1953: With forceps and squalls, I am ushered into the world, along with approximately 3.97 million other brand-new Baby Boomers.
1953–1961: The Eisenhower years. I’m a pudgy white girl growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like every other kid I know, I want a coonskin hat just like Disney’s version of Davy Crockett, and a Daisy rifle. But I’m a girl, so I get a Tiny Tears doll, a Chatty Cathy doll, and finally a Barbie doll.
I am distantly aware that a genial old man, bald like my father but very much more even-tempered, is in charge of the country. Everything seems to be fine as long as the Communists don’t come get us. On this my friends and I agree on the rare occasions we think about it, even though I don’t know what Communists are or why they’re mad at America.
But there’s something called the Cold War, and also The Bomb. Some people build fallout shelters in their backyards. I ask my parents why we don’t have one, and they never really answer me.
At school, when Thanksgiving draws near, we make odd-shaped hats and turkeys out of construction paper as we learn about the big dinner the Pilgrims and the Indians enjoyed together.
Which is interesting, because on TV the Indians are always the bad guys. That doesn’t strike me as quite fair since they were here first, but I don’t question it.
We also have duck-and-cover drills just in case The Bomb falls on us.
The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday, except for Christmas. America is a shiny, bright place where anything is possible, and everything is only getting better.
1965: I watch the TV news, horrified, as state troopers bludgeon Civil Rights protesters crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Maybe not everything is getting better. I have trouble sleeping.
1967–1971: I’m in high school, and now the Vietnam War plays out nightly on our black-and-white TV. Soldiers not much older than I am carry stretchers laden with their buddies, screaming in agony, dark stains spreading in the tattered remnants of their sleeves or pants legs.
The photo of the little girl, running naked, mouth open in a scream, her skin blistering from the napalm our troops use.
I sing along to Country Joe and the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” loudly with my friends and under my breath at home. My dad has a bumper sticker: If your (drawing of a heart) isn’t in America, get your (picture of a donkey, AKA ass) out.”
At school, I wear a black armband until our principal says we can’t anymore. Some kids do anyway.
But in World History class, I learn about America’s role in World War II. I watch grainy movies of the liberation of death camps, skeletal bodies in striped uniforms, corpses being shoved into pits, the evil we fought to end.
But also, there is footage of Hiroshima after we dropped The Bomb on it. Skeletons of buildings in the rubble. More bewildered orphans, doomed by radiation sickness.
A boy who has recently transferred to my school asks me to the prom. He is kind and handsome and funny, and I want to say yes. But he is also Black, and I’m terrified of what my father will do if he finds out. So I tell the boy I can’t, and I feel sad about it for the rest of my life.
1971–1976: I’m in college, a theater major, and then a year of graduate acting school. Lots of things feel more important to me than politics. But I know I won’t forget watching, with a sense of justice, as Nixon resigns in the summer of 1973.
Then Gerald Ford becomes president and pardons Nixon. I am learning, as friends of mine who fled to Canada to escape the draft are still afraid to rejoin their families at home, that justice in America is different for different people, even though it’s not supposed to be.
1976–2001: I leave college with two degrees that mean exactly nothing on the job market. I go to L.A. and get day jobs while I do the rounds of auditions, where I learn that casting directors also don’t care about my classical theater training. Oops.
In 1977, I start dating an artist from Pasadena. My lease is up on my crappy North Hollywood apartment and I move in with him. I run the Pasadena office of a temporary staffing agency, a job that allows me to sneak out sometimes for auditions. I start booking commercials.
The next year, I get my big break: a regular part in a new TV variety show. But during filming, a union rep shows up on set to inform us that the producer is unable to get a bond. I’m not sure exactly what that means, so I stay until shooting wraps.
The pilot never airs, and I never get paid. My agent disappears into the woodwork.
In 1979, I marry the artist. In 1980, we are morose as we watch the election returns and realize Ronald Reagan is winning. We switch to watching The Deer Hunter. It’s almost as depressing.
In 1982, we have our first son. Ronald Reagan is reelected in 1984, which we’re not happy about but we’re unsurprised, and anyway we’re too busy to think much about it. My husband starts a new, niche, specialty hardwoods business. In 1987, our second son is born.
Those years and the ones immediately after are a blur of strollers and Sears photos, soccer games and big family gatherings to mark every holiday and every milestone in the boys’ lives.
A new millennium dawns. The Y2K virus does not send us back to the Dark Ages.
And so it goes.
September 11, 2001: I am teaching eighth-grade English at a private school when another teacher knocks on my door to give me the news. A plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers, obliterating it.
I concentrate on keeping the kids as calm as possible while parents come to fetch them home. The second tower is hit and collapses. I have one son away at college and one in high school, eight miles away.
That night, my family safely gathered together, I realize for the first time that the human beings I love most in the world, these irreplaceable, unique, absolutely necessary individuals, are considered by some people to be nothing but political pawns in a vast, sinister game I don’t begin to understand.
Like everyone I know, in the coming days I surge with patriotism and a desire to do something meaningful to meet this awful moment, to heal and strengthen our wounded nation. I give blood. I wait for further instructions, ready to do what it takes.
President George W. Bush declares a “war on terrorism,” which strikes me as nonsensical, like declaring war on evil intentions. Then he tells Americans to go about their business and keep shopping. Also, “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
Most of the 911 terrorists, we learn, are from Saudi Arabia. But we bomb Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction they’re supposed to have at the ready to use against us fail to materialize. Iraqi citizens do not, as Donald Rumsfeld promised us they would, greet American troops with flowers.
My husband and I hug each other in consolation as the bombs fall on Baghdad.
2002: On a hot afternoon in early July, my husband comes home early from the hardwoods shop, feeling tired and unwell. He lies down for a nap. I join him.
Less than an hour later, I’m awakened by his loud, strangled-sounding breathing. I can’t wake him. I call 9–1–1.
The paramedics can’t revive him. Neither can the doctors at the ER.
My boys are 14 and 20. Numbly, I stand in the emergency room bay, looking at my husband’s body, promising him I’ll get them through college and on their way, whatever it takes.
Two days later, I am at the shop, making out paychecks and helping to unload a shipment of lumber.
2002–2008: Years that contain brutal challenge mixed with joy and renewal. I remarry, someone I’ve known for 30 years. Together we wrangle the business into shape to be sold, which takes five years.
My older son graduates from college and begins the long apprenticeship to become a commercial airline pilot.
My younger son completes high school and heads off to college, happy to leave a home where the foundations have shifted in ways he couldn’t possibly be ready for.
In the evenings, my new husband and I wind down with a glass of Two Buck Chuck on the porch of the house my first husband remodeled but never quite had the chance to complete. We watch a bear shimmy down, butt-first, from one of our nine avocado trees.
Not that I have much bandwidth to think about it, but George W. Bush seems to be the worst president ever. Little do I know.
2008: We sell the business! We sell the house! We move to Idaho, where we have family who have settled on the outskirts of Boise. We find a lovely Boise neighborhood and settle down.
I go to work for a national nonprofit, in a job that feels right-sized, until it isn’t. Barack Obama sells out a stadium right here in Boise, and then he gets elected, and we are giddy. America is back on track.
2010: The midterm elections are a disaster for the Democrats. The Tea Party rears its collective head. This does not, we fear, bode well.
2012–2016: Thank God, Obama is reelected in 2012. My faith in American voters is at least partially restored.
Midway into his second term, my husband and I rent out our Boise house and move back to California. All of our siblings except one live there, and they’re all getting older.
Then Donald Trump somehow gets the GOP nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and we feel like we’re watching a nightmare-clown scenario in real time. This can’t, we keep saying, really be happening.
I phone bank for Hillary Clinton and get on a bus to Reno to canvass for Dem candidates there. My brother-in-law tells his granddaughters how proud he is that the next President of the United States will be a woman.
But Trump wins. Because electoral college. The clown-nightmare has come true.
November 10, 2016: I attend a candlelight vigil at the beautiful Episcopal church in our small Napa Valley town, where we silently walk the labyrinth in the courtyard.
Afterwards, I wonder if it makes any difference. It hasn’t changed the fact that Donald Trump is going to be President.
But it has changed me.
2016–2024: Think of one of those old black-and-white movie sequences wherein the passage of time is conveyed by paper sheets flying off a page-a-day calendar.
The first Trump term. It’s as inept, as appalling, as we imagined.
The Tea Party metastasizes into MAGA. Watching Fox News, which is kind of inevitable while traveling, is like gazing into a funhouse mirror. Except it isn’t fun.
In 2018, my husband and I visit the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. It is a place of deep reverence, true hallowed ground, as we wander in silence among the rows of crosses and Stars of David arranged on the bluff above the very beach where they died.
Later, in the interpretive center designed to be reminiscent of a bunker, one of the displays shows a life-sized soldier mannequin with the exact hand-held radio equipment my father-in-law carried up Omaha beach on Day 4 of the invasion.
We are deeply, deeply moved by this tactile evidence of America at her greatest.
Then, 2020 and Covid. America and the rest of the world are rocked back on their heels. Trump wonders if bleach or horse deworming medicine are the answers.
The Covid vaccine is made available, first to just some of us and then to all of us, and life begins to resume something like its previous shape.
George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020 is captured on video, and the country howls with sorrow and outrage.
Joe Biden wins the next presidential election. We breathe a sigh of relief, sure that the ship of state has righted itself after all.
And then there is January 6, 2020. I don’t think I need to elaborate.
The years unfold. Our older siblings succumb to COPD, to Alzheimer’s, to pancreatic cancer, to various forms of neurological disorders. With most of them either gone into care or simply gone, we move back to our Boise home.
2024: We steel ourselves for the presidential campaign, because Joe Biden is determined to run again, even after a disastrous debate against Trump, until finally agreeing to bow out and hand the torch to Kamala Harris.
I campaign as hard as I know how for Harris and wear a “Say It To My Face” shirt every chance I get. It’s amazing how many thumbs-up and grins I get from people in Boise, especially women.
But I also see cars in downtown Boise plastered with huge FUCK JOE BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM signs. One is driven by a woman who could be anyone’s grandma.
Still, the energy of the Harris campaign is infectious, joyous, uplifting — in contrast to the fear-mongering, hate-spewing rallies so beloved by the opposition.
Trump insists he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025. But I do, and it scares the bejeesus out of me. I phone bank, send postcards, and give money.
And then a bullet fired by some idiot whom the Secret Service certainly should have detected nicks Trump’s ear, and the blood-flecked image of DJT raising his fist into the air is everywhere, and I have a sinking feeling.
I go to bed on election night before the returns are in, refusing to give up hope.
At 4 AM, unable to sleep, I head to the living room sofa to avoid waking my husband. I’m only trying to find a sleep podcast on my phone, but I stumble onto the news.
Trump wins.
I haven’t wailed like that since my first husband died.
2025: The second Trump administration is not only far worse than the first one, it rolls out its damage and dysfunction faster than our darkest imaginings. Again, I see no reason to elaborate; it’s too exhausting.
But despair is not a luxury we can afford, and we resume activism to the extent our nervous systems and bank accounts can handle it. We write, we call, we donate, we refuse to give up, and we avoid watching TV news.
We attend every peaceful, credible protest we can.
October 18, 2025: On a gloriously sunny, crisp autumn afternoon, my husband, my sister-in-law, and I stand with our handmade signs and American flags and thousands and thousands of other people in front of the Idaho State Capitol for the second No Kings protest.
At an event that the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson characterized as a “hate America rally” perpetuated by leftists/Marxists/anarchists and pro-Hamas paid agitators, we are surrounded by a display of jubilant, determined patriotism. Veterans are everywhere. Flags are everywhere. People dressed in inflatable unicorn, chicken, T-rex and axlotl costumes wobble among the crowd.
Just as the organizers had intended, in Boise and everywhere else in the over 2700 events in the nation and other parts of the world, No Kings Day is a loud, joyous, and eminently peaceful display of what democracy looks like.
We wave at one another, cheer at the speeches, revel in the cleverness of people’s signs (one fave: “Trump is the worst president since Trump!”). Together with our compatriots, we chant “No Kings” over and over, and sometimes, “No Faux-King Way!”
When it comes time for the national anthem, we put our hands over our hearts. And together we all sing, full-throated, that gloriously impossible song. With tears in our eyes.
God bless the American Republic. If, as Ben Franklin said, we can keep it.
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