31 March 2025

This liminal season, late March in New Hampshire, challenges body and spirit as the weather toggles back and forth between spring promise and winter redux.  Waking this Saturday morning to sleet on the newly uncovered deck furniture left me out-of-sorts, uncertain of how to make best use of the day.   Friday the deck had offered both bright sun and the aroma of mulch fresh-laid by the landscapers who at last completed their work begun last October while I was at the dentist’s; I had my new garden stairs to admire and the daffodils and daylilies just broken ground beside them to happily anticipate.  But when the weekend chill arrived with no obvious responsibilities (no appointments to keep and no weeding to be accomplished in that sleet), I felt rather stymied in transition.  I hadn’t so much lost my way (as poor Thomas Cromwell admits he has to his daughter Jenneke in PBS’s Wolf Hall, not long before he loses his head) as found myself unable to assign priority to all that needs doing.

Distractions abound these days.  The NH House Representatives’ reports of majority Republican proposals at last week’s Durham Democrats meeting (proposed 0 funding of the State Library, the State Arts Commission, and the R1 University of New Hampshire) provoke outrage that finds no relief in Democratic disarray at local, state, and national levels.  How to protest?  How to resist?

Ever since I heard the Felon-in-Chief (aka Cheeto-in-Charge) proclaim himself head of the Kennedy Center, I’ve been throwing more support to the arts, and last Sunday returned to Boston Ballet for its “Winter Experience” program, spending a completely diverting and uplifting couple of hours in Boston’s Opera House.

Boston Ballet is the only American company trusted to present Leonid Yakobson’s Vestris, the solo originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1969, now wonderfully performed by the first Black male ever to dance the role, Daniel R. Durrett (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BawLRbStXJo).

Such dedicated, sublime artistry DOES inspire (take THAT, anti-DEI policies!), but it doesn’t direct political action.  I write to my Representatives, but they aren’t the ones who need persuading.  How DO you persuade a nincompoop who argues we don’t need libraries because we have the Internet?

Like Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenforde, gladly wolde I lerne, and gladly teche, but these days much of my “learning” comes from NPR, also under attack by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her DOGE Committee investigation of NPR and PBS.  Did Greg Casar’s (D-Texas) witty rejoinders to stupid questions posed by the DOGE Committee have any impact?  Sitting in front of a giant poster reading “Fire Elon, Save Elmo,” Casar asked “Has Miss Piggy ever been caught trying to funnel billions of dollars in government contracts to herself and to her companies?  I’m told we’re here to talk about government efficiency, but Daniel Tiger has not blown $10 million of taxpayer money to play golf with his friends.  But Donald Trump has.”  Hilarious, yes.  But effective, given the Committee’s dearth of wit?  Probably not so much.

TikToker Todd’s lyrics sum up my distress:

            We’re in the middle of a hostile government takeover

            I wanna talk about it but I’ll be late for work.

            And if you say, “Wait a minute.  Who we have to stop this?

            We had one but you didn’t want that lady in office.

            Now that we’re a part of a Nigerian prince scam

            Surprise surprise, it ends up being a white man.

            Oh!  I just wanna know what the hell do I do? 

            (Probably drink)   

But!  This American Life’s “Museum of Now” broadcast #857 (28 March 2025) Exhibit Three  provided me some optimism about the checks and balances the judiciary can still provide. TAL’S reenactment of one dramatic court hearing on the Trump administration’s executive order 14183 and new policy banning transgender people from serving in the military shows what one clever Federal judge can accomplish with flawless reasoning, legal savoir faire, and a penchant for upholding the truth.  Hurrah for Her Honor Judge Ana C. Reyes, who refused to countenance an order with no factual basis.  Her intelligent, witty evisceration of the government’s lawyer Jason Lynch’s argument has renewed my faith in the judiciary.  Well worth a listen/read:  https://www.thisamericanlife.org/857/transcript . 

I’ve also learned so much from the devastating Netflix series Adolescence that I think I’ll have to watch it again. Co-created and co-written by actor Stephen Graham, who plays the father of a 13-year-old accused of murdering a classmate, there’s not a false note or move in any of the four episodes:  all the more astonishing as each of the hour-long episodes was filmed in a single continuous, unbroken shot.  Shakespeare’s Touchstone, the licensed fool of As You Like It, says “The truest poetry is the most feigning,” and it’s the extraordinary measures taken to feign reality in this complex tale of family dynamics and the social pressures on today’s teens that make its truth so searing.  Owen Cooper was cast in the role of Jamie Miller at the age of 13— with no previous experience.  He and all the actors are a revelation. OMG, to be a teenager in 2025!

However! Yesterday at the handsome Oyster River Middle School I heard a moving performance of madrigals, part songs, Vivaldi’s La Primavera, vocal duets from Heinrich Schütz’s Symphoniae Sacrae II, and J. S. Bach’s longest motet, Jesu Meine Freude, by Amare Cantare under music direction by Catherine Beller-McKenna. Those singers finally broke through my unsteady balance here on the threshold of spring.

I’ve begun slowly but steadily excavating the accretions of past lives in this house, weeding the collections just as I’ll finish weeding the flower beds once the sun returns.  And today I bought supplies to craft the sign I’ll carry at the 5 April nationwide protest of current administrative overreach.  My sign will read:  “BILLIONAIRE$ ARE THE ONLY MINORITY DESTROYING AMERICA.”  But thanks to Amare Cantare, I’ll be thinking of Johann Frank’s text set to Bach’s music in movement 5 of Jesu Meine Freude:

            Trotz dem alten Drachen,      Defy the old dragon,

            Trotz des Todes Rachen,        Defy the jaws of death,

            Trotz der Furcht darzu!           Defy the fear of it!

            Tobe, Welt, und springe,        Rage, world, and attack,

            ich steh heir und singe           I stand here and sing

            in gar sichrer Ruh.                   in secure peace.

March may not be the cruelest month; April arrives. But Defy the Dragon?

Yes, we can!