I have heard this from close friends who experienced this revelation, and now – almost mystically – I find that it’s true. I turned 67 two months ago, which I suppose makes me an elder, and I find that when I glance in the mirror before dawn … as my hair goes to gray, as my skin somehow settles differently upon my face … I see a haunting glimpse in the glass of my own mother and father.
Certainly they were in that mirror today, as I rose on the morning after Election Day.
There will be countless observations and analysis about what we just witnessed, this whole Democratic surge to take the House and the Senate that had a rippling impact on countless local elections across the nation, including the ones here in Onondaga County.
Last night, watching the returns, I kept remembering the words of the late Earl Lloyd, a former Syracuse guy who was both the first Black player to step onto the court in a National Basketball Association game and one of the wisest human beings I ever knew:
He used to say that the most soul-shaping things a child ever hears, for good or ill, are the statements parents casually make across a kitchen table – and what ultimately creates the woman or man that you are today is how you choose to keep or discard those lessons, one by one, as you move deeper into life.
In those words, he nailed everything for me about the way I shaped my lasting notion of the United States. It was at that kitchen table where I learned to appreciate this family history: My father spent most of his childhood in an orphanage. As for my mother, her mother died when she was 2, and her dad soon walked away, abandoning six children – my mom the youngest – in their immigrant family.
Neither of my folks went to college. My father barely went to high school. He went on to serve in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, came home to Buffalo, took a job in a factory and met and married my mother, who soon became pregnant with their first child…
That happened just as my dad was drafted into World War II, a war that took a savage toll on my family. While he was gone to the Pacific theater, my mother moved in with a friend, another Army wife in Youngstown, Ohio. They were there when my toddler sister Sharon died of “encephalitis lethargica,” a terrifying and seemingly random disease known as “the sleeping sickness” – a loss of such shock and pain it nearly broke my mom.
My dad eventually made it home from combat, and the two of them somehow managed to rebuild – even as my mother’s brother George, so close to her in childhood, came home from the war, traumatized by bloodshed, and soon took his own life.
My mother, a child of immigrants, lost her daughter during the war and her brother to the horror of it all.
When we were kids, we heard the stories when we stood above those graves, in Buffalo.
In all of it – all of it – was somehow everything our parents showed us, more than told us, about being Americans.
They were registered Republicans – a political choice I suspect happened because my folks both revered Dwight Eisenhower – though they also loved Democratic icon Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their voting was always all over the map and across the aisle.
Some of my favorite memories are of my uncle coming over to argue politics in our kitchen. He had went with my dad into the orphanage, was with him on the day when they finally left the place, and ended up working in the same industrial plant before they were buried head-to-head, in the same town.
My uncle was big in the Democratic Party, in Dunkirk. He knew my folks were Republicans. They would debate forever amid the fumes of coffee and cigarettes, giving the needle back and forth. What I remember is how in the end it always came to laughter, because there was no difference between what they believed, at core:
Which is what it meant to be American.
My parents did not see that idea or identity as locked into marble statues beneath stone walls in Washington. They came from nothing. My father’s life changed because, as a teenager, he learned to drive a bulldozer in a federal public works program – and in that way the New Deal transformed his life.
They had a fierce love for the deep beauty at their doorstep in Upstate New York, the source of countless day trips when we were young, in which they spoke of the deep Indigenous origins of the region. They understood the power both of government and democracy, the idea of the American experiment as a living engine that could lift you up, and that only heightened their keen awareness of injustice.
When I was born, it was still an America where a husband could assault his wife, with little fear of repercussions from the law. Or a child born with a developmental disability could be locked within the brutal walls of an institution, and left behind for life. Or a woman or man of African lineage still lacked fundamental rights in every corner of this nation, simply because of the color of their skin – and in many places lived at open risk of death or violence.
My dad spent his live in industrial work. My mom, in her last job in her 60s, was cleaning bathrooms. They endured family sacrifice on an almost unbearable level – my toddler sister, lost during the war, was eventually reburied atop my mother’s chest – yet they still believed in the higher ideals of this nation, believed the wheels of conscience and justice could somehow address and attempt to remedy that suffering.
In that motion and hope, to them, was communion.
The Americans they revered, the stories they told at the kitchen table – whether of Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman, of Eleanor Roosevelt or Jackie Robinson – somehow wrapped together all those ideals.
All of that made what has happened over the past decade – the national turn in high places toward cruelty and contempt – feel so utterly grotesque.
My parents brought us up in rental houses. Their hands were so thick with callous my mother would sometimes cut it away, with a razor. They worked relentlessly and they both died too young, a couple with this astounding mixture of progressive and conservative beliefs – some of which I embraced and some of which would lead us to butt heads.
They were human and God knows they made plenty of mistakes, but when my mother or father put up their flag on their front porch – the same flag, faded by time and weather, I put up this morning – their America, I think, boiled down to this:
Live simply. Reject cruelty. Work hard. Move toward justice. Love your family and project respect toward your neighbor – regardless of how much they own, where they worship or where they’re from.
Do that, and you elevate your block, your city…
Your country.
I’d like to think a passionate majority in the United States – where millions of voters made choices Tuesday that clearly reflected something higher than just loyalty to party – are hoping the new leaders in whom they placed their faith will move swiftly toward rekindling that same nation.
