the country.” Further, “I do have a main concern in mind and I do expect you to think about this: The environment needs to be taken care of.”

“I expect for you to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Not just white, but people of color, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, LGBT. America’s people.”

“I don’t want you to run off to twitter and go on a twitter rant.  That just reminds me of a teenager. I need you to handle our country like you handle your hair.”

Those letters covered my important bases; they also widened the crack in my heart that began with Mark Baumer’s story. Tarrant is a small city north of Birmingham, where the median annual income is less than $30,000 and thirty per cent live below the poverty line. Closer than the Birmingham school for which my neighborhood was zoned, I attended schools there in the second through sixth grades. It is the place where I learned to love learning, to love libraries, to travel alone on city buses, and to play the piano. It is the place where my sister and I, often with neighborhood friends, were dropped off at the movies on Saturdays for a western, a cartoon, and an episode of “Spider Woman” or “Flash Gordon.” It is the place my whole family went on Friday afternoons to cash my father’s paycheck and buy a week’s groceries, including sometimes the fresh oysters or catfish that, back at home, my father rolled in crushed saltines or cornmeal and fried in hot Crisco.

Tarrant was a prosperous, blue-collar town in those years. I envied my schoolmates who lived there in the small bungalows with neat yards. It was the kind of community then that I would like to live in today, where homes are within walking distance of necessary services. Things are sadly wrong in a country where the place that put me on a road to a professional career and a comfortable life has become a place where earnest students struggle to graduate from high school.

                                                             ###

Sometimes a person is required to start a different life. 

Sometimes a person is required to start a different life.  Twelve years ago I was compelled to start a life as a single woman, widowed after forty-five years of marriage, and, a few months later, the life of a mother of two sons instead of three.  Between those two jolts I elected to retire from a long career.  As part of the grieving and resting and renewing over almost two years, I changed more, dropping out of most of my civic and social activities, paring my life down to the people and things I enjoyed. I have called it “slow life,” and most days it was delicious.

Nothing compels change now except my continuing commitment to a delicious life, which, it appears will have to be rediscovered. Alice and I will rebuild the garden. I will continue to get lost in good books and become excited about new travel, but, as an exclusive diet, they no longer satisfy. My three granddaughters joined the January women’s march in Birmingham, Miami, and San Diego, holding my place in line. There is a still unidentified woman in my neighborhood who held out a hand. Another in Iowa City seeks my reassurance and reminds me that I have a few debts too. There are high school seniors studying history in a place where I have history who are trying to maintain hope; one beautiful young man lost his life calling attention to climate change, including the drought in my garden. These unrelated events look like an invitation to rejoin the world. I have decided to accept. I hope that my new life will be delicious, at least some of the time. If not, I will have to make do with meaningful, perhaps worthwhile to others. I think I remember how that is done.

I do not know where this new life goes, only where it starts. The Clinton/Kaine sign has been repurposed as a message board in the front yard.  It reads: Owner of the large, apricot labradoodle, please ring my doorbell.

de·​sign |\ di-ˈzīn \ noun