Yesterday, three weeks after hip replacement surgery, I ventured out to an afternoon concert in the Santa Ynez Valley Botanic Garden, organized by Grey Bear Erickson for his newly launched nonprofit, MÁS (Music and Art Support). The performers were Mariachi Mestizo, a youth group from Delano, and they opened with a haunting and familiar piece, Pachelbel’s Canon.
“I bet that’s not what you expected,” one of the performers announced afterward. “But we do it all. Mariachi is not a genre; it is the band itself. And this music is the cornerstone of our lives. For anything important, from weddings to funerals, we bring in the mariachi.”
So why not Pachelbel’s Canon? It was a tender and exquisite use of the violins, guitars, and trumpets. There followed other, more traditional songs, “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” for example, and another described as a song about “love beyond death,” surely the underlying theme of everything.
I love this music, with its extravagant, overwrought, unabashed melodrama. Somehow, it connects us all, expressing our shared humanity, no translation needed! (I was similarly fond of the sentimental Neapolitan songs my father sometimes listened to. Italian schmaltz, we called it.) And I am deeply moved by the talent and diligence of these young musicians, but I am angry that their families and culture are under attack in the United States.
Because a crime syndicate has taken over our country. I cannot shake the shock of it, the terrible betrayals, the depravity, destruction, and corruption, the cruelty, vulgarity, and bizarre narcissism, all indulged and supported by the entire GOP and the Court and to a great extent the press, not to mention the millions who inexplicably thought this was a good idea.
When the kids began to sing“Bésame Mucho,” I was moved to tears. This was a song from the early days of my parents’ romance. They were children of immigrants, Italians, and Jews, here for the promises America held, working hard and upholding values and ideals that I adhere to still. Now I pictured them dancing, young and hopeful, with no idea how many things would go awry. And I wonder, is this the way it always is? The joys and sorrows, and even the music, of our parents and our forebears, are absorbed into our souls. I leaned back and rode on the waves of sound, unconstrained by time. Our history is a medley of many languages and songs.
Meanwhile, I’m making progress with my recovery, but it is slow, and I’m weirdly tired. My life has been dismantled, all the pieces and routines in disarray, and I must rebuild some kind of structure. It’s ironic to be doing this while our very democracy is being undone and everything feels dystopian and shaky. I am observing, more than doing, but it is a time of reflection, and I hope for new insights that I can carry forward.
One night, I dream about my father, who died this month nearly 50 years ago. In my dream, I am a little girl again, desperate to see him, but even awake, I realize that my default state is longing. I inhabit a perpetual yearning rooted in my earliest sense of wonder and love, intensified by loss, but illuminated by possibility and the sunlight of imagination. My longing tends to prod me into action, makes me want to try harder, be better, never give up.
A friend wrote to me: “I’m so exhausted. I can’t take it any longer. How did this happen? Where does it end?” I understand. We must acknowledge these feelings, ride them out, and perform the magic we possess to transmute that despondency into defiance.
Because we can and will prevail. If we don’t, it will mean that nothing really mattered in the end except money and vanity, that everything we ever loved and believed and aspired to was for naught. That simply cannot be.
And when I step outside, the glorious world is delivered to me in a sequence of marvels. Like the crows! They are reeling about in boisterous crowds. Or the familiar mountains wrapped in sheer scarves of cloud. Three little girls holding hands. The artfully mottled bark of a sycamore tree. The sky.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr offered these wise words: “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”
May our longing motivate us, and may our decency and dignity demand the governance and society we deserve. My sutures are healing, my gait is getting steady, and I can see that this scraggy-haired, barely dressed old lady is still me, but even tougher. This is a season of being real and true and brave. The world is dazzling me and breaking my heart, all in the same moment, and that’s the way it is and always was.
I am in a Mariachi frame of mind: heartache and celebration, passion and struggle, and love beyond death.
Let us not hold back.
