Leaves and Sand
[Omigawd, not another report on the trip east? Aren't we done with the prodigal thang yet?]
There were only two things wrong with the trip, aside from spending 15 hours traveling each way, and one was that the leaves were mebbe a little slow in turning and next weekend would have been quasi-perfect colorwise. The other was that Linda was not there to enjoy it. She was teaching collaborative law at a legal conference in Southern California, diagonally on the other side of this socially-cosmopolitan country of ours.
I was asked recently if I thought the greatness of our country was in our geography. I opined that as extraordinarily wonderful as is the land from sea to shining sea, it is more the people that defines what is special about America. It's not that you can't find fine people everywhere, but there is something special about their deliciously-purposeful, freedom-ringing spirit that has been recognized by observers around the world from our very conception as being uniquely American.
There's a certain confidence, graciousness, and generosity that marks our national character. It smiles in the eyes like the warmth of a fire in the hearth. Glowing with self-assurance, sparkling with a willingness to participate. De Tocqueville referenced it more than 160 years ago in Democracy in America. I saw it in a flight attendant on the way to Washington, and in a pilot coming back. In a waitress in a Harwich, Massachusetts seafood restaurant, and burbling from a foursome of blue-hairs at an adjoining table. It was in the faces of two construction workers who were eating their lunch, parked in their truck overlooking the ocean in Orleans, who directed me to the Land Ho restaurant for the best clam chowder I've ever tasted; healthy-ish, too, because they use milk instead of cream.
Not that the leaves and seashore don't matter. Their preservation and enjoyment are among my top jingoist motivators. Look how smart we've been to protect so many miles of our shoreline, like the special stretch on the forearm of the Cape. Where on a Monday in late October, with mild breezes and the gulls lazing above the water, life snuck up on perfect and donned this glorious mantle.
Not that there weren't a whole bunch of leaves that had already changed. Thousands of billions of arboreal graffiti in more colors than passed through Mr. Crayola's imagination painted the New England landscape with a holy riot of ostentation oranges and screaming scarlet, amidst the myriad shades of brown, yellow, and green. The Mass Pike and Route 195, which runs from the bottom of the Cape across to Providence, shouted with autumnal glee. Three rolls of film are on their way into the soup, with at least some of the shots likely to wind up in our 2002 calendar.
If there is a place further from the sandy edge of the Atlantic or the maples locked in their shiva dance, it might be the nattering neon rainbow illuminating the underground causeway connecting the C and B concourses at O'Hare Airport. Strange musical tones mix with official public address recordings as multi-hued ant-streams of human slog and race to gates from there to here. Quite incredible in itself, and merely a transition point in the common chaos of everyday life.
Since pride is supposed to be a sin, I will declare my pride in the United States this way. We and our recent forebears have pioneered much of the spectacular journey to where the world is today. It is on our shoulders, now, to figure out how to invest our history to create a legacy that will recognize with respect the challenges we face today.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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