Bat
We came home after dark last night, and as I turned the light on in the kitchen, I thought I saw something flit across the living room. A big moth perhaps? But then, after the lights were on I saw Charlie jumping at something dark on the floor near the table. Jay was close enough to identify it, humming the batman theme song. He managed to get it out an unscreened window in the living room. Charlie was deeply disappointed. I know my sisters, and possibly the younger generation, will remember bats in Amenia. We watched them swooping over the lake and over the lawn at dusk. They would fly straight at the house and with an inch to spare turn 90 degrees and fly straight up the flat face of the house and off into the dark. As with virtually all living things, Mom loved bats and was deeply interested in them. Having a bat in the house (which happened several times a summer most years) was just an adventure for all of us, except for our Bubbe. She was terrified. She was sure that the bat’s only goal was to nest in her hair and she would run to grab a towel to cover her head, shaking with fear until the bat was safely outside. We kids thought that was hilarious, but in retrospect, our laughter wasn’t very kind. It was easy to guess how the bats got into the porous old house in Amenia, but a little more of a mystery how one snuck into Sunnyhill.
It strikes me that our Bubbe was younger then, in my childhood summers, than I am now. I have a clear memory (although possibly inaccurate – Shayne would know) of Bubbe retiring from her work in a garment factory at 65 when she was able to collect Social Security – which I believe was enough for her to live on modestly in those days. For Asher and Rowan, for Lilah and Isaac, for Jonah Bailey, and perhaps for others to come, she is the maternal great great grandmother whose life began in the late 19th century in such a different world. The world she was born into in Poland was a world of pogroms, a world full of things, real and imagined, to fear. She lived through the terrifying ocean voyage to America, through world war, depression, world war a second time and then the Cold War. She lived with so much more fear than we have, fear of violence, of poverty, of disease, of pregnancy. And of bats. She told us frightening stories when we were little, stories with witches and other scary villains who made off with careless children. Her emotional landscape was so different from mine, her history so different from the boomer time I was born into. She would have remembered Teddy Roosevelt as I remember Eisenhower, as the little ones will remember Trump. So not everything is better in our world than it was in hers.
Today on Sunnyhill it is easy to ignore the news from the bigger world, easy to focus on the excitement of a bat in the house. It’s warm, and we have a lot of the windows open. Dan just finished mowing and the breeze carries the smell of summer through the house. With the mower silenced we hear the rich, complex background sound of layer upon layer of birdsong and insects, of an occasional snort from Zen. Nearly all the trees are in leaf now, and the top of the ridge to the west is no longer a skyline of rugged bare branches. The treetops are soft now, and blend together. To the east where the receding ridges were obviously separated in the winter landscape, it’s now hard to distinguish where one ridge ends and the next begins. The fields around us look smaller now, as the trees obscure them and widen the borders between them. I’m so glad we came in the winter, at a time when we could see the outlines of the world around us so clearly. I know our neighbor to the west has a big field between him and us, not what looks like just a patch of lawn now. I know how much space there is between the trees, even though that space is filled with leaves now.
On Tuesday we cast our first votes in New York, in an election for the Cooperstown school district which includes Hartwick, which no longer sustains schools of its own. We voted in favor of the proposed budget and a proposal to continue to lease school buses, and for three of the four candidates running for school board. We couldn’t find any information about the candidates, and had missed the candidate forum put on by the League of Women Voters, but a friend of Aviva’s who stays well informed gave us recommendations. Politics feels different here, in a purple district, in a town small enough where it’s easy to imagine two votes from our household mattering. We’ve been to three events for candidates for our congressional district, a seat currently held by a Republican we disagree with on virtually every issue. I don’t actually know if he’s despicable, and I stopped myself from calling him that. But I do know that we are far apart on what the government should do and not do, and on whose interests it should serve. I find it a little easier not to be discouraged about politics here, where a big turnout for a panel of the eight candidates in the Democratic primary at SUNY Oneonta was a standing room only crowd of perhaps two hundred citizens. Our district will either send John Fasso back to congress to support the Trump agenda, or it will send one of the bright, committed Democrats we heard earnestly telling their stories and explaining their liberal positions. Any of them would do, from what I can tell.
I live in concentric circles: the big world of the NY Times and the PBS Newshour, the sprawling 19th congressional district, the Cooperstown school district, and the bat desperately trying to evade Charlie. It seems more possible to have an impact here, to free the bat, to pass the budget, to shift the NY 19th district – and who knows, with that shift to improve congress a little and reduce the damage Trump can do. I try to keep most of my attention on the bat.