Sad

Gwen, Linda, and Karen, June 1961

Presidents Day 2025

I took a walk this afternoon while my daughter was working out with her trainer. It was cold as I walked east on Madison Street, and even colder when I turned back and faced west. But I was dressed for the weather — warm coat, new insulated gloves, wool hat and flannel-lined jeans — and both my mood and my body needed the brisk walk, the cold air on my cheeks, in my nose and my lungs. 

Madison Street in Forest Park and the cross streets to the south are my old neighborhood, where I rode my bike and walked to school. As I headed down Beloit, towards my mom's old house, I thought about being sent to school in this kind of weather, walking four or five blocks with a scarf wrapped over my face and pants on under my skirt. Off we went on cold winter days, and nobody thought much of it. School did get cancelled when the temperatures were consistently below zeros, and we had several days off during the Big Snow of 1967. 

Today my walk took me past the old savings and loan building at Madison and Desplaines. It's empty now and it's for sale. I looked through the front window and down the spiral staircase that led to a community room in the basement. I remembered going there on a Saturday afternoon with my dad and my sisters to get the polio vaccine, probably in 1961 when the oral vaccine became commercially available. It was a community event. We had probably brought a note home from school from the public health department sponsoring the event. We waited our turn and eyed the sugar cubes holding the vaccine  lined up on the table. We picked one, popped it in our mouths and crunched it and came back a few weeks later for a second dose. 

Going to First Savings, the first bank to occupy this building, was not a novelty. We went there happily on Saturdays with my dad when he did his (in-person!) banking. Most days we left with small rolls of LifeSavers, offered to us by the guard or the receptionist. More sugar. 

I imagine this easy-peasy polio protection meant a lot to parents. Of course they took advantage of it! Thinking back, I realize that I knew some children who'd had polio, who walked with a limp, whose parents had probably been very scared when they were sick. It was not something I had to worry about with my kids. 

As I was waking up this morning, head still buried in the pillow, trying to zero in on what day of the week it was, the first full sentence that came to my mind was, "I am sad for my country." This is what comes of doom-scrolling before bed. The ironies inherent in a 2025 celebration of U. S. presidents (I'm looking at you, Abe Lincoln and General Washington) didn't dawn on me until later. 

In my lifetime I have seen these United States become a more inclusive place, that arc of the universe bending towards justice. I don't know that I remember the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but I do remember Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator from Illinois who rounded up votes to make it possible. I remember the civil rights struggles, the voting rights act, the gradual changes in the acceptance of the LGBTQ community during my college and graduate school years, and the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). 

When I was a child, my aunt taught a Sunday School class for what we then called "mentally retarded" children and adults. I learned from listening to adult conversations that many of these individuals, who lived with their parents, didn't go to school. Schools for them were far away, or expensive, or unable to take any more students. Decades later, thanks to the IDEA and federal funding for special education, my daughter who has Down syndrome was picked up by a school bus and educated in our local public schools. 

With Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, and SNAP, we've also become a nation that cares for the sick and feeds women, children and families who simply need to eat.

The wrecking ball of the Trump presidency and Elon Musk's DOGE empire are threatening and destroying one thing after another, things government does for the good of all. American media has too many pundits already; I don't need to my bit about rich, narcissistic, foolish white men, their delusions and their resentments. 

But how did we get here? Many Americans go into the voting booth every four years with "throw the bums out" as their decision point. Incumbents lose when people are unhappy about the economy. It's not necessarily a formula for rational governance, although it seems to work well in politics. 

But what's happening in the U. S. right now, what's making me so sad, is the shift in values in our leaders. They don't care, they don't take care, they're not even hypocritical about saying they care. They certainly don't subscribe to the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote that "unless all are free, no one is free." Ever-expanding freedom means freedom from want and fear, along with the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

The world keeps changing. Social media, social isolation, polarization, globalization, changes in how the economy works and who it works for — it's a lot. Our brains were designed for making our own little gardens grow. The show of power, the slashing and burning, are reassuring for some, sticking it to people who might take what they already have, or wish they had. But it makes the world less good for everybody.

It makes me sad.

A Cantata Sunday, late January 2025

Cantata Sunday (kənˈtädə sənˌdā). A Sunday on which a Bach cantata is performed as part of Bach Cantata Vespers. Also known as A Long Day at Church. Often thoughtful, sometimes tearful. 

One of the petitions in the Litany we use in the vespers liturgy is a list of people in need, culminating in "and all who await from the Lord great and abundant mercy." Once upon a time, when I was younger and self-involved (more self-involved than I am now),  I thought this was group of people awaiting mercy was a subgroup of humanity, people with particular, urgent problems who needed God to solve them now. Why did I think this? Because I included myself in that group and could not think much beyond myself. 

Foolish youngster! Who among us, from day-old newborn to gray-haired elder, does not need God's great and abundant mercy? I have long since yielded up my miserable hubris. Other people feel scared and vulnerable, too, and have intractable problems, unsolvable dilemmas. Knowing this makes life easier. I'm not alone. 

And we need God's mercy more than ever now, after a transition in government here in the U. S. You don't need a recap here from me. There's plenty to read everywhere you look. A lot to take in and a lot for the people of God to respond to, a flood of willfulness meant to clog our discernment and slow our response. 

Today at church I heard some particular groups of people named who are feeling dismissed and frightened. They are part of "all who await, etc." In naming some, we should not forget others lest we allow our self-protecting, self-justifying brains to divide the world into People Like Me and People Not So Much Like Me. 

I once thought I was special when we came to that petition in Evening Prayer — I had something I very much wanted a merciful God to grant me. But I was not alone, or part of a select group. All, all await God's mercy. Migrants, yes, the LGBTQ community. But also people who are disabled, people who need Medicaid to provide health care, civil servants, military leaders, lawyers and judges, refugees, and more. Fortunately God's mercy is great and abundant.

What disturbs me more than any single Executive Order of last week is the way our nation's stated values have shifted. "For all" has become "for certain ones," or only for "real Americans." I guess, on a civic level, one could discuss this, even justify the ins and outs, who's alike, who's different.  Earthly kingdoms are not God's kingdom. But we who, trusting in God's mercy, prayed and sang BWV 111 together today, saying "God's will is best" -- it's up to us to be part of the mission of bringing God's good and merciful will to the world. 

Pick your issue. What are you concerned about? Who can you speak for? Where can you do the most good? And join the ensemble. Many members, one body. 

Seems almost heretical to add this after Bach -- but I keep hearing that "High School Musical" refrain in my head. "We're all in this together." 

Time rolls on

Generations: the compote belonged to my Great-Grandma Sieving, the music cabinet to Grandma Gotsch, and the mirror to my parents. The placemat was woven by me in 2024; the smart thermostat was installed in 2023. 

I started this post on the morning of January 1, 2025T. Think of it as The Day After 2024. Rolling up a digit at the far side of the date didn't make the day feel much different; time didn't move faster or more slowly in the previous evening's climb toward midnight. Nor did it move any faster on the downhill slide into the early hours of the new year. 

Time, it is reported, was different before people had clocks and watches and computers and phones to synchronize and measure it. Before the railroads had to run on time. "There was evening and there was morning, the first day," says the creation story in Genesis 1, with no numbers pinning down the exact time of sunrise and sunset. The new day began, as the Jewish sabbath still does, in the evening, at the end of a day's work. Long hours of daylight in summer were for planting and harvesting; long, cold winter nights were a test of endurance, or a time to seek comfort in one another. 

Measured or not, time rolls on in cycles of day and night, tides, seasons, patterns of growth and decay. The year 2025 CE looked like a faraway number when I was a child in school in the 1960s, but the intervening decades are like nothing in the context of geologic time or the existence of the universe. (The number 2025 is, however, kind of cool when you factor it -- it's the product of squares: 5 x 5 x 9 x 9.)

One of the books I read in 2024 was "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals," by Oliver Burkeman. A podcast or newspaper article prompted me to search for the book in the online catalog of my local library. It was a worthwhile read. It leaned into philosophy, reflections on what time is and how we perceive it. Burkeman, someone who writes about productivity, found that this understanding of time and its limits helped him let go of the need to corral and optimize it. There's a healthy dose of Stoicism in the book, Stoicism being a different thing as a philosophical practice of virtue and acceptance than it is in lowercase where the word suggests enduring pain or hardship with gritted teeth and no outward complaining. 

The 4,000 weeks in Burkeman's title are the span of an average lifetime. Do the math and it works out to approximately 77 years. Life has limits imposed by time and mortality. I liked the part where Burkeman quoted the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawapa: "Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities." I'll keep this in mind in the future when weeding out my collection of books, yarn, and quilting fabric, my personal accumulations of possibilities. 

Burkeman is a popular podcast guest with a website and a new book. One podcast description says that "Four Thousand Weeks" subverts the self-help genre. It's also an antidote to New Year's resolutions. So is this Calvin and Hobbes panel that my sister posted on her Facebook page. 

See those footsteps in the snow? They're a measure of time passing by. 

The year that just ended held many time-inflected marks in our national life: a once-in-every-four-years presidential election; a U. S. president realizing (albeit slowly) he was too old to hold the office for another four years; another U. S. president, Jimmy Carter, dying after reaching 100 years of age, an allotment of far more than 4,000 weeks which he used to accomplish a prodigious amount of good things.

In my life and my family's life, 2024 included the death of my mother, Marilyn Gotsch, at age 92, the last of her generation on her side of the family and my father's. At her funeral we filled a table with memories of her life which included a partially used ration book from World War II, wedding photos from the early 1950s, and pictures of her with that awful perm she had somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. In writing her obituary I broke her long life down into chapters — childhood, marriage and children, working, widowhood, grandchildren, old age. Each had its time and tasks.

Her passing has left me, the dutiful eldest daughter, conscious that I am now the oldest person at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. But I'm not sitting in a rocking chair letting people come to me for  hugs or nuggets of wisdom. Nope. I'm still cooking, clearing, putting away leftovers, and helping with the dishes. But also, at age 70, feeling the effects of time. 

I don't mean achy hips or gimpy knees -- my joints, thankfully, are doing okay. But I do find myself wondering at all that a lifetime -- 3,663 weeks to date -- contains. I see some of this just by looking around my home. Photos taken 60 years ago and scanned into my computer in 2020 appear as a screen saver on my living room TV any time I hit pause and go to the bathroom. Other memories from the past emanate from lamps, dishes, furniture, framed pictures that were once part of my parents' household and have emigrated to mine. They come with stories: the prints that hang above my sofa were purchased by my father on the day I was born. The red glass bowl currently holding red and green Hershey Kisses was my mother's. There's a teapot from one great-grandmother and a crystal compote from another; Aunt Clara told me once that her mother served fruit from this not-very-generous vessel. I knit and sew in the same rooms my kids once littered with Legos and Matchbox cars. The Christmas tree stands in the bay window where Christmas trees have stood for all of the 38 years I've celebrated Christmas in this house. I'm pretty Christmas trees stood there long before I came into the picture; the house was built in 1940. 

Looking back also measures the sorrows of a lifetime. Failings and failures, disappointments and losses from every era. Grief persists. And it's not unwelcome. 

Still, at the beginning of a new year, one tries to look at the bright side, though counter-balancing sadness with joy is not easy these days. Time's ever-rolling stream carried a lot of detritus from 2024 into 2025: war, political polarization, lies, disinformation, uncertainty. Some kinds of changes are filled with hope, others not so much. 

The Stoics would say that hard times are to be expected in life and accepting this is the key to contentment. It's a way to keep on living, and not a bad one as January days lengthen and the work of 2025 begins.