A good weekend in Georgia

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
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

(00:35):
I'm a suspected terrorist, and then I'm a close personal friend.
I did two shows in Georgia a few weeks ago
after the election, at both of which I walked out
on stage and I said, it's been a hard week

(00:56):
for US Marxist communists. But there's a song I want
you to sing, which is often played triumphantly by brass bands,
But it's not about triumph so much as survival. The
fact that after the rocket's red glare and the bombs
bursting in air, the flag was still flying and a

(01:21):
hum the note a G 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, and
some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican.

(01:44):
It was very moving. What they did in the election
was shameful, but at least they're capable of human feeling,
and they sang gorgeously. The next morning, a woman came
over to me in the dining room of the hotel

(02:04):
and said she had flown from Houston to see the
show the night before, and she'd enjoyed it, and we
fell into conversation. She'd grown up in Vicksburg in the sixties,
and she discovered early on that she had an affinity
for math, and she studied it in college, and she

(02:29):
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

(02:52):
between true and false, the truth can be proven. And
her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won
and would wield enormous power. Trump had exploited fear and

(03:13):
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 to maintain a standard of civility.

(03:36):
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

(03:58):
to face encountered, just as we used to do before
Facebook and face time. And then I had another conversation
with a woman who'd been at the show. She was forty,
the mother of two kids whom she was homeschooling in order,

(04:19):
she said, to give them a chance to find themselves
and grow into their personalities without the powerful distractions of
TV and video, cell phones, social media, which she felt
corrupt a child's imagination. She limited her kids to thirty

(04:41):
minutes of video a day, and cell phones were forbidden,
No texting, no posting. She could see the benefits up
close already, the flowering of their minds, their feelings, their expressiveness. Again,

(05:02):
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

(05:23):
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

(05:49):
a kid, I got to experience what we call visiting,
when the family got in the car and dropped in
at someone's house and sat around and we visited. We
kids sat quietly listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods,

(06:11):
which could be a real revelation, hearing their different versions
of family history. Who looked out the window of the
school house and cried our houses on fire, And the
day Joe Louks drowned in the Rum River, And the
winter night Grandpa woke up the kids, seven of them,

(06:35):
got them dressed, hiked out to the meadow to look
at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What
lives in memory is first hand experience. I read the
pundit's eulogies after the election, but I remember those two

(06:56):
women and those two audiences. A prairie home companion's fiftieth
anniversary two CD set is packed with music, favorite sketches,
and of course, the news from Lake Wolglegng. The rollicking
celebration was recorded live at the Fitzgerald Theater. More info

(07:17):
at Garrisoncuther dot com