How Do We Get Through It?
I reached for my old copy of "Fear and Loathing"...
Dear Readers,
I’m doing that thing again where I frequently check the president’s public approval ratings and wonder how soon they will drop and how low they will go. Most presidents have started their terms with approval above 50 percent. Then they gradually lose support as reality sinks in. Trump has never been able to keep his approval above 50. Right now it’s at 47.7, with disapproval rising, at 47.1, according to the polling averages at the 538 website. The negative line will soon intersect with the positive line . . . but it’s going to be a long, long four years.
Good news: the odious Senator Mitch McConnell will finally retire to a rest home in Kentucky. Bad news: prominent people keep doing Nazi salutes in public. Sort of good news: then they at least try to deny they were Sieg heiling. How long before they come right out and say we need a little fascism? Bad news: some already have.
I wonder every day how we’re going to get through this.
Helping each other not to sink into despair. Reminding ourselves that those in power now are not the superhumans they think they are. Keeping our eyes open, even when we want to look away. Taking some kind of action. Paying attention to other things when we need a break from politics. Holding on to music and art and literature. Attending to those who need help. Walking the dogs.
The brilliant Erik Hoel noted some time ago in his newsletter that there is scientific evidence that dancing proves to be the number one cure for depression.
I devote some time each week to rolling a 15-pound sphere down a 60-foot alley, seeking to find my total strike feeling. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a frivolous pursuit, but I notice every time how much momentary relief I get just by spending a little time with my mind on something other than work and doom.
During those high-anxiety months last year before the election, I was thinking back to the campaign of 1972, when Richard Nixon won every state except Massachusetts. I wanted to remind myself how the writer Hunter S. Thompson portrayed a political system that elevated the worst, most venal political actors. I went to my bookshelf and opened his chronicle Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72.
But I was soon distracted. There was a handwritten letter folded inside the book. It was dated “Mon. nite” and began “Dear Folks.” Two sides of a single piece of stationery. At the end, “Love, Freda.”
Freda was my aunt who lived on the family farm in Southern Indiana. She was writing to her folks, asking if they planned to come to her daughter’s wedding. “Glenda is going to make Gerri’s wedding cake,” she reported. “Rose and I, with various other relatives, are going to fix the eats, we think. Don’t know how it’s going to work out but it’s the only solution we could come up with, prices being what they are.”
How did the letter end up in that book, to be discovered some fifty years later? Because I grew up in a house with my mother, grandparents, and an aunt and uncle (large family), and family members regularly wrote letters to each other. They would arrive in the mail, get passed around, and sit on the coffee table for a few days. Thompson’s book came out in 1973. The letter appears to have been written in the spring of either 1974 or 1975. Nobody was saving any of the family correspondence. Freda’s letter became a handy bookmark.
Gerald Ford was president by that time and inflation was running wild (up to 12 percent in 1974). And Freda was raising eleven children on her own, because her husband Leonard had been struck by lightning while on a tractor in the mid-1960s. Not long after Freda saw her daughter Gerri get married, tragedy struck again: Freda was in a car accident and died a few weeks later of her injuries, in July of 1976. Eleven of my cousins were on their own, the older ones taking care of the younger ones.
I sent a copy of the letter to my two uncles in Indiana, and one of them forwarded a copy to one of my cousins. (This is the kind of exchange that would normally take place on Facebook, but I stay far far away from Facebook.) It led to one uncle recounting fond memories of his times putting up hay with his father and siblings. He and Freda were the designated “hay trompers,” a process he explained.
I’m lucky to have two uncles who have always been good letter-writers. They both responded to last month’s newsletter, “Where I’m Calling From,” in which I was recalling the music that we listened to with our aunt Kay on the “back landing.” I had surmised that she started listening to country and blues stations out of Memphis, but one uncle remembered that the station came out of Gallatin, Tennessee, near Nashville. He also wrote about men listening to St. Louis Cardinal baseball games on the radio at the local store. “My Dad once told them he had read an article that claimed MIT (?) had experimented with sending pictures through the air like they did sound,” my uncle wrote. But apparently nobody believed it.
When I lived in Arlington, near Boston, I thought it was a stroke of luck that we had one of the few remaining typewriter repair shops on the East Coast. I’ve got two manual typewriters, and I visited a couple of times to have them tuned up. Last summer, my friend Bob, who has taken to collecting these wonderful old machines (he currently has seven) paid a visit to the proprietor of the “Cambridge Typewriter Co.” an engaging man named Tom Furrier.
Bob was visiting from Texas, and he already knew that the shop was entering its final phase. (Because he follows the news in the typewriter community.) He talked with Tom about his efforts to find a buyer for the business. But how many people are qualified to run a typewriter shop? Now comes word that the shop will close down for good at the end of March. At age 70, Furrier is ready for retirement. He wants to sell as much of his inventory as he can in the next month. And he plans to have a “type-in” party with loyal customers before the last day.
Bob went home with a nifty teal-colored Olivetti 45. I get a typewritten letter in the mail every once in a while from him. I’ve sent a couple myself. You can see a nice photo of my Smith-Corona, if you really want to, in a newsletter I sent in February of 2024. I reported then that Tom’s shop was “still going strong.” Ah, way back in February of 2024 . . . a letter from an earlier age.
—30—
I am not surprised that someone claims dancing is the no. 1 cure for depression. When you combine exercise with music with a pleasant partner, it’s a win-win-win!