Your Stories Our Nation's Stories: Red White and Blues

Excerpt Citizen Media Maven (My USA250 Story ~Adele Houston)

Full story here: Glimpses Through Stained Glass Blogspot

Happy birthday America, land of contradictions—and of truths, still becoming

As I read, I learn, or relearn ...

The rare book library ultimately helped me value writing as, not only a process and a legacy, but a means to formulate ourselves. 

Red White and Bicentennial Blues

Revisiting the nation’s founding exhibit at the The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library a second time triggered different memories. My demo cassette tape of Red, White and Blues had mixed reviews. Ultimately, prospective funders deemed it too controversial. I was not willing to abandon my words a second time. The song that remains foremost in my memory speaks to the paradox that is America.

America is both sides of the coin we come to make, that’s what makes her great.

…the original poem reminisced about seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. The “I” in that poem is me—a girl not yet sure she had the standing to call herself a writer, or to claim the liberty Lady Liberty promised. Women’s right to vote was barely fifty years old. My right to my own credit card, not yet won. I did not struggle free of that in the writing. But that struggle is mine. 

Red, White and Blues 

I was looking up, at Lady Liberty,
in the harbor of immigrant city,
when an old man, cautions questioningly,
What does this lady speak to me?
My knotted thoughts they struggled free…
What America means… What does America
mean? To me?
Grandma was an immigrant. Grandpa philosophized.
America is both sides of the coin
we come to make. That’s what makes her great.
So he set his hands to working, until they ached.
Grandma prayed for my Daddy’s sake.
I believe that you, can show me too,
Red, White and Blue.
Because you’re part of me, and I am part of you.
Then my dad inherited what they had done,
he continued on, it was for his son.
Now I’ve 16 years of schooling
where in something lies, ‘bout what Grandpa philosophized.
America it’s you I make, and when you ache,
I am aching too. But I believe in me,
And so you see, I believe in you.
My knotted thoughts they struggled free…
That’s what America means,
what America means, to me.

Another song in the collection, Never A Sunshine Patriot, embodied in stanzas the biography of the inconvenient revolutionary, Thomas Paine. 

Two hundred and fifty years on, the contradictions have not resolved. They have accumulated. Jefferson’s self-doubt and Paine’s inconvenient truths, the Dunlap Broadside and the Declaration of Sentiments, the man honored at the cemetery and the man erased from it—these are not footnotes to the founding. They are the founding, still unfinished. The bus pass expires. The voices stay. That, too, is America.

Transcript

Excerpt Citizen Media Maven

Happy birthday America, land of contradictions—and of truths, still becoming

...Maven is a very apt name for an Apache Software tool that can build any number of projects into desired outputs from accumulated knowledge. For me, it is an aspiration. I am driven, in the moment and for the future, to bring people and ideas together in service of something greater. In retirement, my work is optimizing and connecting to possibilities from years of accumulated experience. It is work, until it isn’t...

The urgency of liberation stalks my thoughts. Memories break through the disparaging self-talk.  I am getting nothing accomplished anyway, so I yield. Where would I go this time of year when I lived in the city? The answer pops through like sun at the end of the Westville tunnel or the building itself:  The Beinecke.

With an assist from Google, I confirm the bus and Beinecke library schedules. In a fleeting moment, I remember the avid quilter from the corporate IT help-desk. 

Judy, an affable redhead, tapped me on the shoulder. “Look. I have something super-incredible to show you. It will be a verb someday.” She laughs. She deftly saves what I was working on. She enters ‘g-o-o-g-l-e into my computer’s browser. My eyes track her fingers. She points to the word SEARCH displayed on my monitor besides a long empty rectangle. She instructs: “Type anything.” ...

Stumbling Off Main Streets

In 1974, the student ‘me’ literally stumbles on Wall St. ...The details refer to a public celebration, a tenth anniversary. I pull the calendar from my book bag. I scribble aside Saturday July 3rd: yale. marble building. 12 - 4.

Community-centric Truths in the Bicentennial Year

...I take campus walkways to reach the exhibit. From Elm St., Rose walk extends to Alexander Walk which ends at the mobile-like ‘Gallows and Lollipops’. It is an abstract sculpture by Alexander Calder installed in 1975. It stands rather than hangs. Painted in primary colors, its steel elements hover in constant motion, as if they are an invitation to play. Its geometry is an expressive counterpoint to the exacting symmetry of the observable library. For a few minutes in late afternoon, the sunlight refracts through the marble, spewing color bands of light onto Hewitt Quadrangle. 

My first visit inside Beinecke was kinesthetically memorable. The sunny day gave new meaning to the allure of six-stories of translucent cathedral-like walls of Vermont marble. Once inside, the rise of the glass tower of books through the core of the building amplified my feelings of insignificance. The stacks were reserved for permitted use. I mustered up the courage to walk through the revolving doors into the mezzanine. In a sunken courtyard, visible but not accessible from the plaza, is a pyramid, circle, and cube. Awareness of the boundaries, more than gently, disrupted my sense of well-being and welcome.

It was Yale after all. I was a student from the public college down the street...

The Bicentennial exhibit was awkwardly community centric. ... Like the tip of an iceberg, the role of newspapers in democracy begins to take root in my conscience. Like a tip of an iceberg, the landmark look of the library obfuscates its true presence—with three underground levels extending under the plaza, most of the library is hidden.

While more ponderous than accessible, the initial step inside the revolving glass doors was a transformative experience for me. Upon leaving, I felt more whole than I had upon arrival. Maybe it was the title of the sculpture that puzzled the pieces of my experience together. “Nowhere, yet somehow familiar,” is how Isamu Noguchi describes his assemblage of the earth, the sun and, most provocatively, the cube of chance. The senseless paradox of my feelings of unworthiness dissipated. I was the community the curators had hoped to reach.

June 2018 - Bus Pass Day #2 ‘We Hold These Truths’

The promotional materials at the library entrance demonstrate that decades of programming evolved the Annual Nation’s Founding Exhibit into a city-wide experience. In the library mezzanine, the latest brochure announces a July 5th reading. It details complimentary exhibits at other locations. The We Hold These Truth brochure features John Trumbull’s painting, “The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.” at Yale University Art Gallery. To invoke curiosity, it tells the reader: “The painting bares a true likeness of all the founding fathers. Mr. Trumbull traveled across America to meet them and sketch them in his miniature version of the painting.” 

...Curators mingle rare into the ethos of current events ...History’s callouses are brought to light. ...As I explore, I submit to cognitive sensations, both bitter and sweet, child-like curiosity and adult incredulity. As I wander from display to display, I realize that the primary sources we uphold as pure and sacred are not immune to impurities. The issues of sources, timeliness, and accuracy existed long before the invention of television. 

As I read, I learn, or relearn: ...Gone was the image of a patriot brimming with confidence. ...contrasts, even polarity, of Jefferson’s writings. He constantly shifted between utopian ideals and realist solutions. Jefferson, who owned and lived on a plantation, had frequent urges to visit Philadelphia, then the cultural capital of the country. Yet, he held the view that cities were powder kegs of chaos and hothouses of epidemics. Writing helped him formulate his opinions and points of view. The rare book library ultimately helped me value writing as, not only a process and a legacy, but a means to formulate ourselves. 

Red White and Bicentennial Blues

Revisiting the nation’s founding exhibit is a memory trigger of a personal kind. ...The demo cassette tape of Red, White and Blues had mixed reviews. Ultimately, prospective funders deemed it too controversial. I was not willing to abandon my words a second time.

The song that remains foremost in my memory speaks to the paradox that is America.

America is both sides of the coin we come to make, that’s what makes her great

…the original poem reminisced about seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. The “I” in that poem is me—a girl not yet sure she had the standing to call herself a writer, or to claim the liberty Lady Liberty promised. Women’s right to vote was barely fifty years old. My right to my own credit card, not yet won. I did not struggle free of that in the writing. But that struggle is mine. 

Red, White and Blues 

I was looking up, at Lady Liberty,
in the harbor of immigrant city,
when an old man, cautions questioningly,
What does this lady speak to me?
My knotted thoughts they struggled free…
What America means… What does America
mean? To me?
Grandma was an immigrant. Grandpa philosophized.
America is both sides of the coin
we come to make. That’s what makes her great.
So he set his hands to working, until they ached.
Grandma prayed for my Daddy’s sake.
I believe that you, can show me too,
Red, White and Blue.
Because you’re part of me, and I am part of you.
Then my dad inherited what they had done,
he continued on, it was for his son.
Now I’ve 16 years of schooling
where in something lies, ‘bout what Grandpa philosophized.
America it’s you I make, and when you ache,
I am aching too. But I believe in me,
And so you see, I believe in you.
My knotted thoughts they struggled free…
That’s what America means,
what America means, to me.

Another song in the collection, Never A Sunshine Patriot, embodied in stanzas the biography of the inconvenient revolutionary, Thomas Paine. 

Two hundred and fifty years on, the contradictions have not resolved. They have accumulated. Jefferson’s self-doubt and Paine’s inconvenient truths, the Dunlap Broadside and the Declaration of Sentiments, the man honored at the cemetery and the man erased from it—these are not footnotes to the founding. They are the founding, still unfinished. The bus pass expires. The voices stay. That, too, is America.