Which Side Are You On?

(photo from May Day, 2006)

[Part of a brief series about protest songs, in honor of the Occupy Movement]

“Which Side Are You On” is a protest song that came out of the labor movement. It was written in the early 1930s by Florence Reece, whose husband was a miner and union organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky. One version of the story that’s told about the song is that Reece and her kids were at home when Sheriff J.H. Blair and his goons violently busted in looking for her husband, at the behest of the mining company boss. They stood guard at the house waiting for Florence’s husband to come home, terrorizing the family. After they left, she wrote this song:

Last week at my new job, we had to tell our “personal stories.” I’ve never done this before; most of the staff jobs I’ve had involved pointedly not telling your personal story, or else having to glean it and its context slowly from one another during the daily press of office-stiff bodies at the coffee shop around 3:30pm. But in a ‘movement’ job, it is expected and understood that our personhood informs and drives our work.

So at a meeting, in the light of a December sun as seen through small windows of a nonprofit organization in an office building that was formerly a hotel, after the cinnamon rolls are all eaten up, we go around the table to say who we are, how we got here, and why we have landed in what is generally called “social/economic/racial justice work.” I’m really nervous, even though my union organizer boyfriend has prepped me for this. I’m wondering what my story even is; there are so many seemingly distinct experiences in my much-lived-in life that I often fear others might view me as patched together, impulse-driven, wild at heart. My coworkers are serious ass-kickers of the system; what am I gonna do, talk about working at a record store and writing poems?

But the basics of storytelling tell us that a turning point in a story may occur when a character’s frustration turns to action. So, I asked myself, when did everything break for me? When was a moment in which I realized that if you’re not on one side, you’re on the other side, and when did I decide that this—whatever this is, this thinking and talking and fighting about making things a little bit different for some people, maybe, we hope—was more important than other things I could do with my days? When did I answer the question, Which side are you on?

Here’s a story I didn’t tell:

It was way past midnight on Christmas day two years ago, in Pennsylvania on a train barreling from Chicago to New York City. The train stopped, which woke me up. Everyone in our car was asleep; Max’s head was on my shoulder and my feet were tucked beneath a large fake-leopard-skin coat I’d borrowed from a friend just for the occasion of a winter vacation spent in a place where it actually gets cold. I looked up, forward, as people on transportation invariably do when their forward-motion ceases. I saw two young men wearing dark blue uniforms. They had guns. They walked down the aisle shaking people and waking them up. They looked at me and then quickly passed me over for two women sitting behind me, students with skin darker than mine. I tapped Max silently, urgently, wake up.

The young men with guns stopped behind me and asked another woman, also with skin darker than mine, for a certain type of piece of paper. She shook her head and motioned as though shaking out the contents of her purse; she didn’t have it. The two young men with guns demanded her papers again. We are on vacation, she said. My papers are at home. The two young men with guns then picked her up from her seat and walked with her, pinning her arms behind her, toward the front of the train. I saw her feet, still in thin pink socks, as they passed me. Max rose to follow and watch them, disappearing to the front of the car where, I could hear, more men with guns restrained the woman’s travel companion as he tried to exit after her, pushing him back into the train car as the doors slid shut.

Seconds later we were back in motion. The woman’s travel companion—her father—sat with me and Max in the observation car looking out at the black snow, moving at 100mph away from the detention cell in which his daughter now sat. As we tried to figure out who to call, which government agency concerns themselves with taking travelers off trains in the middle of the night on Christmas, we told each other little bits about our lives. As he told us his story – his recent marriage to his wife, a lost and re-found love from childhood in the Philippines; this family train trip to New York to celebrate their first anniversary; his earlier years of occupation as an airplane mechanic for the U.S. military; a grown daughter proudly about to finish medical school in Los Angeles—the man couldn’t stop shaking his head. No matter what he said, his body moved back and forth in a silent “no.” He was wearing a baseball cap that said: USA. Beneath the brim of the hat I could read in his eyes a helpless bewilderment—a search for some sort of justification, realization, or understanding of how and who and what had just taken his daughter away from him.

Much later, I helped the man and his wife hail a taxi outside of Port Authority in a freezing rain in the madness of Times Square. It was their first time in New York, and their daughter had planned to take them to museums. Now they would be spending the week trying to get back to Erie, to find their daughter and hopefully take her home. As the man thanked me profusely, I looked at his eyes beneath his baseball cap again, and a bitter grief was forming. All his life, he had told me on the train, he’d thought he was accepted. That he was one of ‘us,’ or ‘them’—American. Those young men with guns had finally made him understand that he never would be. And now he didn’t want to be, anymore.

There isn’t only one of these moments, for me and for others. There are many, and they are cumulative. We have seen more moments like these lately, or at least seen them more publicly: increasingly, people who used to think of themselves as safe realizing they are not safe. We see in these people’s eyes their brutal reckoning. And we’re going to keep seeing more.

I never even really liked “Which side are you on” as a song that much. I tend to resist being a ‘joiner’, and the song always felt… too much. But really, what the song espouses is not even about having loyalty to a union, or following ‘the union’ blindly. Unions are systems like any other; prone to fucking up but also pretty fucking useful at doing what they’re set up to do. A union is a way we have of dealing with problems–namely, the little problem we have in which the people who own things tend to exploit the people who actually make the things or run the things or… you know, do the work. So we have this thing called a union to give some structure to the gathering and exerting of power over those in power. But when we talk about the union, we are really talking about placing ourselves—our bodies, our intelligence, our power, and our weaknesses—in opposition to those who would place us beneath them. That’s all. Which side. People or property. Bootstraps or love. I’m getting sentimental but it’s real, you guys.

At work that day, I didn’t tell the story about the woman on the train in part because I’m not the main character of that story, but also because I wanted to talk about storytelling itself–about who gets to tell their stories and why. So instead I talked about working in a nightclub in New York in the late 90s, and how one night a brilliant and very rich, famous musician wanted me to let him into the club for free, and how at that same rock club where the rockstar didn’t want to pay the $8 entrance fee, I made $20 for an 8-hour shift with no tips, and I couldn’t afford to buy a guitar to replace the one that had just been stolen from my apartment.

I talked about how as a writer, I often see the same people getting to tell their stories, because they have money or power, and then they just go on and tell the same stories again and again, and promote the stories of other people who have similar stories. I talked about how some of the most brilliant artists and thinkers I’ve known have to work to live, and so usually just end up getting drunk after work instead of making art. I talked about how I want to use my working life to tell and promote different stories, even if it means I don’t get to be a prestigious author or a rockstar or a member of the literati, because at some point, you have to look around, and see.

We all have personal moments of realizing: it’s rigged. Then we just have to figure out: are we the ones tying the knots, or the ones making them come undone?

Sometimes I’d flirt with you, machinery of the system, but we never really had a thang.

Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come / Get Yourself Another Fool

[Part of an ongoing series about protest songs; we'll resume 'regular' rock talk at some point...]

This happened:

In 1993, in high school, I discovered Sam Cooke. I brought my CD boombox into the living room upstairs and lay on the carpeted floor with my head next to it. It was cold – California-winter cold, with a dry crispness even under the gray of morning’s clouds. Later it would be bright sunny and still crisp, quiet with no waves. Maybe later Mom would make a fire in the fireplace.

I had heard his hits, of course, grew up with them in the canon of American popular music that came embedded in radio stations and car rides and movie soundtracks and old records belonging to grownups. On my own, I came to Sam Cooke via a CD re-release in the 1990s of an earlier record (Night Beat) that placed Cooke perfectly between his gospel beginnings and his pop appeal.

And I was sold, entirely. I bought all the greatest hits compilations, searched shops for the original albums on vinyl, tried to sing along and realized there are some voices too good to sing with. I told my friends about the amazing vocal arrangements and the smart lyrics. I read books about 60s soul music and began a deeper discovery of other artists of the era.

It was on that floor, in the boombox, that I first heard “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s a famous song, I learned later, made perhaps generic by its own fame at this point. This song, released in the early 60s just after Cooke’s death, became a frequent soundtrack to the civil rights movement. But to listen to it for the first time, closely, with your head next to it and the crackle from the carpet and the heater humming beneath its strings, is to feel its power– to understand viscerally how a piece of music can effect in its listener a feeling of change, even without all that context stuff.

The song consists of Sam Cooke’s purest-of-the-pure voice backed by dramatic orchestration. It builds and crests and rides an obvious sense of its importance. And it works. You can’t deny the existence of potential, of change, in the way Cooke revolves this phrase:

It’s been a long,
a long time comin’
but I know
oh-oh-oh
A change gonna come.
Oh yes it will.

But here is what makes this song a protest song: it is personal. It is lyrically ambiguous; it mentions intimate events that could be read either as “small” emotional experiences, or large moments lived in history as they are occurring. This song never once mentions by name things like racism, segregation, economic brutality, violence. It never calls out the context in which it became a major song of the civil rights movement. But it’s in there.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to nail down a way to make art about politics is because we experience injustices as people, not as headlines or as slogans on cardboard signs. Cooke didn’t say, “meet me in Alabama and we’ll do some civil disobedience to fight for our rights!” He said, “I was born by the river in a little tent.” He said, “I go downtown and somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around.” He says it’s been too hard, living like this. So let’s not do it anymore.

 

And this happened:

In 1995, I went to Paris and a boy broke my heart. It was cold in Paris, colder than home but still possessed of that sort of dry precipitation less-extreme winters give us. The sky over pointy rooftops and grand facades was always grey, a few times dusting my nose with snow, but mostly just grey. I walked a lot. In an old woolen military pea coat I walked.

The faithless boy who left me there gave me Paris like I hadn’t imagined I could have it: entirely, mine, alone. And a general strike gave me Paris like I never would have it again, shutting down the subway, all but the fewest of long-distance trains, and even museums. Workers from every sector struck for weeks, delivering to me a city filled with people: people in numbers large on streets, walking, people who would normally be in taxis, walking; people who drove opening their vehicles to even more people, hitchhikers standing on every corner as the new image of rush-hour traffic…

There were no subways, no trains, and museums were either closed or closed early. So I walked around. From the apartment I found with a generous friend of my mother’s, located in the 19^th arrondissement in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of “central” Paris, I walked all the way across town. I crossed the Seine at least twice a day. I walked when it rained and I walked at 2am when it was not very safe and I walked in the morning when I didn’t know where I’d go that day. When it was cold or wet, I stopped and drank coffee or ate a kebab or crepe. When it was lonely, I stepped inside one of the many small repertory movie houses that dot the city, watching my old American friends Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood portray macho black-and-white versions of the romance and the home I sometimes missed.

I had a cassette walkman and just a couple tapes, and I would sometimes meet up with a group of students to play cards. Whoever won the first round got the walkman as a prize, sitting out the rest of the game in a headphoned state of musical reverie. This often took place in a ‘maid’s quarters’ apartment up eight flights of stairs with a bathroom in the hallway complete with pull-chain toilet. The view from the apartment was amazing, with Dickensian sights onto the peaks and valleys of external-versus-internal city existence: a corner of the Arc de Triomphe, a cat crossing a rain gutter, a woman’s profile steamed in distant bathroom windows, and the anciennes themselves, the Parisian buildings, each one older than the state in which I was born.

I listened to Sam Cooke sing “A Change is Gonna Come” and other songs out that window and other windows, moving, always moving around the city that winter in Paris. But it was “Get Yourself Another Fool” that I felt closest to at that time. As a recently dumped young lover, this was my personal protest song, a masterful breakup song to an oppressive situation. The song’s loving fuck-you lyrics and the ghostly organ beside them ushered away an era, a relationship, and a method of assumption now dead to me.

And this also happened:

It was in Paris on one of those cold grey mornings that I attended my first French demonstration, by accident. Turning down the rue de Belleville, I approached the Place de la Republique and even in the daily crush of urban bodies made thicker by the transit strike, it seemed to me that there were more people than usual. It seemed like they were wearing matching colors, some of them, and then I saw their signs and heard their chants. Hundreds of thousands of people, multiple mornings a week during that month, demonstrating against public sector cuts.

I remember the press of bodies feeling warm and I was feeling cold. I remember not really understanding what people were talking about. I remember being startled to see the everydayness of the protesters– people who looked like my friends’ parents and my friends and middle managers and cab drivers and mechanics and doctors (not nurses—doctors). As I pressed in to the heat of the crowd, the face of Marianne de la Republique poked over the crowd. Someone had tacked a sign on the sculpture’s chest that said “solidarité” and I wondered if that word means something different in French culture, where the concept of “brotherhood” and “equality” are right up there in the national slogan along with the classic “liberty.” Where professionals protest in the streets right alongside those who work for them. Where there is a middle class who feels comfortable shutting down a city to make their power known, who not only isn’t afraid to ask for more, but feels they have a right to. Where solidarity is a cultural quality, not just a term used within the specific context of labor movements.

I walked on, along my daily route, through the iconic daily existence of Paris. Past shady bars near Bastille where one night walking home at 2am, two young men tried to grab my arms and I yelled them away from me before running all the way home. By the plaza outside the Hotel de Ville where that famously misleading iconic photo was taken of that couple kissing, and by Notre Dame, whose minimal statue of Joan of Arc I would visit and sometimes whisper to when I felt sad and cold. I walked near the English-language bookstore of legend, Shakespeare & Co., where I asked a strange man for a light in French and he replied “I don’t speak French” in an New York accent and then later I saw him busking on the street and he sang better than Dylan and we became friends. I walked to the area around the Sorbonne as some kids broke the windows of the Macdonalds where I frequently went to use the toilet. Past the Turkish guys at the café I liked, and the closed-for-strike newsstand owned by the two Algerian dudes who always tried to talk to me about surfing when they found out I was from California. The streets were smokey, people were running, the beep-beep of European sirens blared. Snow formed and failed, and tried again to form. I walked.

And I kept walking. And I felt it, there, in a private moment of my own personal pain and in a public political moment: Something bigger. Something huge, if we can only do this in America – make our personal pains public and make them outraged and make them matter. It’s protest, it’s heartbreak, it’s something big that is also something tiny and inside you. Something like a change, coming.

Life’s Rich Pageant

I.R.S., 1986

So, R.E.M. broke up.

I have to be honest: I didn’t exactly know they were together. I’m an R.E.M. fan, but I still tend to think of 1994’s Monster as their “new” album, because I’m pretty sure that’s the last of their albums I bought. However, lately, in part because I’ve been around a lot of mandolins recently, I’ve been revisiting their earlier albums and remembering how much I loved this band, and why.

They’re good. Really good. They make me raise my head up and sing along and sometimes even jump up and down. They clearly know way more about music — structure, harmony, all that academic stuff — than many of their contemporaries. They send me back to times and places far from here. They last.

In fact, they often get better over time: Automatic for the People and Monster were almost dirty secrets for me at the time of their releases, because R.E.M. was by that time firmly a popular band and grunge was happening and they weren’t “hard” or “loud”; I joined in with other alternative posers in whispering that R.E.M. were “sellouts” while at night I still listened to Drive over and over until I could fall asleep. Now, without such a time-based pop culture context (and partially because compared to a lot of popular rock bands now, R.E.M. is so obviously cool and dark and different), those “mainstream” albums of theirs play even better.

R.E.M.’s songs consisted of rock structures, harmonic vocals, and fine-tuned songwriting — with countryish suggestions via fingerpicking and a bit of twang in Michael Stipe’s voice. They were not a country band, but they were a rock band from Georgia. They wrote about some of the same things punk and grunge bands wrote about, but they felt… quieter. And they were good. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe: all in their own rights deft and skilled musicians who were so self-possessed they didn’t showboat with their sound, but instead were a group. This was a band, not a lead singer and some backing musicians (I’m speaking about their music and sound here, not about their cultural/celebrity image, which was decidedly and increasingly Stipe-centric). They even all sang harmony.

At the time, people thought this band was political, in the way that at the time a sixth grade me wearing a “save the rainforests” sweatshirt on the first day of school was considered political. In other words: not exactly activism, but earnest and concerned, especially in the face of most pop music of the 80s.

Party to their political earnestness and their emergence from an independent record label, was R.E.M.’s status as the poster band for “college radio”: alternative, indie, whatever you want to call it. I had heard about this when my friends got me into them in high school, but I was a decade too late to understand what college radio in the 80s meant to people who were actually in college in the 80s. I was a child in the 80s; by the time I got into R.E.M., I didn’t know about radio and the way it could build alternative cultures in the face of pop destruction and Reagan-era conformity. I didn’t know about the unique sounds this band was creating or that they were truly unique sounds– or how big their influence was on most of the other bands I loved in the 90s.

Here’s a fun exercise: put on “Old Man Kensey,” from Fables of the Reconstruction. The slow bass intro, the strength of single, dark plucked guitar notes. A droning repetition to the rhythm and the voice. Speed this up a tiny bit, put a little more angst and raw pain in the voice, make it louder and switch out the chorus pedal for a fuzzy distortion and let the song explode at the chorus … and it’s a Nirvana song. Something in the way. Repeat.

For me and my friends, who worshipped Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Madonna and Pavement equally, R.E.M. was about mix tapes and poetic phrasings, long sessions spent driving and singing along in bad harmony, a romanticized image of southern America, and hints at the political wrapped in the eternal emotions of rock and roll. But mostly, despite their cohesiveness as a group, R.E.M. was about the words.

Stipe is a poet. Let’s just be honest here. In the video for “fall on me”, one of my possibly favorite songs of all time, we see only the lyrics, in all caps, sans punctuation, running over upside-down images of humanity’s earthly follies:

Did you notice the lyrics?

A melody and a counter melody. The sky and the sky. There’s a problem feathers iron. Lifting and falling and there was a moment somewhere – my dad’s backyard, a bootleg live R.E.M. mix tape copied over and over via friend and friend, in the hammock, discovering the most immediate way for me to feel grounded: to lie on my back and look at the sky, through overhead leaves if possible, and pray — and ask — that it not fall on me.

Also something about the way humans think we can own things we can’t own.

This was poetry. This was a musical era in rock in which a lyricist could ramble free-associatively in semi-linked metaphors and imagistic expressions of emotion, and still mean something. The best lyricists of a certain kind still do this – Cobain, Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy? Thom Yorke almost gets there but doesn’t let go enough — but it is becoming increasingly rare in rock music, as hooks and guest-spots and statements take over our sonic media like so many status updates.

So I’ll throw on this record and be in the backyard, still years too late to know anything about context, and I’ll be only in poems, in finger-picked poems, under the sky, beginning to fall all over again.

OK Computer – Side 4

Side 4: "mo"

Side 1: eeny
Side 2: meeny
Side 3: miney
Side 4: mo.
Lucky. The Tourist.

I’ll make this short: I never meant to stay.

At night everything smells like roses, and it isn’t raining. But when you wake up, you know you’re just visiting. A tourist. It’s okay; that doesn’t mean your feet don’t hurt. But you walk on, eventually.

And years later, when you listen to certain albums, you can feel eternally linked to the places you were when you discovered them. And you can feel sick of them, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean the love isn’t there.

When you woke me up and I was dreaming in thick metaphorical surrender, messy consciousness and deep sobs and all, I immediately wanted to go back.

But every time, something pulls me out, and every time, I can’t forgive it. But I let it win.

 

OK Computer – Side 3

Side 3: "miney"

Side 3.
Fitter Happier. Electioneering. Climbing Up the Walls. No Surprises.

OK Computer is not technically a concept album, but it’s an album – a work meant to be heard all together, in a row. What happens when it’s split into different movements, not even the standard two but four sides of a record, with three songs maximum fitting on each side? Turns out, despite the weight and sensory glee of the physical medium, this is an album born to be on CD: vinyl separates “Karma Police” from “Fitter Happier,” which is wrong.

That said…

___

Fitter Happier
Getting along better with your associate employee contemporaries has its moments.

This computer-voiced checklist “song” now annoys me as a beginning. As a subset of Karma Police–fading up from the rush-hour drudgery of that catchy little number in which cool kids with Hitler Hairdos still denote what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, absorb us and then decimate us from inside the circle—it’s good. But now? Just get me through your fake computer voice to Electioneering, the song of guitar-loving madness that pulls no punches. Don’t even listen to the words.

___

Electioneering

“How can so many assholes like this album?” asks Jeannie, as we’re hiding underneath the counter in one of the big cubbyholes reserved for stacks of scratched vinyl rejects. It’s early in the shift, so it’s empty. She loves it, this record, she rolls around in it beneath starry nights and I am learning to do the same. We like to drive her truck to the coast or to closer but equally exotic spots like bridges and forest-thick parks, and normally in her truck we listen to old skate punk, Descendents, Superchunk. Sometimes it’s Journey for the fun of singing out loud. But also we both really, really love Radiohead right now. And we aren’t sure why everybody else loves it, too. All day long we answer inquiries from men who look like they’d rather slap us than listen to us, rich guys with convertible cars, drunk herds of boys in pastel collared shirts, housewives who probably haven’t paid their maids in months but are excited to drop $20 on a brand new compact disc they heard about on NPR and get one extra, for the kids.

“I don’t think they listen to the words,” I venture, burrowing deeper beneath the sightline of the growing line at the register.

“Yeah. Well. Nobody likes surprises,” she says.

___

Climbing up the Walls

The downright-mean-est thing about having a retail job is the double insult of Monday holidays. There you are, you’re at work, it’s Monday, a nice slow rainy only-middle-aged-men-who-buy-bargain-classical-records-come-in-today Monday. But it happens to be a holiday — perhaps the ironically named Labor Day, on which retail clerks battle it out behind the dusty counter, sleepily suggesting bestselling titles to office workers who are our age and here, set free for one glorious weekday of their lives, inexplicably in shorts in the 50 degree morning, inexplicably drawn to buy things at 10am. On Monday holidays, not only do you have to work: you’re slammed.

With three phone lines blinking and a post-it note already swimming in penciled titles to run out and check for, plus a line of at least 10 in-the-flesh music fans waiting to pay, I answer: “GoodmorningeverydaymusichowcanIhelpyou?”

“Oh, hello there,” Her voice is old. “Is this the recording store?”

“Yes, how can I help you?” Chop-chop, lady. I’m a machine here.

“I was wondering, you see, I was sitting here, and I’m trying to remember—I was wondering whether you know the name”—

“Are you looking for a certain album?” Chop-chop, spit it out already. Beep.

“Well I don’t know whether you know the name of that machine…”

“I’m sorry? Are you looking for a record?” Eyes roll, debit cards are being pawed as paying customer-feet shuffle.

“Well; ah, no. But I was wondering whether you might tell me the name of this device— it’s connected to the telephone.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m really busy right now, so if you’re not looking for a record I can’t help you. Did you try the library?”

This usually works. Older people still use the library. Pawn it off on someone else, someone not slammed.

“Yes well you see the library’s closed today. It’s Labor Day, you see.”

As I know all too well, and labor to find the last grain of servicing politesse left in me. “OK… well I’m not sure what you’re asking me here but I’m really busy so―”

“I can’t remember the name of…. it records messages.”
“What? Look, lady…”

”It answers the telephone when I can’t. What do they call that, I know it has a precise name…”
“Are you talking about voicemail? I’m sorry, I don’t understand…”

“Yes, well I just can’t seem to re—”
“OK, I’m sorry, I have to hang up now―”

More people now in line, in a hurry although they don’t have anywhere to go, lattes in hand and shorts freshly ironed and they don’t know why the rude tattooed girl at the counter keeps talking on the phone. Probably gossiping with some slacker friend. Eyes roll, chop-chop. Machines these days.

Somewhere, something goes forward and something goes backward and voices meet.

“It’s a machine, you see, and it answers your phone for you….?”
“An answering machine? Look, I have to hang up now, Goodbye, thanks for calling.”

“Yes, thank you, but are you sure―”
“―.”

I am saved from the line by the same labor laws that refuse to honor this day with a fucking paid day off for hourly workers: the Ten Minute Break.

___

No Surprises

Outside sitting on the doorstep by the back entrance I can stop for a breath and see her as she really is: alone, in a cheap rent-controlled studio apartment with the blinds closed, and she can’t call her daughters because they’re away at the river vacationing or something, and she can’t leave the house because she’s afraid she won’t remember where it is when she comes back, and perhaps her kitchen smells because she can’t clean it up, and perhaps she is unable to understand why she can’t remember what this little black box on her end-table is, she knows why it’s there and what it does, why it’s connected to her rotary phone by its grey thin cable that stretches delicately beneath the paper taped to the side of the device bearing emergency phone numbers written in the hand of her eldest child. And she knows that the nice lady at the library would know, and address her by name as Mrs. ______, but they don’t answer down there for some reason, even though it’s a Monday— oh it’s a holiday says the non-human voice who answers, and she’ll never understand why they don’t work on a day named for work—

When she was years ago, she went to marches on this day, yelling and flourishing and brandishing her mind, bringing down the reign of rules and those who hold them over us with every step.

She then remembers, because she does remember a lot of things, that they were always so helpful down at that little store on that street downtown when her and her husband used to shop there for vocal albums, and she calls them just wanting to know the name of the machine that answers.

And they answer. She is surprised.

But then the young lady is awfully rude, almost automatic, but Mrs. ______ doesn’t know why. Mrs. ____ only hopes the girl will know things she doesn’t anymore. As an answer she receives only confusing feelings: a shadow sense-memory of what it was once like to know these words, and a great tiredness at the intense effort involved in trying to recreate how she came to know things, like how does she know the way from the kitchen to the bedroom in the dark?

These senses, plus the feeling that someone is annoyed with her, someone doesn’t have time.

___

You don’t have to understand the words to feel them.

___