I have had music and warmth on my mind this week. Not because life has been particularly full of either; if I’m honest, it’s been the usual February cold, damp and dreary. But because February 1 is my new year’s day, a day fit for optimism, I’m going to bring some of both, slathered in butter, to this little corner of the internet.
Although first, I’ll tell you why I think I should do this…
Dark clouds, bitter days
For those of us who “lean blue,” as the demographers say, the weeks following the election were scarcely joyous. They should have been wonderful! The ballots counted, even if it took a while to complete, showed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won. The electoral college as well as the popular vote were not in dispute.
In the past, defeated candidates (even one-term presidents) resignedly acknowledged their losses. They forced smiles to congratulate the winner, and graciously stepped out of the limelight. This was true in 2020, in most states, for most officials. But the outgoing president forced America to watch challenge after court challenge. Our neighbors listened to cats-cradles of fabricated yarns about voter fraud, night after night. Our joy was alloyed, in the metallurgical sense: lead mixed in with our every golden moment.
Yet all those challenges and hoohah were essentially frivolous, tossed out by court after court.
I wonder what passed through the minds of some voters. On the one hand, they had imbibed weeks, years even, of false accusations of voter fraud. On the other hand, they saw ordinary Republican candidates elected across the country. How to square the rant that voter fraud is rampant when Republican officials declared their elections clean?
I recall hearing one angry, red-leaning voter accuse some Democrats of sanctioning voter fraud. (This was around the time of Barack Obama’s re-election.) Egregious voter fraud, at that! — because we protested state-imposed strictures that made it harder to vote. How many illegal ballots would we condone, she shouted, before we would be outraged by illegals voting. Or felons voting. Or whichever nefarious group was in her mind. Our suggestion that county officials seemed pretty competent at keeping their rolls clean was met with a snort of disgust. Our belief that everyone eligible to vote should be able to vote, and easily at that, was met with outright derision. Why should such civics basics be ridiculous? I never had an answer.
An upcoming Civics Sunday post will certainly look at the latest crop of voting barrier laws Republicans are promoting. They are designed to make it harder to register to vote, to cast a ballot, to stay on the rolls. I still can’t think how to convince my angry friend that it’s a good thing that all eligible people vote. Perhaps the Republican vision is closer to the earlier versions of our Constitution. You know, before those amendments that let Black men, women, and young people vote.
Where does the sunshine come in?
I know, I promised a post with unalloyed joy, or at least a bit of a smile. Here is one:
Timothy was a Jersey guy, although as a jazz musician, no especial fan of Jon Bon Jovi’s rock and roll. Nonetheless, I think he’d love this lighthearted performance, on a January morning, on some nameless Florida pier. (Of course, Jersey folks go south in the winter as reliably as waterfowl.) Seeing this performance during the inaugural concert across America made me smile in my heart. And then the sun broke through the clouds above Jersey’s crown prince, and I laughed out loud.
You mentioned butter?
So much for the music and the sunshine. The butter is not my idea. (Although Miss Ella the Kitty lives for all things dairy, and thinks butter 24/7 would be an excellent idea.)
I heard about a “butter journal” by way of a woman who participated in one of those bonkers reality-ish programs. This one, Alone from Netflix, apparently took the last-one-standing concept into the inhospitable wilds of the Arctic. (Tropical insects but mild nights or bears plus frostbite? I know which I think is worse.) The runner-up goes by Woniya Thibeault. Woniya’s an earnest believer in seeking joy in settings that would have most of us retreating to our Kon-Mari textbooks in vain.
Once back in “civilization,” Thibeault decided to offer a course in what she calls surthrival, thriving in nature instead of fighting with it. She disdains the notion, encompassed in ‘survival,’ that beating nature is a zero-sum game. Having hacked down bitterbrush to allow tiny native flowers and baby oaks and pines to thrive, I see her point.
The Guardian’s reporter who attends the class reported back:
In class, Thibeault gives us a crash course in “bird language” and I find myself deciphering the difference between when the birds are comfortable, and when they sense a threat; between their territorial squawking and cries of alarm.
We are told to keep a “butter journal”, packed with observations “that make your life rich and delicious and fulfilling.” Mine is quickly filling with doodles of the creek’s shifting wrinkles and the emergence of snow berries and tiny yellow pine cones.
A little layer of butter
This is such an appealing notion. I think the butter journal must be a close cousin to the more common gratitude journal. But it seems more free, less respectable perhaps. Recording what I’m thankful for at day’s end is different from pausing at the end of a yoga session to be grateful. And both differ from noting down what made the day rich, delicious…
Thinking of butter brings back one of my happiest memories of the first week Timothy and I spent in England. We had just moved into our very own (furnished, rented) flat in Ealing Common. We’d undertaken our first grocery shop, in the Ealing Broadway Centre’s Safeway. We bought a bloomer loaf of bread, some butter, eggs, jam and marmalade, probably a couple of lamb cutlets for dinner. But that first breakfast, eating richly flavoured chewy bread, spread with butter and jam that tasted of dairy and fruit, made us laugh like children. The tea (mine with milk) was probably stronger than the New York City coffee of those days before ubiquitous espresso.
I expect Ella the Cat will be overjoyed if I institute a regular practice of buttering my journal with sunshine and joy.