Stoned

School has begun. Jason has driven Sheba and Zeke to their respective institutions. Only Brenda is home, recovering from injuries received on Labor Day. She’ll be all right, but she shouldn’t have gone to the picnic in the State Park.

You left her suffering at the hands, or rather, the mouth of Mitch Wagman, so you could go off to your own celebrations of the day.

The State Park is an old institution in these parts. It’s the traditional hang-out of the old-fashionedly patriotic. The men either labor or administer in the local factories. The women still stay home if they can. They bring picnics in baskets, they play baseball, they explode fire-crackers on the Fourth of July. The women talk babies and old times. The men make fires and cook the food.

When she selected it as the site for her major public appearance on this very important day, she was thinking of the swans in the lake. How graceful they always are, floating there together. A pair. Unlike humans, swans are naturally monogamous. They look so contented.

A nice, pleasant place to be, especially after the visit to the hospital, where she would address an assemblage of people who’d been injured at work. She’d assure them that she would fight for the on-going health care that covered them, tell them they would not be dropped from their plan because they were unable to work, that it was not true that disability insurance was going over the cliff with the Pontiac. And, incidentally, for the older among them, Medicare was not going to be cut to pay for the new government health plan.

Brenda has been diverted from talking about education, to defending the President.

Let’s drop in on her at the hospital.

It turns out to be a hard sell. One man wants to know why he should believe anything Obama says, when he’s doing everything he said he wouldn’t do, and not doing anything he said he would. She answers that she is not here to defend the President, who doesn’t need defending – he can’t do everything at once, nor can he quickly abandon all the mistaken projects of the previous administration. She never mentions the previous president by name. She can’t say his name without her ire automatically rising.

She is here to say that she will fight for them, that she believes everyone should be secure in the knowledge that if they are unable to work, their lives and the lives of their families will continue as usual. “We are past the days when suffering is tolerable. We have standards. We take care of our citizens when they’re in need.”

She does not receive the applause she expects. Instead, a woman in bandages yells from her mummied mouth, “How do we know you’re not lying, just like him?”

Brenda is supplied with facts, excuses, evasions, and quotes, but no magic. “I am not a liar,” she lies, because, indeed, that’s what she feels she’s become. She shares their fears. There is nothing anyone can count on. She knows. She’s got to follow Obama’s lead, and she’s found it means contradicting herself day after day and hoping no one puts the pieces together.

So just as she had hoped, when she finally got to the park, and the trees, and the picnic tables and baseball field and kids running around, and the smell of grilling meat, she was happy to be there.

There was a small grandstand used for concerts, looking out over the picnic area dotted with tables and blankets, kids’ toys and hampers of food, tubs of bottled drinks, and strollers.

She was escorted by Chauncey, who’d jumped at the chance to be at a picnic, maybe get to throw a few.

He introduced himself. Some people remembered his glory days, and he received first a smattering, then, after a few whispers, a real round of applause, which broadened the smile on his big face and put an extra wallop into his presentation of the candidate.

Brenda looked around at the people taking some time out from their enjoyment to listen to her. She was about to begin, when she saw, over their heads and beyond the picnic tables, the two swans floating on the lake and…

What was that? Some children. Big children, standing on the shore. What were they doing? She saw a swan twist its neck, as if to get out of the way of… The children were throwing stones at the swans!

There were three boys tormenting the big birds. “Stop that!” she yelled over the microphone. “You boys at the lake! Stop throwing stones at the swans!”

In reply, the biggest boy picks up another, throws it, and hits one of the swans. She goes down, but comes up again yards away. Her mate has become distressed and is flapping his wings in alarm.

All heads are now turned toward where she is looking, but they can’t see over the bushes and the picnic paraphernalia the way she can. Nobody does anything.

Brenda is enraged. Zeke was right. She loves animals. Animals are helpless. More helpless than children. They can’t talk. Can’t plead for themselves. In the case of the swans, can’t even call for help.

She turns into a flame. She’s burning, red hot. She’s not going to tolerate those hooligans brutalizing the birds. She sweeps off the stage in her white-for-Labor Day clothes, almost trips down the stairs, but rights herself, and flashes through the crowd. She heads for the lake, to put an end to the torture of animals.

And trips over a baseball bat lying in the grass. Trips and falls, ladies and gentlemen. Onto a table she’d intended to skirt – an oversized aluminum table holding dishes of food. It goes down under her unexpected weight. She goes down with it. The table has collapsed in the center, and the dishes from either end, some of them heavy, roll down on her. Brenda is buried under food. Covered with baked beans, potato salad, tomatoes. Last, but not least, a pie slides down from the end of the table and throws itself right in her face.

Now the crowd comes to life. There is a rush toward the table. Chauncey, the athlete, the only one here who knows her personally, has flown off the podium and gets there first. He starts flinging off the heavy items.

Someone else puts his hands in her armpits and tries to raise her up, but Chauncey yells, “No! Something might be broken!” The hands drop her back in the baked beans. The jolt hurts. She cannot move. She’s afraid she’s paralyzed. Then suddenly, feeling comes back. She opens her eyes and looks up into a sky full of faces staring down at her.

“She’s okay,” someone shouts. “She’s okay.” Brenda sees arms waving over a turned head.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Shapiro?” It’s a woman in a baseball cap. Mary Steele, the local reporter, who happens to love the swans, and now loves Brenda. She’s trained to observe. She saw the whole scene shaping up. If she were less of a reporter, she would have gone down to the water’s edge herself, and stopped the assault as soon as Brenda pointed it out. But now she’s got her story.

The other people of the press are not at this picnic covering the Democratic candidate, because Mercy Alexander is giving a concert five miles away, featuring not some black group nobody in the neighborhood gives a damn about, but Peter, Paul and Mary, an old trio who made it big way back when a large segment of this boomer-dominated district were in their teens.

Everybody loved Peter, Paul and Mary. By the way, Dad tells me Peter went to Cornell when he did. That should give you kids an idea how old these performers are, and should explain why Mary doesn’t really sing anymore.

Dad went up to his 50th reunion. Went to the old fraternity house and saw some of the brothers in his pledge class. Sneaked in over the back side of the hill and managed to avoid seeing anybody else, including Peter, Paul and Mary, though I know – he’s told me a few hundred times – that he took the course Peter taught as a student. A gut course: Romp and Stomp. Sittin’ around singin’ songs with Yarrow the Sparrow, as he was affectionately called.

These are sacred relics, and the press corps is all here to hear Peter tell the crowd that “Puff the Magic Dragon” is not about marijuana. That’s what they want to hear, now that they’ve got children of their own.

“What about Jackie Paper?” someone yells. Another wise guy bellows, “‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ isn’t about LSD!” The audience is getting into it. They’re all laughing now, including Peter. “Alice B Toklas brownies don’t got pot.” And finally, “Acapulco Gold is jewelry!” Peter strums a huge chord on his guitar to put an end to the impromptu exhibition.

The crowd is huge, gathered near a different body of water, a municipal swimming pool. A bandstand has been erected at the shallow end; the press is around the pool, behind the chain-link fence, with some VIPs sitting on chairs on the cement. The rest of the audience is on blankets covering the large green lawn surrounding the pool, where people are allowed to eat, but not have fires. There are plenty of plastic containers and tubs of drinks and patrolling municipal police. Neither Jackie nor Puff has made a public appearance the way they once did, but over beyond the bushes there, behind a grungy shed covered with vines, some of them poison ivy, two boys and a girl are hunkered down honoring those two heroes of songdom, and getting Jackie and Puff back together again.

Mercy has arranged this gig (she does not have a campaign manager; he or she would be superfluous) so that she is part of the act. Between songs she comes out, and she and Peter do a routine. He plays the straight man and asks her questions. “Mercy, why is the Democratic Party thought of as the party of the people?”

“Because at the Democratic party, you get candy. But we know you shouldn’t take candy from strangers, because it may be a trick to kidnap you. Barack Obama says he wants your children from cradle to career. Wasn’t that supposed to be when you had them? Aren’t you supposed to raise your children as you see fit? Obama wants to raise them for you, then auction them off to the highest bidder. Sound familiar? Like family life on the plantation. Massa takes the kids, trains them and sells them.”

Maybe you wonder why PP and M would let themselves be used by the Republican Party. Well, they aren’t. They’re letting themselves be used by a gay black woman. What were once three strikes are now three home runs.

And her message resonates. She simply wants people to be free. That’s what these people used to want when they were young. “When freedom is lost, slavery follows,” she says.

To another question, Mercy voices her anger at the press. At a rally in Phoenix (the city), at which Obama was present, there was a man with a gun. He was reported as being dressed like a commando on patrol, and carrying a machine gun. He was not. He was dressed in a white shirt and tie, and carrying a one-shot-at-time rifle of the kind the press confuses with a military weapon, because of its appearance. It was ugly or beautiful, depending upon whether you looked at it from the left or the right, and was slung over his shoulder. In Arizona, it is legal to carry, but not conceal, this weapon. The man was reported to belong to white supremacist organizations. What the press neglected to tell us was that the man carrying the gun was black.

“Black, baby, black. It’s the pass, and we don’t want this guy to get a pass, because he’s carrying a gun, and we don’t like guns. But he’s black. This is so confusing. Let’s just not mention that the man is black.

They misprepresented on three counts – what he was wearing, what he was carrying, and what color he was.”

Brenda, the candidate for the party of labor, does not get to deliver her message on Labor Day, but her opponent, putative proponent of the industrial masters, does.

In her closing salvo, Mercy takes a shot of her own.

“Freedom,” she says. “It’s the basis of happiness. ‘Freedom with responsibility.’ Peter, you remember that, don’t you? It was Cornell’s motto. ‘Freedom with responsibility’. What does it mean?

“It means people shooting off their mouths, instead of the guns they are legally carrying. That’s the number one and number two freedoms guaranteed by our nation’s Bill of Rights, written right there, into the Constitution. In America, people with guns and people with big mouths are protected. In other countries, they’re the ones who are shot.”

A good shot, that one. But it didn’t make it to the media. The press did not take kindly to being called out for less than accurate reporting.

But, as we part, I don’t want to leave you worrying about injuries sustained during the ruckus at Swan Lake. Let me put your minds at rest. She’s all right, and the next stone missed. Her swain, the male swan, perhaps emboldened by hearing Brenda crash onto the table, stood up on the water, and ran, wings outstretched, onto the shore. Straight to the miscreant who had thrown the stones, and wings flapping from head to toe, pecked him repeatedly, as the press, Mary Steele, gleefully wrote, “in his privy stones”, which her editor changed to “in the groin area.”