Eight years ago, we were in the throes of a sudden move. It was the coldest month in Binghamton that I remember, we had lost our cat, Matt was beginning to admit that his mouth really hurt and that he should go to the dentist, our whole lives were in boxes, and then, suddenly, it was Inauguration Day.
I woke up that morning in a panic. We did have a tv, but it was shoved in a corner behind a pile of boxes and it wasn’t hooked up even to the wall, let alone a cable wire. The children were cranky and sad, as they had been for the whole week. The kitchen was in total disarray because, to comfort myself the night before, I had peeled and thinly sliced five pounds of sweet potato and sautéed them in butter in my big cast iron frying pan. It hadn’t been what needed to be done, but, in the grief and chaos, it was one thing I could focus on for three hours to try to regain a sense of time and space. I wandered around in the early dawn of that new unfamiliar house, picking up the remnants of my sweet potato wreckage, and thought, “I must make a cake!” And, “I must find a tv.”
Now, consider, I hadn’t voted for Mr. Obama, and didn’t the next time either. I assumed he was going to be the disaster that he turned out to be. I didn’t really want him to be president. But he had won, and he was going to stand up, as so many before him, and take a solemn oath. Plus, as I hardly need remind you, he was the first African American ever to do so. Of Course the weight of the moment pressed down on me. I got on the phone and began calling around town looking for someone with a television.
Our dear friend who fills the place of grandmother when no grandmothers are to be had answered the phone and an hour later I had hauled the kids over and dumped them in her living room. She turned on the tv and told them to pay attention, and then, for reasons I can’t remember, I left and ran off to an appointment.
Later I asked them what they remembered and they couldn’t think of what to say. But they were small. Very small. And probably didn’t even know that we had a president.
Eight years later our tv is plugged in, and we’ve extended our Christmas cable treat so that we can watch it live (and also the super bowl) only this time the children have some sense of what is going on. And they certainly know who Mr. Trump is.
It doesn’t matter that I didn’t vote for him. It doesn’t matter that I expect certain new kinds of disaster (may I be wrong). It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t fit the ideal of what I think a President should be. He’s been elected. He’s going to stand there, putting his hand on a bible–which still, for the moment, represents the gravity of truth–and take a sacred oath. And I want my children to see it. I want them to know that nations rise and fall, that people are sinful, that governments (all of them) are broken and not to expect too much. But I also want them to see the oath, the promises taken, to see that a man can stand before all others and swear, and make promises. I want them to feel the gravity of the moment, of power transferring from one to another. I want them to witness the strange miracle of two men, so diametrically opposed in ideology and manner of life, can secede authority, one to the other.
Do you think, O Child, that you are always right, and the other is always wrong? Do you think that you must control every corner of your human experience? Look how one man, with the greatest power on earth, can give it to another man who might even have been his enemy. You, small one, can let go. Can let another person go before you, even if you think they are wrong.
Because, truly, we are caught in time. We have to live in the age in which God has premeditated to place us. We can fret, and agitate, and very often we should, but at the end of the day–whether our lives are piled up with boxes and anxiety, or laundry baskets and a dirty kitchen, or the terrible wonder of a clean pleasant living room with a properly working tv–at the end of the day God is the king. He knows what lies before us. He has promised that as long as the earth endures there will be seed time and harvest, the sun and the moon circling in their regular celestial ways. We are but dust, sometimes called to stand up and take oaths, sometimes striving after the foolishness of the wind, all the time sinners. But God is faithful, and kind, and his providence lasts much longer than our current circumstances.
So, maybe I will make a cake, even though I hadn’t thought to. Or rather, maybe I’ll buy one, since I’m not feeling well, and this is America, and it would probably be good for the economy.
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