Once I embraced her fields and trees and skies with my young body. Once her views were my home.
My mother driving us around a corner, a little cluster of frame houses in the middle of nowhere, my mind on fire from my parents' divorce, suddenly I saw, as though for the first time, REALITY, disorienting in a second floor room in a grey house, a hundred miles from nowhere, two hundred miles from New York and home.
Who lived in that room? WHY did they live there? What did they THINK?
And the car whirled past and left me knowing I knew something, some of the QUESTIONS.
The green leaves passed on fire above our heads.
And later, on the right, there came a huge house, set back in a tidy lawn. No one was around. Did anyone live there? Who WERE they? Why did they did they live there and not anywhere else? And what did they think?
And the two gum ball machines side by side with their charms and the juke box in the diner ("they make wonderful stew") at Pine Plains. That was reality, childhood and a new stage combined. I emptied the gumball machines for their charms. WHO was Johnny Cash? WHY didn't I know about Patti Page? And yet I did, sex and music and politics another world, a mirror image of my own. And the magazines! I wore an olive green corduroy skirt with a silver buckle on the pocket. I was still myself; I hadn't grown up.
And at night we would reach the strangeness and the cold of our own house in the middle of Vermont. The long iron key unlocked the kitchen door, and the still air was still there.
Later, my first hundred plane rides: the dazzling randomness. A main street set down in the middle of the world, infinitessimal. What was going on? Who thought of this?
I wanted politics when I was a child. I had political parents, and my cousin went to a school in New York where politics was everything. But at my school we had Current Events once a week, the UN and the budget and that was all.
Averell Harriman was governor of New York. Gracie Mansion was just up the river.
Orville Faubus eclipsed everything in my mind. The world was real.
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I wanted to know about HUAC. I wanted to know about unions. I knew that what I didn't know, what I wasn't learning, was what it was all about.
And suddenly the 60's exploded, and blew me away with them.
And the 70's, teaching, radicalized me because I saw at last what politics was and how important it is, in a nightmare of chicanery and lies.
And then the Vietnam War was over, and I came home.
And Reagan erased the mind of the country.
And now Newt Gingrich is cunningly, mindlessly, remorselessly toppling this country like an evil child with a house of blocks.
This country that used to be our home.
Everything I've done has been political, whether or not the political roots have been left out.
And last night I called my mother in Seattle when the rates were down, and I said, in my True Voice, ―I think you better come home.‖