I was In College the day John Kennedy was shot.
I hadn't forgotten that misery the night Barack Obama was elected President.
It was right there on the tip of my soul.
By human standards a pretty vast time gulf has spanned those days - and today.
But the feeling of intense "I am an American, and that means something special" has just jumped back into my heart this morning; I have felt it many times in the last four years, but never as on the day we lost the real hope of our future or on the day when it appeared that that hope had been given back.
In the last four years it has always been the feeling of "I am an American and that means something special, but everything that has contributed to that specialness is being dismantled".
Today I am on an island in the Salish Sea.
There are no crowds.
But a lot of horns have honked here.
We have elected one of the most eminently qualified, decent, caring men in our history to the Presidency.
His Vice President is our future; she can pick up any fallen banners that might occur and lead us forward; if history is kind to us, without fallen banners, she will do so in her time.
So what's not to like about Darkness Abatement Day: 7 November 2020?
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I wrote Screen Saver as if the last half of the Twentieth Century were flashing by like pictures on a computer screen at rest.
My hope was, that when complete, a non linear view of that history would be lodged in the reader's mind as a - perhaps - useful reference point.
This morning I would like to offer an excerpt from Screen Saver: some image flashes that I had hoped would be a reference in some - I had imagined - distant future.
This morning that imagined future has come into focus.
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"Taking what might have been an action of some significance, but as things were to turn out, apparently wasn’t, the first person I sought out was Barbara. We went into the Park Blocks, out of the buildings, into the open air and walked, hand in hand. Everybody was out there. There was some kind of device or there were multiple devices that were filling the air with updates on the president’s condition. We had stopped where a group had gathered, among them my fraternity brother Tom. The words “John F. Kennedy is dead” insinuated themselves into the air like a malevolent spirit. Barb dropped to her knees on the grass. We all stood, or knelt – there were others on their knees – frozen and looking like the statues of the victims of the Irish potato famine that I would see many years later in Christchurch. It seemed as if the world was in the process of fading to black. I had looked at Tom and said, “thank God Lyndon Johnson is Vice President”. Tom nodded his agreement.
"Many years later another event occurred that had somehow seemed to be inextricably intertwined with John Kennedy. Mysti and I had gone around the corner to the Olympia Pizza Restaurant early so we could get back by seven and watch the election returns as the polls began to close from the middle of the country westward. We knew that the east would be closed by then and we knew that any bad news would begin to show itself - if there were going to be any - among those eastern results; but we had felt that there was still going be a story unfolding from St Louis west.
"After returning from Pizza it looked as if no bad news had cropped up yet, but it was still anyone’s election. But good things kept happening and more states were turning blue than were turning red. There came a point where the electoral count was not 270 blue but it was close. I had looked at the map to try to get some kind of idea what might be going to happen. The entire pacific coast had no color yet. The obvious suddenly flooded upon me in a form that can only be described as joy. “He’s got it,” I said to Mysti.
"A few minutes later the West Coast turned blue and the City of Seattle erupted. Everywhere people poured into the streets. We were on Capitol Hill. As we entered the courtyard we encountered people we barely knew or didn’t know at all. We all hugged one another and made loud joyful sounds. People were streaming into the streets and up to Fifteenth. The rest of the night was a massive party of people in and out of the bars and coffee shops to the street and back again. Cars full of joyfully shouting people with the windows down paraded up and down. I had never thought that the magic of having a leader that stirred a feeling of pride and joy at being an American would ever be given back to us; but it appeared on that night as if it had happened."
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