It was Christmas time for Joe I and in Buffalo. The Bruno family siblings and their partners all together celebrating a holiday, built upon treasures of family life from the past with the added bonus of current events soon to sweetly be swept into the memory category of family life together. No matter the single digit weather of the inches of snow on the ground, my husband’s family including all of the nerves and nephews gathered together eating, drinking and wondering as we looked around, where had the time gone, when suddenly most of those present were once so much younger. But then time is a magician, it will take decades of years squish and squeeze them and presto chango, turn them into NOW, and what was younger is older, what seemed just a few seconds of life becomes do you remember when, and just how many decades later THEN really happened. But for my (MACHA-TUN-UM, Yiddish for a family you inherit when you married) Christmas is then or now is just the medicine necessary to keep hope alive.
I promised Joe I would NOT smother myself with the current events of the day, I secretly understood my addiction, and kind of sorts of crossed my fingers behind my back and just nodded my head. (Perhaps not really answering aloud, made this a fib, or JUST a white lie) I was good, I really tied to avoid anything on TV with the words TRUMP, LIAR, FASCIST, REPUBLICAN, or GREED. But this being America in the year 2017, all of that vocabulary has become the norm and avoidance was similar to not inhaling oxygen, it had become a way of life.
We arrived back to LA, to our routines, and low and behold, even as I wished and prayed that somehow LAW and Order and the American Constitution would reclaim victory and power in the US, TRUMP was every where, his poison scorpion tail, lashing out, his venemous narcissism spewing, and his snake oil still being bought and sold. Now, it seems the newest ploy in the Fascist playbook of the GOP is to define anyone in the government who disagrees with the dictatorial methods employed by Trump as attempting a coup de’etat. Most authoritarian insecure men and women, throw that phrase around when nothing else seems to work. Hmmm, here we go once again. As I heard the Talking Heads, pretend to KNOW ALL, being paid a pretty penny for not really KNOWING ALL, I had to set my internal clock back to Buffalo, I already needed an escape from what has become a Twilight Zone of reality, and tried hard to remember what the Bruno family counted on each year at Christmas time…HOPE! I wish all of US who really care, who really think, who really understand good from bad, HOPE for the new year!
