A good weekend in Georgia

The Column: 11.11.24

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I like flying out of the Atlanta airport. I go through Screening and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase and wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments and then she says, “You’re good to go, sweetheart.” First I’m a suspected terrorist and then I’m a close personal friend. I did two shows in Georgia last week, after the tragic election, at both of which I walked out onstage and said, “It’s been a hard week for us Marxist-Communists, but there’s a song I want you to sing that is often played triumphantly by brass bands but it’s not about triumph so much as survival, the fact that after the rockets’ glare and bombs bursting in air, the flag was still flying” and I hummed the note and a thousand people stood and sang it majestically, a cappella, with four-part harmony on the land of the free and the brave. Some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican. It was very moving. What they did to the nation was shameful but at least they’re capable of human feeling. They sang gorgeously.

The next morning, a woman came over to me in the dining room of the hotel and said she had flown from Houston to see the show and had enjoyed it and we fell into conversation. She’d grown up in Vicksburg in the Sixties and discovered early on that she had an affinity for math and studied it in college and rose to a point where she was often the lone woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors hinting that she’d gone into math in order to find a good husband. But her love of math was based on a love of logic, that there are clear lines between true and false, that truth can be proven, and her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won and would wield great power.

Trump had exploited fear and resentment and bigotry to exploit divisiveness to win the day and she remembered how, in the Vicksburg of her childhood, the church ladies of town, black and white ladies in big hats, had joined forces so maintain a standard of civility.

It’s rare that I get to talk with a member of my audience — sometimes people walk up with their phone out and say, “Do you mind if I bother you for a selfie?” and we huddle together and they come away with a snapshot of themselves with an old man, but what happened with the Houston woman was a face-to-face encounter just as we used to do before Facebook and Facetime.

And then I had another conversation with a woman who’d been at the show. She was 40, the mother of two kids whom she was homeschooling in order, she said, to give them a chance to find themselves and grow into their personalities without the powerful distractions of TV and video, cellphones, social media, which she felt corrupt a child’s imagination. She limited her kids to thirty minutes of video a day and cellphones were forbidden. No texting, no posting. She could see the benefits up close, the flowering of their minds, their feelings, their expressiveness.

Again, it was a genuine encounter, sitting at a table, drinking coffee. The first woman apologized for “bothering” me but conversation is no bother, never has been. She had sat in Symphony Hall and listened to me and now I got to return the favor and hear the story of a woman who’d had a happy career in mathematics, not teaching it but applying it in the scientific corporate world. If I want privacy, I know how to find it, but public spaces are meant for these encounters.

I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and the day Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River, and the winter night Grandpa woke up the seven of them and got them dressed and hiked out to the meadow to look at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What lives in memory is firsthand experience. I read the pundits’ eulogies but I remember those two women and those two audiences.

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