Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Isaac Israels: Two Donkeys (1897 - 1901)

Gallery Notes:
Scheveningen’s donkeys were not just entertainment for seaside visitors; Israels made grateful use of them in his paintings. He portrayed them a few times, either with children riding or a boy leading, or as here, waiting for the next ride. Their keeper lies in the foreground, on the sand.

"I remember we'd once been Exiled before our Visitors found us home."

Visitors transformed our Exile. On our first days there, two old friends just happened to be passing through the area to visit relatives, and we spent two days easing into that terribly unfamiliar place together. It seemed much less foreboding with them there to distract us into entertaining. Something about visitors brings the host out in us. We might not usually take ourselves out to dinner, but when we have Visitors, we're much more likely to consent to the splurge and even try to find the best. I become tour guide-y, even when I'm unfamiliar with the territory. I have an almost uncanny ability to find interesting places, and our Visitors almost always appreciate my efforts. We wouldn't have visited half the tourist traps in DC had Visitors' presence not quietly goaded us into agreeing to go.

The GrandOtter was our most frequent Visitor after we were Exiled.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Philippe Pigouchet: Visitation, from Book of Hours (15th Century)

" Who would greet us when we returned?"

During Exile, The Muse and I were able to infrequently return to the scene of our banishment to visit family and friends. We learned early in our Exile that holidays were lousy times to visit since people already had their traditions, and the last thing they needed was some fifth-wheel visitors messing up their rhythms. Also, we ached to visit ordinary times rather than during celebrations when people might be on their best or worst behavior. The one visit we made over Christmas, early in our Exile, proved disastrous. We never attempted a repeat performance.

I usually managed to make it back for my grandson Roman's birthday, even though it was in February.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Beatrix Potter: Cats in the Window (1909)

" … those fading days may never go away."

Before I move these stories away from Takoma Park, I must recount one of the most fulfilling activities I engaged in there. Our Sherman Street neighbor and benefactor Clair had been involved with a group that cared for the town's many feral cat colonies. He recruited me to take a turn. Rather than try to domesticate these critters, these people trapped and neutered them, then returned them to the wild, returning daily to feed them forever. Each volunteer agreed to feed a certain number of cat colonies for specific days each week. I decided to service five drops, four days each week. I was responsible for buying and dropping the food off each designated day.

The colonies lived invisibly.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Constant Troyon:
Vache qui se gratte [Scratching Cow] (1858)

"I knew most people only in passing."

Eventually, that second Exile settled into the very soul of domestic tranquility. The Muse's early struggles to adapt to her job's politics settled into her widely acknowledged mastery of that context. She held a job that made a difference and was held in high esteem by her colleagues. I, too, had found a level. The yard in Willow Street offered me opportunities to tend a garden and mow a lawn. That house could have been more reliable. The HVAC repair man and I were on a first-name basis. He confided that the owner had installed the air conditioners upside down and backward. The house was so big, and the climate was so fierce that two air conditioning systems were stacked into the attic. The heating system, too, exhibited problems. We returned from a visit home to learn that the young woman we'd hired to tend cats and plants hadn't noticed that the furnace had failed. We lost about half the house plants, and the basement filled with millipedes. Millions of them. That took some serious cleaning up.

That landlord had hired a management company to watch over his home while it was rented out.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel: Everyman (1556 - 1560)

Gallery Notes: The bearded figure with the lantern represents Everyman during his lifelong search. The legend explains, ‘Everyone searches for himself in various things, all over the world. How can anyone then get lost, when one is always looking for oneself? However, no one knows himself, … Whoever understands this has insight into a great miracle’.

"We live lives of ritual and habit …"

Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel: Everyman (1556 - 1560)

Gallery Notes: The bearded figure with the lantern represents Everyman during his lifelong search. The legend explains, ‘Everyone searches for himself in various things, all over the world. How can anyone then get lost, when one is always looking for oneself? However, no one knows himself… Whoever understands this has insight into a great miracle’.

"We live lives of ritual and habit  …"

Life continues in remarkably similar aspects even after being Exiled. Conservation and Preservation Laws applicable to physical systems also seem to apply when considering social ones. My rituals and familiar patterns continued trying to replicate themselves even once their originating contexts disappeared. Many attempts seemed absurd, though I rarely considered whether my intentions were reasonable. We were used to taking Sunday toodles when living in our small city, so we attempted to continue the ritual after moving into a big one. It might have taken us half the afternoon to get to what we might consider country, at which point we'd have to turn around to get back home by suppertime. We toodled anyway! In this and a thousand other ways, we preserved our rituals even into Exile.

Before, we'd home-can tomatoes every summer.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Charles White: Harvest Talk (1953)

Frequent readers might recall that The Muse and I started a project to remodel our front porch in the first week of August. We end the first week of November without a completed remodel, ultimately violating our original worst case by not completing it by Halloween. Halloween found me camped out in front of the blocked-off front porch steps to ensure no goblin fell into our porch deck frame's black hole. I’ve reset my original expectations a half dozen times since we started. Everything I knew about project work informs me that we're executing normally. No project was ever supposed to be completed on the initially expected schedule. Each rightly became an exercise in recovering from the shock and shame of turning out different than initially expected. Project Mastery, a subject in which I once taught well-respected workshops, was always about managing emerging expectations rather than ensuring the originals occurred. No force in the known universe could ever ensure satisfying original expectations and it's at best naive to presume that anyone in this generation could so succeed. No, we're born to experience serial failures and somehow manage to recover from them. The MAGAs will prove to have been every bit as cruel and unreasonable as we expected they would be, and we will prove to be worthy of unexpected opponents. Who will ultimately win depends upon whether one believes in an end to history. I suspect the people to whom I will become the 16th great-grandchild will still wrestle with the same dichotomies. Evil might be just as eternal as good. My job, and your job, must be to stand on the side of good, however seductive evil might seem this time. Thank you for following along!

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

C. M. Bell: Smithsonian Institute.[still image Stereograph} (1870-79)

" … charge nothing for admission but leave a much more lasting impression."

Neither The Muse nor I had ever lived in such proximity to famous places until we were Exiled to our nation's capital. There, a National Mall holds a collection of monuments and museums that contain something akin to our national heritage. Millions of visitors travel long distances to visit these places. It's a tradition that if you're about to graduate from a high school located anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, your class will travel by bus to what The Muse and I came to call Tourististan. On any odd summer afternoon, tour busses line The Mall from Fifteenth Street to the foot of Capitol Hill, idling, belching diesel smoke. They disgorge their passengers into swirling crowds of the usual suspects: boys showing off to imaginary girlfriends and preening teen females carrying identical non-functional purses. Add to the mix families pushing strollers filled with kids too young to appreciate anything they might witness. Welcome to Tourististan.

We gave The Mall wagon room and usually went out of our way to avoid the place.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

7310 Willow Street, Takoma Park, MD (2012)

"Dislocations do not always prove to be as perilous as they seem."

Three years into our Exile, The Muse and I were Exiled again when our landlord informed us that he would sell the Sherman Street house. He and his wife were relocating back to the States from The Hague and needed the cash out of that house to buy themselves a place in Houston—no hard feelings, nothing personal. We would have put an offer on the place if we had been in any position to purchase it, but we were still recovering from our bankruptcy three years earlier and couldn't quite imagine floating the deal. We'd been juggling finances since we began our Exile. The Muse had contracted with a couple to make a down payment on a rent-to-own arrangement that gave us some cushion, but that deal had fallen apart after less than a year. Those renters had left the place worse for their wear. The Muse's son agreed to move in and help recover from the damage for reduced rent, so we'd been paying premium rent in Takoma Park and subsidizing our original mortgage back home.

The last thing either of us wanted was to go out searching for another place to live.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema: Self-Help (c. 1885)

"When I could no longer believe in who I might become …"

Besides laying open the myth that I could return home for Christmas, my Exile also displaced my inherited faith in the great American Self-Determination Myth. Most Americans of my generation were taught that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to and that any of us could grow up to become President. This might have been an odd offshoot of Jefferson's assertion that all men are created equal, a helpful fiction not necessarily intended to have been interpreted literally. Anyway, like almost everybody, I came of age believing my lot in life, if not at that moment improving, was definitely, if invisibly, trending better. Sure, my current trajectory might seem unpromising, but the magic of Self-Determinism would shortly muster a miracle. I just needed to contribute faith, patience, and persistence.

The thing about belief was always that it conveniently becomes self-sealing.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [boy with Easter egg] (c. 1950)

" … celebrations exclusively reserved for nuclear families …"

A myth promotes the idea that anyone far away might successfully return home for holidays. I'd attempted to accomplish this end for most of my adult life before being Exiled. Once Exiled, the underlying truth finally sunk in. Before Exile, I grew up and moved away, dutifully returning almost every Christmas and many Thanksgiving holidays. I considered these excursions high points. I'd reclaim my childhood bedroom and introduce my kids to country Christmas traditions, though I might have noticed I no longer belonged there. It had not been my home for years, and my annual return was more nostalgic than substantial. I'd forgotten how to appropriately dress there, and my interests seemed more distant from theirs every year. I sincerely wanted to be everybody's favorite uncle, but nobody ever gets to be an absentee anything. You're either there or not; if you're not almost always there, you've already gone, your annual appearance more ghostly than actual.

Exiled to the odd other coast, returning home for Christmas was mostly out of the question.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Emil Orlik: Three Women 1905

" … a much broader connection than I ever could have discovered had I just stayed home."

Our Exile was as much a political act as it was social. Our business went bankrupt in no small part due to the corrupt practices of the George W. Bush administration. The mortgage bubble his supply-sided economic policies promoted ultimately brought down the economy on our shoulders. He'd been doing damage to the high-tech industries our consulting firm relied upon since the very beginning of his very first term. His hasty invasion of Afghanistan, followed by his foolish incursion into Iraq on blatantly false premises, had amplified uncertainty, which is one thing every economy fears. The oughts were fraught with stupid political turbulence. We fled into Exile and the welcoming, reassuring arms of the first term of the Obama administration. Washington, DC, in those days, was a palpably hopeful place. Obama had made viable a hope many had not dared to dream. We relocated to a place very near the center of that renewed enthusiasm.

We had been politically active before being Exiled.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Carle Vernet: Hussard Walking in Front of his Horse,
Smoking a Pipe (February 8, 1817)

" … one impossible plan."

It might be true that every Exile serves their time alone. Certainly, The Muse's Exile seemed very different than mine. She would disappear into the Takoma Park Metro Station every morning and return every evening, off to engage in meaningful work and petty politics. She was an increasingly significant presence in her workplace, expanding her role from its initially forgettable status into something with genuine if informal, influence. She was becoming something. I was the one who ensured she got up on time and would often give her a ride to the station. In the six years we lived in Takoma Park, she drove the car to work three times. I regulated her departures and arrivals. Having supper ready when she returned became my primary occupation.

I had rarely had so much alone time.

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz

Edvard Munch: The Vampire II (1895/1902)

We're Not Going Backward
I have avoided making overt political statements in my stories, and not only because politics tend to render stories less timeless. For instance, I did not write a January 6, 2020 story, though I've never tried to hide my affiliations. Like you, I have always believed Trump was a dumpster fire. He represented what was always reprehensible about Americans stretching back before and including Andrew Jackson’s champions, which included some of my forebears. I might be remiss if I missed this opportunity to acknowledge at least that these Exiled Stories, as well as the preceding Grace and Fambly stories, were all created beneath a pall of the possibility that old Mr. Corruption might get reelected. Now, five days before the election, his reelection seems even more impossible than it appeared eight years ago when we were all blindsided by the most catastrophic election returns in the country's history. Trump didn't disappoint my expectations for an instant of his term. He proved inept and incapable, the very soul of terrible. He's only gotten worse since.

But I come here to praise Harris, not to recount Trump's many shortcomings. If he didn't have shortfalls, he wouldn’t have any falls at all, for he's a singularly unimpressive person, a failure by almost every measure; even his purported wealth appears to have been phony. He still owes money to every venue he rented for his 2020 campaign. This campaign only made that debt worse.

Harris has already accomplished what so recently seemed impossible. She's managed in a few scant months to remind us who we were and who we might become again. The seething foreground her opponent foments was never once a threat unless, and of course, we took that noise seriously. She didn't and hasn't, and in the process of taking her opponent unseriously, she's reminded me of who I intended to be. I had been afraid and needed reassurance. I believe we all needed to see a slim woman stand up to that shameful fatcat and his minions as if they couldn't ever lay a hand on her. They haven't. They couldn't. They can't. They will continue to ineffectively rant, but we're well on to their con.

I feel courageous now, American rather than cowardly courageous, the kind that proudly hails instead of disgracing itself. Harris did the impossible. She reignited a flame that most commentators had insisted might never burn again. I could not have been more delighted to vote for Harris and Walz. I have avoided engaging in the traditional catastrophizing Democrats always engage in every four years. I have at times pretended to feel confident that the American character remained intact, that it had only been napping and would be ready to engage again once awakened. I'm awake now that we're not going backward but forward again. Finally!

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz