Quiz #71. "Everyone is Good"
How did Bruce Springsteen, The Roches and Sara help me break the "Groundhog Day" quality to this Saturday morning during the pandemic? Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for July 18, 2020.
Getting ready for the weekend during this pandemic, I am always on the lookout for something good to watch. This Friday, July 17th, in my morning reading of newsletters, I took a look at the “Watching” post from the New York Time TV critic, Margaret Lyons. She recommended “Halt and Catch Fire” on Netflix--and the last line of her review is what caught my eye.
If your favorite scenes on screen or in life are when people leave a party and happily complain to each other about how everyone else at that party sucked, you will love this show.
I copy-and-pasted this line and shared it via text message with two friends. In my text message, I prefaced the quote with this, “I read this line and thought of one of you.” (Neither friend responded.)
And so it was on Friday that I got to thinking about this great song from The Roches, “Everyone is Good” from their CD, “Speak.”
I would like to be a person who does not judge
Free to be me whatever that might be
I don't want to hold a position, don't want to hold a grudge
'Cause it seems to be the cause of a lot of misunderstanding
Heartbreak misery
Many years ago, I actually heard The Roches sing “Everyone is Good” in concert. Terre Roche, who wrote it, explained that she’d written the song after a great night with a group of friends. One by one, someone would leave the get-together and Roche observed that each time, the remaining rest would trash the newly departed—the process repeating itself when another person left. Her response was this song, a reverse corollary to those people who leave the party—and then trash their hosts and those they left behind as Lyons observed in her review of “Halt and Catch Fire” (which I have not yet watched).
The song is saccharin, but it’s got a point. The world would be a whole lot better if we all weren’t so quick to judge--and yes, I realize that if I have a fatal flaw (as if there might only be one), it’s that I have spent too much of my life judging others. Sorry about that.
Each morning during the four months of this pandemic, I have fallen into my own “Groundhog Dog” routine. I wake up early, usually before 6:00 AM, take the dogs downstairs and let them out.
I make my coffee, empty the dishwasher and take my pills. (Four in all these days. Various medicines designed to relieve the pressure and keep things running smoothly in my body, mind and heart.) Coffee made, dishes done and pills taken, I head to the back deck to watch the sunrise, read my morning newsletter and try to figure out my place in this ever-changing world.
Happy and me, watching the sunrise from the back deck (again).
Sometime between 6:30 and 6:35AM, my morning peace is interrupted by the sound of a distant car starting in our neighborhood, somewhere out of sight and beyond the trees. I don’t know whose car it is or even what car it is, but it’s always the same sound. The car’s got a problem with the exhaust system so the engine starting is always startling and loud (even for me). My first thought has always been, “What an asshole.” I think about how I wished that guy or gal would get their car fixed. Do they know how loud it is? If people aren’t awake, does that car ruin their last moments of slumber?
One morning within the last month, Sara was up early and joined me on the back deck. At 6:33 AM, the car started. I told Sara how much the car bothered me--and wondered if the owner knew. Sara stopped me. “Maybe it bothers them too--and they just don’t have the money to get it fixed.” Clearly, in this equation, I was the asshole.
Empathy. Think the best of people. Make no judgments.
As noted in Quiz #46. Jim McNellis, being sixtysomething is a time to take stock of your life--especially during a deadly pandemic. Where did you come from? Who are you? Who were you? In the last few months, I’ve tried to take a closer look at myself, how I got here and who I want to be. It’s a work in progress. In the writing of this quiz at least, I’ve tried to be less mean. I hope you have noticed. I don’t want to always make Sara and our kids my foil.
In part, judging others is something that comes from my family where my siblings and I have talked about we each draw quick conclusions on others, a trait we inherited from our parents. And it wasn’t just about outsiders. Growing up, at Christmas, my mother championed something she called “typical gifts.” Each family member was assigned one other person for their “typical gift.” The gifts started out as jokes, maybe a baseball for me or a firetruck for my brother Richard who is a lifelong firefighter. As we got older, though, the typical gifts often became a little meaner. My mother was especially tough, a real ball-buster. Pointed and piercing. I remember as a young adult her giving me a bumper sticker about a child being angry that their parent was spending too much money and wasting that child’s inheritance.
This Friday night, July 17th, Sara and I did not watch “Halt and Catch Fire.” We watched Springsteen on Broadway instead on Netflix. It’s a must-watch. We are not Springsteen fanatics. We like his music but do not hang on every song or every show. There are people who worship his wisdom. We’re not in that group. His songs have become anthems for the working class--or those who identify with the workers. In the Broadway show, Springsteen mockingly admits of himself that the songs were written by a man who never worked in a factory. Part of his magic, Springsteen jokes.
In Springsteen’s Broadway show, for me, it was not so much the songs, but his monologues before each of those songs that were brilliant. He is a simply a fantastic story-teller with an appreciation for the rich detail of the many magical moments in his life. In so many ways, the play is Springsteen’s love letter to his parents, but Springsteen is fully aware of his own father’s sins—and how those impacted his own life. He has a great line about parenting his own children after his father, in the months before Springsteen’s first child was born, apologized for his own bad behavior as Springsteen’s father.
We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence.
On a Friday night a few weeks ago, Sara and I also watched “Good Trouble,” the CNN documentary now widely available online about the life of John Lewis. That documentary is all the more poignant with the news this Saturday morning, July 18th, that Lewis has passed.
Twitter is filled with wonderful tributes and memories, but the best line for this day is from Lewis himself. Something he said in a tweet last year which is quoted in Saturday morning’s “Letters from an American” by Heather Cox Richardson.
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”
Beyond that message and the unstoppable hope and optimism that was John Lewis, the other thing that struck me watching the CNN documentary was seeing Lewis with his siblings who gathered together with him for the documentary. They talked about knowing from an early age that their brother was--and would be--special. Different in school--and in the rural fields where they worked--he was destined for a higher purpose.
From the profound to the ridiculous, last weekend Sara and I also watched “Palm Springs” on Hulu. It’s the Andy Samberg movie with a “Groundhog Day” theme to it about a man stuck in a time loop, waking up every morning in the same day. It sounded so much like “Groundhog Day” that we almost didn’t watch it. I am very glad we did. It’s not perfect, but it’s different than “Groundhog Day.” I liked it a lot.
The less you know about “Palm Springs,” the better.
In these pandemic times, there is certainly a “Groundhog Day” quality to my life. This Saturday morning, I woke up too early. 6:24 AM. I took the dogs downstairs and let them out. I made my coffee, emptied the dishwasher and took my pills. Coffee made, dishes done and pills taken, I headed to the back deck to watch the sunrise, read my morning newsletters and figured out my place in the world. 6:33 AM came and went without the loud car starting in the distance. It’s the weekend.
And yet, this morning, in the middle of writing this quiz, I took a break and heard that car starting from an open, upstairs window. 9:01 AM. A little later on a weekend morning--and this time, instead of being annoyed, I was amused.
The noise made me laugh and smile.
Everyone is good.
What did NOT happen?
A. My previous quiz, Quiz #70. Twitter- was dark with a depressing analysis of the death numbers that are coming from the coronavirus. On our family text group, my son Ted linked to this article, “Why coronavirus deaths remain low in the US despite surge in new cases” and wrote,
There are two sides to every story. It’s sad the daily quiz’s focus so much on the negative/dark/side of this thing;
B. Saturday morning, on our family text chain, Sara wished Will a “Happy Birthday” and posted a picture of him from 2019 with an ice cream birthday cake from Dairy Queen, a family tradition. This year, Sara is breaking that tradition and baking a cake. No Dairy Queen;
C. On my Saturday morning phone call with my siblings, my sister Susan observed that she shared my pessimism. She’s never felt worse about the coronavirus;
D. Sara’s making home-made Chicken Parmesan for Will’s birthday dinner. It’s his favorite meal. We’ll also drink chocolate milk;
E. When Sara proof-read this quiz (as she always does), she told me that she regularly reads “Watching” from Lyons. Sara told me that she thought of me when she read the line from Lyons about “Halt and Catch Fire.”
If your favorite scenes on screen or in life are when people leave a party and happily complain to each other about how everyone else at that party sucked, you will love this show.
Clearly, I have some more work to do.
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Answer #71. “Everyone is Good”
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Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #72. NICE.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #70. Twitter-
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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