Grace, Amazed

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What a time this is. Tonight, I found myself suddenly singing harmony to "Amazing Grace"along with the notes that floated up from the police station near us, played on the bagpipes. Last year this time, clouds of tear gas spewed into our neighborhood from the same building, police in riot gear, police leaving the neighborhood in urban tanks toward the BLM protests downtown. At night, we shut our windows; at night, the voices of protesters rose over the breeze, then came the acrid smoke, shouting, loudspeakers far into the night. 

There were no bagpipes last year; tonight, there are multiple, playing on the roof of the old safeway-become-precinct.Last summer, the pandemic was still young; we had moved beyond our sourdough starters and toilet paper shortage, to months of protests, to social unrest. Then the fires came. The skies went red, then yellow, then the entire world was grey for weeks. Tear gas and smoke, air so dangerous it was unbreathable. 

 Last night I attended my first opera rehearsal in over a year. I sang in a (fully vaccinated) group and cried the entire way home. Two weeks ago, I ran my first race in the same amount of time, and began sobbing as I crossed the finish line. 

And when I find myself singing the harmony to "Amazing Grace" I find myself crying because all week I have been watching from almost 2,000 miles away the approaching wedding of my Kalamazoo family's daughter, J's first babysitter (and, with her brother, only babysitter). R. and I couldn't attend due to a number of sudden, dire medical issues that meant we were rooted in Oregon for the forseeable future. So we headed to a cabin in the mountains, with our olden dog. 

But those hymn-notes, all those years singing with my Kalamazoo family, how easily we could sing together, how they took me and J in. How much of my life has been shaped by music, by singing-- When we moved into this house, I loved the regular Monday night bagpiping: reels and hymns and whatever else police bagpipe choirs generally play. Maybe it's the almost-year in Scotland; maybe it's me being corny AF. Maybe it's related to my JESUS FUCKING CHRIST LOVE OF MARCHING BANDS. 

I suppose it is better than tear gas. It is still problematic. For a moment, the city considered making that precinct building a homeless shelter. I wish they would do that--but we are fancy-neighborhood adjacent, so that seems terribly unlikely. 

 Anyway, this is just to say I am still here. We are. J. comes home in five and a half weeks. COVID cases are rising again. There are no fires here in Portland, yet, though a walk through any neighborhood, a drive through the mountains will show you the damage the heat dome did: scorched trees, plants, rivers a trickle, the mountain almost bare of snow. But for a week we stayed by a rock-strewn river, fast and cold. For almost a week we did nothing but write, walk the olden dog, run (me), wake to the sound of water over basalt, slow runs over country roads, bald eagles and stellars jays and northern flickers and red-breasted mergansers-- 

 The cop bagpipers are playing two songs: Amazing Grace and their other old standard, with drums this time. It sounds like a very slow reel. I cannot figure out what song it is, but can sing it for you. 

These cops also have dogs, also have tanks. Also I have dated a cop who was once an ice dancer and operatic baritone,  and slept with a cop and taught students who were entering the police academy housed at my old school, been pulled over by former students who were now cops. 

I am fundamentally opposed to the police state, have changed my mind on a lot of things my privilege let me believe were benign. I am moving closer and closer to severing all ties with higher education and its inherently classist, sexist, racist systems of caste stratification (this doesn't mean I do not value learning, or education. Actually, the opposite: education, as Paolo Freire believed, must be radical and revolutionary). 

And. The bagpipes make me cry. Emotional arguments are powerful this way, deeply irrational, dangerous. 

Amazing Grace throws me back into FCC in Kalamazoo, singing with J and C and my little boy running around with their daughter, who got married this weekend. And I am here, 2,000 miles away. And the air smells of juniper, dry earth, the sky pinkish-yellow at 8:30 PM. 

Sitting in rehearsal last night, still terrified of the Delta variant and how vulnerable all of us are even though we are vaccinated, not knowing anymore how to temper my terror, how I miss, have missed, will always miss, singing with people. Whatever normal was, we're not getting back to it. The earth is burning. We are on borrowed time, all of us. But there is still beauty. Singing with people will always remind me that there is the potential for beauty and divinity in every moment. Also, nothing can be taken for granted. Not family, not privilege, not emotional assumptions. Not even what feels to be true.

Here we are, here we are, here we are. 

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