It’s a moody day at Chatter Creek Cottage. I love mood. Fog creates such compelling chiaroscuro in my memory, old fine prints of recollection like black and white films in which footsteps are heard beyond the shadows and your heart skips a million beats.
Recollections like small town streets at dusk, empty beaches on rainy days and large convertibles with wide fins, rock and roll that made you twirl when you danced and old pay phones on city street corners that had an odd mystery about them, especially when they rang and no one was around but you.
Nostalgia and mood go hand in hand for me now but they didn’t used to because I didn’t know that black and white photographs were going to disappear as the norm, vanish the way of two seater Thunderbirds and television variety shows. When I watched the old Judy Garland show back in the 60s I had no idea I would become part of a lost world. I had no idea that Sonny would leave Cher and die on a pair of skies or that no one I know now knows who the hell Rowan and Martin were. I had no idea John Lennon would be assassinated back then, or that several of my friends would die because of some horrible epidemic called AIDS or that a man with no experience, platform or compassion would run for president.
Which leads me not only to the beauty of fog and the way it conjures up a sense of stillness, almost akin to smoking too much marijuana. I refer now to the fog inside the brain that does not permit people to think rationally or intelligently. Donald Trump is not an old Chrysler, he’s a spiffy beefed up Escalade, the kind of obnoxious overblown SUV that rides your ass on a highway and blows by you on their indifferent road kill drive to Superficial Drive on Schmuck hill. Donald Trump is the lie you were tossed about some get rich pyramid plan, he’s the guy who thinks someone’s sister is ugly because she’s overweight, he’s the guy who doesn’t give a damn about your pain, or your finances or your fears.
I hope to God I don’t look back on this time in my life as a time when Trump was president because then there would be no beautiful fog, no compelling nostalgia in my memory. It will not be a time when beauty and compassion ruled the earth; it will be a time when America went mad and handed over the reigns of a precarious future to a man with no substance or respect for the truth, or any knowledge of fair play. Bring on those debates. I want this time in history to be filled with the nostalgia of an era, when a woman ran this country and no, not made it great, it already is great, but made it greater. Just think about it folks, a fist in the face of your future or a thoughtful, experienced, compassionate, reasoning candidate who values life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Vera Jane Cook is an award winning author and has eight published novels. Her most recent ebook, The Story of Sassy Sweetwater, has gone to print and will be featured through Bublish at the Southern Independent Bookstore Association Conference in Savannah on September 18th -19th. To learn more about her visit: www.verajanecook.com
