Recall my blog posting of two months ago, “Pandemic Communication”? I’m taking a break from my job publishing daily notes from my Williams classmates.  Below is my departing letter to my classmates as editor, at least for the next few months, as Joe Bessey – my co-secretary – takes the reins.

There have been 102 classmates (including me) who have sent in at least one comment since I started this project, and I have published 81 “class responses,” almost one a day.  It has been wonderful to read them all – honestly, at times my major source of pleasure during these difficult times.  I’ve worked with the yearbooks beside me, but I haven’t needed them all that often.  The faces usually popped up in my head the instance I saw the names.  And now I feel I’ve re-connected with long-lost friends, with people I thought were, like Clementine, lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry.  They all came rushing back!

But much has saddened me during the last three months.  And it isn’t all because of the pandemic.

The quoted words below are mine, posted in my blog February 1, 2017.  I was explaining why I love our country:

“I once spent most of a year in a white Carry-all named Moby Dick, driving all over America, even rolling through a lot of Mexico and a bit of Canada. I started in Maine, crossed the Mississippi, and saw the faces on Mt. Rushmore, the bison in Wyoming, the lovely wild Baja Peninsula, a bullfight in Mexico City – from sea to shining sea.  Then, during the summer of the Bicentennial I rode a ten-speed bicycle from one of those same seas to the other.  I knew I was free in this country.  This was America. I loved being here.

“In America I have taught in five different high schools and one college, working with many delightful, diverse young people in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont.  As I crossed and recrossed the country, I met scores of kind men and women and saw all of that beautiful landscape – the mountains, the prairies, the lakes and rivers.  After I pedaled across the Mississippi into Iowa, I turned down under the bridge and took a swim in the Big Muddy.  I loved seeing my land.  However, as I think now, even more I loved meeting the fearless, open-handed generosity of America’s people, who buoyed my spirit, who touched my heart.”  (https://www.johnagould.com/feeling-blue/)

In fact I’ve crossed the ground of America ten times, all but one time solo.  I’ve cycled, trained (a CN journey after the bike trip), and driven.  And I explored places.  Several of my blog entries have concerned recent drives and places and people I’ve met along the way.  So I think I know this land intimately.

But life here has changed, hasn’t it?  I felt this was coming when I wrote the quoted words above, just as the new president was taking charge.  And now my heart has dropped so low that my feet kick it every time I take a step.

Two Saturdays ago, I was fighting this depression.  I should have been happy, for my two sons, their partners, and my wife were all sitting together in our living room.  We hadn’t had them here for at least four months.  And here they were.  After quarantining themselves, the kids were visiting us for a week, and in the next few days they would set out to drive cross-country themselves, where eventually they would land in Lanesboro, MA, 15 miles south of Williamstown, in the Berkshires, where we have a summer house.  They had invited me to go along with them.  Normally I’d have jumped at the chance.  But I’m not going, of course, because of the virus; I’m too old, too diabetic to risk it.  Still, there was something else I needed to tell them, to explain the morose mood I’d lately been exhibiting.

“I’m sorry I’m not more cheerful for you guys.  I know I should be. You need to understand that right now I feel profoundly depressed.  I just can’t pick up my chin from the floor.”

It wasn’t just the COVID, I told them, although that was certainly a factor.  More importantly, it was the image of that policeman and his friends, as they joyfully murdered an unarmed, handcuffed Black man – another American – by kneeling on his neck for more than 8 minutes.  Then there had been another Black man killed, shot in the back while running away, impotently waving a taser as he ran.  And I saw images of others killed, Black and Latino.  Even the old white guy protesting in Buffalo, knocked on his face, bleeding out of his ear.  All by police, for God’s sake, serving and protecting.  This is the America that ten times I’ve driven, cycled, railroaded across; I’ve driven down both coasts from one border to the other, all the while stopping in all 48 of the continental states, where I met scores of kind, generous, people. As I said, usually I was alone on these trips, and I was almost always completely safe.  How can I now be living in a country where the national leaders think so little of us that they won’t protect us?  Where they won’t lift a finger to help us stay alive?  Where it’s more important for the president to be re-elected than to deal responsibly with a lethal pandemic instead of lying about it?  Where he refuses even to fund testing for the virus?  Where he calls peaceful protestors “thugs” or “terrorists” and tweets at white supremacists with winks from the highest office in the land?

It breaks my heart, I told the boys, their partners, and my wife.  (She already knew.)

Classmates [and now blog readers], please forgive me for writing this to you.  As I said, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading everyone’s stories for the past 3 months.  I hope you’ll still keep writing in as Joe takes over for the next few months, so I can keep reading those stories.  And I hope, desperately, that we can all emerge together, hale and healthy, safely hand in hand on the other shore.