Come Again

 2025? Awful. We can all agree. Just awful.

I was reminded of Mrs. Windsor, almost as was Mrs. Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg, aka Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and of her other helms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and successively Helen Mirren, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton. So, the other night I watched the late Queen, the actual one give that speech at the Corporation of London luncheon to mark her 40th year as head of The Firm. You know the speech, it's the one about her "Annus Horribilus." Remember? Three of the old girls four children got or were getting divorced, Princess Diana smoked her soon to be ex on the television, the very institution of monarchy -- that quaint billion dollar antique, tottered like a Chinese porcelain on a narrow plant-stand -- and then poor Lizzie's favorite castle burned down, mostly. 

Now, it can be hard to feel much sympathy with anyone who gets to have a "favorite" castle, you know? I get that. I have little to no sympathy with monarchs and monarchy as an institution. "No Kings," as the best people are saying these days! Honestly, that man who wrote The Queen and then The Crown, he made it harder to only see the proud uselessness of the House of Windsor and the world's richest white woman. He made her human, damn him. Well, him and Claire Foy and the rest. So, Liz had what she thought at the time was going to be about the worst year ever, right? Took it on the chin, she did. Rather her raison d'être, that. In a quiet way however the Queen did do something pretty extraordinary in that speech, not perhaps unprecedented but certainly rare. Basically, she said, right out loud, in public, "ouch," and she also asked in so many words if everyone might, just this once, ease up a little, 'cause it had been by any measure, as she said, a horrible year. (Honestly, it's like she had feelings or something. It was eerie.)

But we've all had horrible years, right? I know I certainly have. My own "Annus Horribilis" came a quarter of a century ago. There was a disputed election, the Supreme Court basically elected a fool. It was grim. That was also the year my best friend died, I nearly died, and then I lost my job. Damn, right? My friend Peter was in San Francisco and I was living by then in Southern California and managing a famous Gay & Lesbian bookstore. When I took that job I still didn't drive or own a car because as an adult I'd always lived in civilized communities, but then I found myself not only in suburban Orange County, California, but also learning to drive on LA freeways, and then commuting forty-four miles each way every day, which I did because I loved that job and that bookstore. I had my license for about three days when Peter called and asked me be with him because he was scared. I had to drive the length of California to get there. Happened more than once. The last time his family called me. Pete was back in the hospital and he wasn't coming out. I drove north and spent a week or better staying at my dear friend Richard's apartment and then in Peter's lonely little place, getting up at weird hours to move the car. Terrible that that is one of my strongest memories of that time, setting an alarm clock to run out in the dark and move the stupid car so I didn't get a ticket for parking overnight on the street! I stayed as long as I dared and then I decided I had to get back to my job. The bookstore was already in all kinds of trouble when they hired me. It didn't get better in the years I was there. I had to get back, go home, leave Peter. That last morning I went again to sit beside him. When the nurses clearly hadn't in a while, I gave him a bath. When he woke up for awhile he made blurry eye contact with me just long enough to tell me to "stop staring, it's rude." Sorry. I kissed him and we told each other that we loved each other and then I left to drive the six hours home. He died before I got there.

After I'd given the eulogy at his funeral in Pennsylvania I came home, went back to work again, and then had a horrible pain in my side. I had a check-up scheduled for Monday. It was the weekend, so I waited. By the time I went to my appointment I could hardly walk. The doctor took one look and ordered an ambulance. It was a big practice, a huge Kaiser Clinic. They decided it wasn't safe for me to walk back out the way I came in. They put me on a gurney and passed me through a window into the ambulance, where I may or may not have died a little (and no, I didn't see God, or my grandma, or a bright, white light -- and come on, who wants direct, bright, white light when one is not looking or feeling one's best? How cruel is that?) At one point I sat up on the gurney and the EMT's voice broke like an adolescent when he said, "Please lie down, sir!" My hands were blue. It turns out that my appendix had burst a few days before my scheduled appointment and I had gangrene! Gangrene! Can you imagine?  What a truly weird, eighteenth century disease with which to be diagnosed in the first year of the twenty first century. It was like being told one was suffering from dropsy, or scurvy, or a floating uterus. I got twenty-four staples in my gut. It was a month before I could really walk with a cane. 

And then I got fired. While I was away, the owners sold the bookstore to a guy who lived right around the corner. So he really didn't think he'd need a manager, but thanks though. Done. I'd about gone into bankruptcy, managing that place, worked nights, weekends, lived in a motel, didn't get a raise, blah blah blah. So after that wonderful meeting I drove straight home. Never went back.

So 2000 was a horrible year, my "Annus Horibilis." I mean how could things get any worse, honestly? Right? 2001 just had to get better, am I right? What else could go wrong?!

Now here it is 2025 and I'll be honest, this hasn't been winner either now has it? In fact, I feel safe in saying it turns out to be ever so much worse than we ever let ourselves think even as short a time ago as that long lost paradise of 2024. I mean... phew. 

And my mother died. In February. I went to see her like I've done for years, on my vacation in the summer of 2024 and we had a lovely visit and then she got very ill one evening when everybody else: my sister and brother and sister-in-law and our friends had all gone into town to see live music and Mum and I were home by ourselves and she got sick. And then she got sicker. And I didn't have a car because everybody had driven all the vehicles in to see the show, so I had to call them at the concert and tell them to come home which they did. We took Mum to the emergency room and spent a very long time there like you do and then finally a little doctor came in and told us there was "an obstruction" and it was probably cancer. Mum was 92. She'd survived two cancers already. Even the surgery to properly diagnose the cancer would probably kill her. She went to another hospital, a better one in Erie, and they told us pretty much the same damned thing. She didn't want any of it. She'd survived all that, twice. Not again. "Take me home," she said, so we did.

I stayed until autumn and then I had to get back to my job -- my job that didn't end this time, but changed, a lot. Mum celebrated her ninety-third birthday in January. I made it back to her house the day before she died and she got to see me and I got to see her and we got to laugh and then she went to sleep and then the next morning she died. I stayed to give her eulogy, we gave away some of her chicken collection to anyone who came by, and then I had to get back Seattle, to husband, and to work. 

Everything about this year then has been hard. Nothing so bad as when she died, but nearly all of it complicated, confusing, hard.

More than once when I was alone with Mum, when she was asleep in her chair, just as I'd done when we were taking care of my Dad at the end, years before, I'd find myself standing out on the porch, to catch my breath as it were and not smile for a bit. And sometimes with not a thought to do so, I'd sing a snatch of something just to make the moment go by a bit easier. Lord knows what I was singing. It was alright. She couldn't hear me at the best of times usually, even with her "ears in" -- meaning her hearing aids.

One song I do remember. A folk song. Only knew the chorus really, but I was wrong about that. I remembered more than I'd thought, and it wasn't a folksong actually. It was a very old song, but it was by a famous songwriter, our first really: Stephen Foster. Remember him? Old Kentucky Home and Camp Town Races and "Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me, / Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee...," etc. 

Problematic we'd call ol' Stephen now. He wrote for the most popular entertainments of his day, Minstrel Shows. Songs of the South, so to say and this despite the fact that he was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania boy who mostly lived in New York and as I understand it went South exactly once and did not stay. He also wrote what they called "Parlor Songs." These were rather lachrymose ballads of "pale drooping maidens," usually pining for lost love and that sort of thing. It was one of these I remembered a little and sang alone on my mother's porch.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

there's a song that will linger forever in our ears, 

Oh! Hard Times come again no more."

Now this is interesting. Stephen Foster knew sorrow. He had what they might have called "a weak frame" and was frequently ill. At just 37 and alone in his hotel room he fell and either was injured grievously or cut his own throat. Very sad. Despite his great success and his lasting fame, a very sad end indeed. But what is more interesting is when I came to read about this particular song, the one I sang, Hard Times Come Again No More, written in 1855 at the height of his power and popularity. And what makes it interesting? I'll tell you. (I find comfort in reading and research. Something I've always done to escape.) 

Note that he addresses not God, but his listeners, his audience, the people well enough off to presumably have a piano in the parlor and a parlor in which to gather round and sing. As I say, the song is not a prayer,  but an invitation to what we would call mindfulness. It is a plea not for divine intervention, but ours. 

"Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, 

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

The composer quotes the cry of the destitute and the sufferer, it is in their voice that he calls us to witness and intervention. And he addresses us again, those better off:

"While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,

There are frail forms fainting at the door;

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard times come again no more."

Extraordinary. When I was repeating the chorus and snatches of that first verse, it was frankly with little more than self-pity. Poor me, worried me, busy me, me losing my mother.  Shamefully self-indulgent. No wonder I was careful that no one should hear me.

My friend Nancy recently posted a brief poem, For Instance is the title, by John Ciardi and those last lines stuck with me:

"Not everything that happens / is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is." Yeah, that. Remember that.

We order even our memories to make meaning where there might not have been any, or much at the time those memories were made, yes? It is what we as a species do: we make sense when there may not be any. But the idea that we can or should desist is, I think, if not wrong then not likely. Can't be helped. We want lessons, don't we? Coincidences and meaning and uncanny scenes that foretell sand summarize and distill what otherwise is just pain. We want poems.

And that's why we need art. That's why we make it, require it, enjoy it even when it is sad. Art makes the sense we can't otherwise, even if it's little more than a feeling.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears." Yes, let's. There's something in that, isn't there? We can draw not only strength but joy from a sadness shared. It is good to stop and think not of our problems, not of events as happening to me, as if other people's suffering, as if even the deaths of people I loved have meaning because I loved them rather than being fully vested with meaning for having been lived. Remember life and all the living in it, past and present, loved and unknown to me, and be humbled, awed by how little it is to do with me. All I can do, all we can do, is try to lesson the burdens of others, ease their way, feed the poor, protect the innocent, fight the power of bad and stupid men, and remember what it is for those who know hard times as we, in fact, do not.

"'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no more

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times come again no more,

Oh, hard times come again no more."

That in mind, a moment's mirth and beauty, yes? and so ... A Christmas Memory, by Truman Capote.