Red's Wrap

We have been saved. By ourselves.

Maybe that’s all I need to say. But it feels like I need to say more.

We are changed by what has happened in our country. There are fine parts of us that have been worn away by the steady rasp of cruelty. We felt this happening. It was searing and painful at first, but soon we became numb, and then we were surprised to look at ourselves and see the fine parts gone.

There has been damage done, not just to us as a people, but to us as people. Each of us.

But there’s also been muscle built where before there was weakness. Millions of people, exhausted but made stronger by treading water in the bottomless, terrifying ocean of our country, found their way on to the life raft of the election.

Seventy-four million of us. We saved ourselves. We saved the country.

And now we have another chance to make things right.

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Originally published November 7, 2020, the last time we thought we could make things right. This time I think we really will.

I skipped the class field trip to the medical examiner’s office yesterday.

At first, when I saw the field trip on the syllabus for my Death & Dying course, I thought, hey, I can do that. It’ll be interesting. I’m into public health and know that the ME is often the first line of data collection about plagues and all that. Car wrecks, overdoses, all the tragedies. Overflowing.

But even though Milwaukee County has built a brand-new facility that I’m told is state of the art and absolutely pristine, I knew it would smell of death in some undetectable by other people way. I would smell death there. I woke up yesterday and thought. I can’t go there.

The instructor didn’t mind when I opted out. She looked right at me last week in class and practically invited me to opt out, not by name, of course, she is too professional for that. But she’s also a social worker so she is always looking out for everybody and maybe especially me. That’s nice. I don’t mind. There are times when I need looking out for.

In other news, this afternoon’s school pickup featured wind, rain, and cold. I stood in my sturdy Street Angels fleece holding my new push button umbrella and watched one five-year-old after another come bounding through the door, dressed in their heavy hoodies and winter parkas. Our girl walked out in a short-sleeved red Sylvester shirt and her beloved grey ‘jean pants.’ When asked, she had no idea where her sweatshirt or jacket were. “I lost them,” she said, oh, so serious, and so, we raced down the street to the car while I felt the eyes of a dozen right-age parents. Grandma can’t even dress that girl right. Nobody looked at me. Everyone’s too nice. It was just my disembodied self.

If you suspect my mind’s all over the place, you would be right.

I went to Street Angels this afternoon to roll and label pants. There is a trick to rolling jeans that involves tucking in the crotch. That’s something I learned today. The jeans are rolled and labeled so outreach workers can reach for them quickly, not have to rifle through a pile of stuff. I rolled maybe three dozen. It was a lot of pants.

Tomorrow, I plan on focusing.

Somebody whistled far off down the hall and we all woke up.

After decades of a Republican legislature bent on strangling big cities (well, one big city), Wisconsin now has a Democratic State Senate and Democratic State Assembly along with an extremely capable and incredibly charismatic Democratic Governor.

It’s a wonderment.

People turned out all over the state but especially in the cities the Republicans had nearly choked to death. But it wasn’t just the urbanites. Democratic voters turned out in little towns, farm communities, resort villages. There were lines to vote everywhere.

It was delicious.

The endless thrashing about trying to get the simplest people-centered legislation passed, say, increased funding for Meals on Wheels or adequate special education funding for local school districts has come to an end. Life will get better.

Governor-Elect David Crowley has been Milwaukee County’s County Executive for six years. He’s smart, strategic, collaborative, and uncannily able to make friends with anyone. Here is a picture of the two of us taken last spring at a candidate forum. Not everybody knew that I’d decided about five years prior that he would be governor someday. He knew, though. One old lady saw it in her crystal ball.

And it came to be.

I don’t know where my Groucho Marx glasses are either.

It’s okay because I’ve been pretending to be a parent and you don’t need a costume for that, just a pair of jeans and a good hoodie.

Well, that’s actually not true. I don’t pretend to be a parent. I pretend to be a grandparent who thinks she’ll live to be a hundred.

Today at Doctor’s Park, I walked fast down the endless stairs to the beach. Kiddo, Cupcake, Cookie, Sweetie, Honey, Paulina still beat me to the bottom. As did the dog. We did a quick walk up and down the beach and, in that time, I and the dog saw a dead muskrat laying on its back with a huge stick across its chest and a dead sea gull as big as a small turkey. Seriously, it looked like you could roast it and feed five people.

Paulina, five and fascinated by the beach in all ways, collected armfuls of rocks. So many they spilled over, dribbling behind her as she charged from one fascinating rock to the next. That’s when I stepped in with my grandmotherly self to remind her that the real purpose of hoodies was pockets. She studied me for a long minute, my hands in my own hoodie pockets, and then she untied her hoodie from around her waist and put it on, stowing her dozens of rocks in the pockets for the trudge back up the stairs.

At home Paulina shook out her hoodie pocket full of rocks on the living room floor, sand and all. Then she found two purple ribbons, laid them on the floor, and lined up each rock according to size and look. And because it’s so pretty, I’m loathe to ask her to pick them all up. Maybe tomorrow.

I love a kid who loves rocks. It’s a grandmother thing.

The Milwaukee Brewers won the World Series last night. It is a stunning and wonderful thing especially for people old enough to remember their losing the World Series in Game #7 in 1982. The ’82 Brewers are Milwaukee legends – Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper, Ted Simmons, Rollie Fingers – that every Milwaukeean of a certain age can rattle off like they saw them play last week. We’re all surprised to see them now. They got old, too, along with us. The new players are young and beautiful, and we love them like they’re our grandsons.

I asked my husband how many Brewers games we watched this year. There were the twenty in our season ticket package although we gave a couple of those away. And then there were baseball games on TV throughout the nights of summer, the windows open, the gentle din of kids playing in the street, our dog barking at the neighbor, the big fan running, maybe a little rain, a child asleep on my lap. My husband said we watched a hundred games. I don’t know if that’s right. It seems right. There were so many.

I could say that baseball saved us after the death of our daughter in June. That would be hyperbole. We were weak through much of the summer, but we didn’t need saving. As it turns out, though, we did need the rhythm of baseball, the balls and strikes, the pitch count, the stealing, the hit batters, the high fly balls and the wild catches where outfielders crashed into walls to grab a ball. We needed Sal Frelick, William Contreras, Christian Yelich, Jackson Churio, Brice Turang, all of them. They were our boys and they did good.

The Brewers won the World Series last night. In a weird kind of way, so did we.

It was getting late. We’d already gone to one campground, after traveling maybe five miles down a dirt road, that displayed a Campground Full sign. It was very hot – 102 degrees but, as they say, out West, it’s a dry heat. Absent the humidity of the Midwest, the heat doesn’t inspire a full-bodied sweat. But it is hot, hot, hot to the touch. The dogs are in the backseat panting.

We pull over and google hotels. There is a baseball tournament attracting families from all over southeast Wyoming. The only available room requires that dogs weigh 25 lbs or less. Ours are 65 and 70. We launch a brief argument with one hotel to no avail. They are adamant.

Down the road – 30 or 40 miles – is a state park so we head in that direction. At the gate, the nice lady ranger marks in pink the areas where we could find a site to put our tent. “Find a site and come back to tell me which one and pay.”

The park, Guernsey State Park, is massive. Long winding roads carved out of the hillsides by the Civilian Conservation Corps surround an enormous reservoir. Seven campgrounds, all of them hardscrabble, situated on dry hillsides, thick with rocks, but shielded by tall pines. It is a rough place.

We pass a meadow with a dozen empty sites but decide to keep going to find the ‘best one.’ I am the impetus for this, believing always that something better is just around the corner and I want to find it so I don’t regret not finding it later.

Then I saw the perfect campsite. It was at the end of a narrow strip of land, really a slice of a very high hill, with a view of the beautifully blue reservoir below. No more than thirty feet wide, this promontory promised the most extraordinary camping experience although it occurred to me, looking over the side as we drove to the point, that we’d have to keep close watch of the dogs. But, oh, what an incredible campsite!

We agreed at the very same moment. We couldn’t possibly camp there. It was too narrow. Too high. We could roll over and go cascading into the lake. It occurred to me it wasn’t the first time I’d gone hunting for something better, for the best, and then regretted it. It wasn’t the first time we’d had to work together to address the excessive ambition of one of us, our tendency to overreach. Well, mine. Maybe.

But backing up wasn’t an option. Too much risk of error.

So we worked together to get the truck turned around. At least a dozen back-ups, going forward, back-ups, going forward, with him driving and me directing on the ground, until we could drive off the point onto the road and go find a campsite with no precarious edges.

That’s the beauty of teamwork.

I tell this story for no particular reason except I don’t want to forget it. We got ourselves into a tough spot and because we are practiced at joining forces even when we want different things, we found a safe and beautiful place.

We slept on this rocky hill with six or seven campsites around us. Because it was so hot, we had all the tent flaps up. This means that in the middle of the night I could look up and see the Big Dipper. It stayed there shining all night so every time I opened my eyes, it was there. The finest thing.

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Originally published in 2022 during an epic camping trip across the west with our two beloved, now departed dogs, Swirl and Punchy. Those were the days, my friend.