“Do you see that?” I say to my kids. “How those teenagers don’t notice or move for the woman who just got on with a cane?” I try to stop myself before I say, “I hope you never act like that,” because the truth is, they will. And these kids aren’t bad people. But I can’t help wondering if these kids had grown up having to look adults in the eye and say “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir,” if they’d had a little less first-name familiarity and a little more fear of adults, they’d be more inclined to stand up. The phones aren’t helping.
And then, last week, Julia, James, and I got on the bus to go home from piano lessons. Sam was with a sitter. The bus wasn’t crowded; by this time, it was almost 5:30 p.m. But the open seats were still few and far between. I headed to the back of the bus and sat next to a teenager. Julia and James found two seats together, diagonally across from me. At one point James asked for his book, which I’d stashed in my purse on our walk from the piano teacher’s apartment to Central Park West. I got out the book and leaned across the aisle, a little awkwardly, and somewhat over the young woman’s lap, to hand him Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus. Then James asked me to hold the plastic container that he’d been eating pretzels out of. Again, I leaned across her personal space to nab the container. The teenager turned to me. “Would you like to sit next to him? I’m happy to get up,” she said. “Oh, thank you. But no, that’s the last of it,” I said. (And then, yes, I laughed. Sue me.) A few minutes later the teenager got off the bus, turning to us as she pushed through the door, “Have a good night,” she said.
Perhaps the world and public transportation won’t disintegrate into a fiery hellhole because of teenagers after all, I thought. And a split second after: her mom is doing a great job.
FOURTEEN
TO MY WORK COLLEAGUES, RE: NOVEMBER 9, 2016
Hi everyone,
It’s Elizabeth Passarella. I hope all of you are doing well. This is weird, writing you a letter that’s wedged into the middle of a book, but believe it or not, you are one of the reasons I started writing this book in the first place. You are the people I had in mind when I thought about the lovely, hilarious, smart, quirky New Yorkers who might be surprised to know I am a Christian. I mean, some of you knew this, vaguely. I didn’t exactly hide the fact at work; the reason I organized my part-time schedule to have Mondays off was because I led a Bible study for moms through my church, and there was that long discussion over lunch a couple of years back when I confessed that I didn’t have sex until I was married. That was a clue. A few times I’d hear one of you talk about having a baby baptized or going to mass over Christmas or giving up something for Lent. Oh, Lent! Lots of people came in with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday. And I would say, “Oh, my church doesn’t do the ashes thing, but I always kind of wished they did,” and you’d say, “Oh, what church do you go to?” and I’d tell you, and then we’d both assume we were of the same, generally spiritual, lapsed something-or-other, show-up-occasionally-on-holidays type of believers. I’m kind of not though. I’m sort of the show-up-every-Sunday, talk-about-Jesus-at-the-dinner-table, have-a-historic-symbol-of-Christianity-tattooed-on-your-foot kind of believer. And I know y’all would have been fine with that, because we were friends who cared about each other, and New Yorkers are up for anything, even Jesus. But the morning after the 2016 election changed things for me. For all of us. I suddenly felt this intense unity with all of you and the heartbreak everyone was feeling that day, except I also felt hope, a tenuous wisp I grasped to keep me from slipping into a well of despair.
Y’all didn’t feel the hope, did you? Yeah, I know. Which is why I kept my mouth shut.
Remember that morning? Of course you do. New York City was like a scene from The Walking Dead (what I’ve seen from previews that come up on FX while I’m watching The Americans, mind you; zombie stuff gives me nightmares). Oh, Manhattanites. Staggering, exhausted and shell-shocked, through the line at Starbucks, onto the subway, giving each other weak, sympathetic smiles before looking back down at the New York Times on your phones. You’d think everyone would have been dissecting and chatting, but instead it was so quiet. Do you remember? Walking into work was like filing into a wake. Everyone was crying, sharing tissues, holding each other. There was a critical mass huddled around the youngest millennials—the family of the deceased, if you will—who took it especially hard. We watched Hillary’s concession speech together in the conference room. When she said, “And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams,” a couple of you completely lost it. One person said, after it was over, “What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” No one answered her. We shifted in the cushy, black pleather swivel chairs around the conference table and sighed big, huffy sighs, then groaned like we were finishing the last excruciating sit-up in a long set and stood up. We walked back to our desks, made excuses to go to Starbucks again, gave ourselves permission to eat the burrito with the guacamole and sour cream for lunch.
There are those of you reading this whose eyes are rolling so hard right now, they could alter the tides. “Poor, poor New Yorkers,” you are saying. “Those elitist liberals, so out of touch with the rest of the country. Serves them right. Boo hoo.” I’m not really talking to you, but okay. You’re here. Let me try to be your guide to the psyches of New Yorkers for a moment, as someone who has a foot in both worlds. Your political shaman, so to speak. The whole calling New Yorkers elitist is not much of a sting, to start. I’m not justifying it—only the shaman here—but, yeah, they are very happy to be elitist and do not consider this to be in any way an insult. Explaining the gobsmacked misery that was New York the day after the election had as much to do with surprise as it did with the homogeneity of its politics. I’ll put it in terms my Southern beloveds can understand: picture being at a bowl game between Auburn and, I don’t know, Brown, and Brown wins.
I wasn’t crying that morning. I was sad, but not nearly as sad as the rest of you in the office. And I realized, thinking back over that morning, it was a moment where I felt most profoundly the duality of life as a Christian. I had an overwhelming love for the world, my friends in it, and my city, especially when those things were hurting, and a deep, desperate gratitude for an eternal perspective that says, “All is not lost.” None of that would have been appropriate to pontificate upon in the conference room, obviously. But I’ve thought about that day quite a bit since, and there’s a part of me that feels dishonest, joining in on the grief but keeping the hope to myself. Maybe you don’t care (probably you don’t care). Maybe this sounds patronizing (I hope not). But if we are all going to champion the call for civility and dialogue, of learning how others think, I might as well throw this out there.
So I first need to confess the less controversial fact that, although I voted for Hillary Clinton, I was, at the time, a registered Independent, which is where former Republicans who are scared of their parents go to die. Back when I got my first New York state driver’s license, in 2000 or 2001, and I simultaneously registered to vote, I wanted to move away from my Republican upbringing but thought if I went alllll the way to registering as a Democrat, my mother would somehow find out and stop paying for my plane tickets home. I understand that by 2016 I was almost forty years old (oh, sweet literary time travel, I’m still thirty-nine in this story!), and I’d had plenty of time to change it. The thing is, I was a little apathetic toward politics and also extremely lazy. For example: I usually find out my driver’s license is expired because my birthday is five days before Christmas, resulting in a situation where I’m often traveling on or near the day. More than once (yes, more than once), a TSA agent has checked my license in the security line, looked at me with exasperation, and told me my license expired yesterday or last week but to please move on already. I then wait another three months to renew it.
Because I was a registered Independent, I didn’t vote in
a single primary. In New York, you have to be registered with one of the major parties to vote in their primaries. Which means that in neglecting to change my registration from Independent to Democrat, I’d been legally apathetic enough to let you all pick Hillary over Bernie for me. I think I probably would have landed on Hillary anyway, even though I was fed a distaste for the Clintons most of my childhood. Memphis could easily be part of Arkansas—downtown Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas, are separated only by the Mississippi River—and I have family in Little Rock who have been calling Bill Clinton “Slick Willy” since the late 1980s. I know people who are sure the Clintons murdered Vince Foster. What I’m saying is: Hillary came with some baggage for me, but I voted for her. If you are incredulous that an evangelical Christian voted for a Democrat, I will say:
There are more of us than you think.
Reread chapters two and seven.
Now, you might mistake my chill in the face of this crazy election as one of blind acceptance or passive complacency. Everything happens for a reason. God is in control. Hakuna matata! Those are all true. That’s not what I’m saying though. In John chapter 11 Jesus hears that his friend Lazarus is sick. He waits a few days to go visit, telling his disciples that Lazarus is asleep, but he is going to wake him up. He’s really saying that Lazarus is dead; he’s going to bring him back to life. The disciples think, Oh, a nap will do him good. They have no idea. So, Jesus shows up, and Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, tell Jesus that Lazarus is dead. They’re a little miffed. If Jesus had come earlier, Mary says, maybe Lazarus wouldn’t have died. Jesus listens, then tells her that her brother will rise again. She isn’t getting it. So here’s Jesus, fully aware that he’s about to raise this guy from the dead and make everyone’s day, yet when he goes to see the body, do you know what he does? Weeps. Loses it. He weeps for the unfairness of death, for the sorrow of Lazarus’s sisters. He sits in the darkness for a bit. But it doesn’t consume him. He calls Lazarus out of the tomb.
What’s my point? It’s that even when we know the end of the story, even when we know that, eventually, the light is going to overpower the dark, we can weep in the darkness. Being a Christian doesn’t exempt me from feeling terrified or outraged or bitter. It doesn’t mean you don’t fight for what you think is right. Or get sad when you think the bad guys win. What being a Christian means—to me—is that because my ultimate hope and identity are in God, the occasional crappiness of earth doesn’t drive me to despair. My hope lies in God, not man. God is bigger than the president. I know, that sounds like a platitude I’d offer to my first grader. But what if we could all cling to something that simple?
It feels like the world is falling apart.
But God is bigger than the president.
He’s going to destroy values that are important to me.
But God is bigger than the president.
If I can detour for another minute, this argument works for the other side too.
Hooray! A president who is going to do everything I want!
But God is bigger than the president.
God’s plans are never going to fall neatly into one political party. How could they? We Americans made those up, and as further evidence that we are fickle and flawed, the parties were practically flipped a century ago. Try explaining to your preternaturally politically active nine-year-old that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
God is bigger than the president.
Back to the conference room. Specifically, to the person who asked, “What am I going to tell my daughter?” That one hurt. I have a daughter. I took her with me to vote. We were high on the historic significance. We took a selfie outside the polling place to commemorate it. And here’s what I would have told her, had she been older and more inquisitive and disappointed: If it feels like the country or the world doesn’t value you as a woman, God does. If it feels like your voice isn’t being heard, God hears it. If it feels like you have to work harder than others and still feel powerless, hold on to the truth that you have God’s power within you. Remember that the world is made up of flawed humans, and if you base your worth on their opinions, even on the ones you agree with, eventually they’ll let you down. Find your worth in the fact that you are made in the image of God, that he would have died for you if you were the only person on earth. Also, God is bigger than the president.
When I was growing up, my dad always took me with him to vote. It was thrilling, driving into the parking lot of whatever elementary school was our polling place for the day, with all of the candidates’ signs clustered at the curbs like someone spilled a huge deck of oversize UNO cards. My dad would stand in line with his hand clamped around the back of my neck—that’s how he walked with my sister and me for the years when we were the perfect height, just parallel to his elbow; it was the most efficient way to simultaneously keep us close, steer us in a different direction, and apply pressure when we were being sassy. We’d squeeze together into a voting booth and pull the curtain closed, like a tiny dressing room at a store, before taking in the giant (to me) metal voting ballot. Kids these days miss out. My children are only allowed to watch me fill in the SAT bubbles on a Scantron sheet. I guess I could let them put that piece of paper in the scanner, but where’s the fun in that? It’s on par with reaching into the ATM when the little slot opens to project the cash, something I also don’t completely trust my children to do correctly. But in the 1980s I got to flip the levers, those fingertip-size door locks with smooth, flattened teardrop edges, still warm from the hands of the last person in the booth. My dad would read down the names, I would flip, and then, at the end, when we were sure everything was correct, I’d get to pull the large lever, like the handle of a shovel, from one side to the other, that locked in our vote and sent all the small locks click click clicking back to neutral. Wha-bang. Back to even odds between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.
Y’all, he was Jewish. And he was probably (definitely) voting for a Republican. And in taking me with him, letting me participate in one of the greatest gifts we have in this free country, he made me feel valuable. Even if you think all of my God talk is nuts, even if you want to ignore the whole middle chunk of this letter and the idea that your identity comes from being created by a loving God, you can still rest assured that your daughter feels her worth from you, not from who the president is or isn’t. You who took her behind the lame foam-board privacy screens that have replaced the curtains. You who took a selfie with her with your I Voted sticker stuck to your nose to make her laugh. You, too, are bigger than the president.
Love,
Elizabeth
FIFTEEN
YOU GET WHAT YOU GET, AND (OVER THE COURSE OF A FEW YEARS AND THE PERSISTENT WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT) YOU DON’T GET UPSET
ON THE MORNINGS THAT I AM in charge of taking my children to school, we disembark from the city bus about a block and a half from their elementary school and walk, frequently with many neighbors and friends heading to the same school, while my kids tell me I’m the meanest mother in the world because I don’t pack their lunches. To be clear, they don’t pack their lunches either. They’ve offered, but considering one of them still puts his pants on backward most days, I don’t think it’s wise to add another task to their morning routine. No, in our house no one makes lunches, because my kids eat school lunch. They are righteously ticked off about it, and every morning is a fresh opportunity to tell me so.
Our family rule is that I will make lunch while you are in preschool, but once you graduate to public school kindergarten, the gravy train ends. The list of reasons why is long and varied. For one, my kids’ school lunch is decent. Desirable, even. The most recent monthly menu I looked up on the Department of Education website listed a Chinese food day, with egg rolls and dumplings, and a New York State produce day, with apples grown in the Hudson Valley and a kale salad. Kale salad! On days when my kids are off their game, they’ll let it slip that school lunch included a slushie. (Further questioning reveals that this might be a f
ruit cup that was frozen and not properly defrosted, but . . . details.) There are always stacks of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an alternative to the daily meal. These choices seem downright fantastic; when I am working from home, I eat a stale tortilla and a banana. On days when I have sent a lunch—for a field trip or because a child has a club meeting during his lunch period—and food comes home, uneaten, I point to it as evidence that I’ve made the right decision. I paid good money for that salami, I say.
Another reason I don’t pack lunches is that I’m good at it, and it feeds my pride. During the summer, when my children attend a day camp where home lunch is required, I fill bento-style boxes with leftover pasta from the night before and the perfect number of strawberries to fit in one tidy, baby-fist-size well. I’ll even add a piece of candy or, on mornings where I’ve unquestionably left my body for a few minutes, a note telling them that I love them and to have a good day. When I finish, I call my husband in to admire my work or skip into the living room to tell the kids what I’ve packed them, like a restaurant server rattling off the night’s specials. Every so often, my kids go to a science camp that asks for lunches to be in disposable, not reusable, containers. On those days, I write their names in block letters on brown paper sacks and draw snakes and panda bears and balloons. This is how I know packing lunches is bad for me. I already struggle with humility in household tasks, and packing an award-winning lunch puffs me up bigger than a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. I don’t need the temptation.
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