Politics, Rain, and Existential Angst, Mixed With a Little Pollan

“roadside” is courtesy of our Flickr pool’s rainy day photographer zenobia_joy

It’s raining. It’s been raining for days. Everything I own feels slightly clammy to the touch and my sweater wafts a slight reek of mildew to my nose when I move my arms. It could be my imagination, but it makes me paranoid and self-conscious.

I’m too lazy to walk the half-mile to wait for the bus out in the rain, and I’m working, again, so I go a little wild and call a taxi. The driver is from northern India, a Sikh going home tomorrow. I’m his first fare of the night–a good omen, he says, since I’m heading downtown. It’s easy to pick up another quick fare downtown.

He misses the turn to Benaroya Hall, so we travel an extra block and end up stuck behind an SUV that can’t decide if it wants to invest in valet parking. Robby presses me to call him after Michael Pollan’s talk, when I’m ready to go home. He’ll be there in five minutes, same place, for sure, so I take his number. Why not? I admire people who will ask for what they want.

I have two tickets, but it turns out I’m flying solo, so I pile my coat and baggage in the extra seat, and offer it to my neighbors for the same purpose. Everyone unloads and we all feel better. Despite the signs to check large bags and backpacks, my own backpack never elicits the slightest comment or raised eyebrow. After 20 years, it’s not really a bag, it’s more a leathery, brown growth that happens to contain everything I need in the event of civil disturbance or force majeur. Like a kangaroo’s pouch, only with receipts and nail clippers instead of tiny infant marsupials.

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Michael Pollan (Photo: Alia Malley)

Pollan carries a giant papier-maché pea-pod and a QFC sack onto the stage. He has props. The crowd goes wild in a quietly musty sort of way. Pollan plays show-and-tell with cereal and yogurt and some sort of irradiated instant turkey entree. I’m taking furious notes, but my brain has mostly checked out. The hall is warm and dim, and I’m tired.

All last week I anticipated tonight, looking forward to seeing one of my heroes, a modern American philosopher, talk about food, one of my favorite subjects. Then a judge was assassinated in Tucson, a Congresswoman was nearly assassinated, and over a dozen other of my fellow citizens were injured or killed. Food suddenly didn’t seem to matter so much.

I’ve been staying up past any reasonable definition of bed-time, reading news and opinion columns, watching footage. Sitting in this room, with all of these people, my bag on the chair beside me, I wonder: how many of these people are carrying a gun? In the lobby, later, as we pack together at the exits, I wonder, again.

In Seattle, I never worry about being out. My gender is no secret, not with the twins preceding my every entrance, but I don’t hide my sexual orientation, and my ethnicity is rarely even noticed. In Montana and Mississippi, it’s a different story, for different reasons. That’s why I live here, and not there.

This week, I’ve worried. I’m the liberal elite media. I’m the American that my fellow Americans want to take America “back” from. I’m the treasonous Democrat, the grammar manipulator, the innocent bystander. I’m the same person, the same progeny of the twisted union of a conservative Vietnam veteran and a liberal feminist Dixiecrat that I was two weeks ago, but I’m one week less innocent.

I’m reaching a point where I mark my life in public milestones, as much as personal ones. The shooting of Ronald Reagan, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle accidents, the Oklahoma City bombing, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, September 11th, the Columbine shootings, both the Iraq wars. Others.

Tucson, Arizona has been added to the list, this week, and I am still figuring out where to go from here. How do I integrate the shooting of a Jewish Congresswoman, the heroism of her gay Hispanic intern, the deaths of half a dozen people, one of whom was, tragically or ironically, a “Faces of Hope” poster-child, into my personal narrative, into my mythology?

I don’t know. In any case, it’s not happening in Benaroya Hall, six rows from Michael Pollan, who deserves better than the attention I’m giving him. His shirt is untucked and he looks tired, as well, but he speaks passionately, and answers a few questions from the audience, starting with the usual zinger about access to affordable food for the poor.

It’s still raining when I finally clear the doors. I call Robby to pick me up, calculating that the hours of work it will cost to pay for this evening’s transportation is worth the hours it would take to get home on the bus. Robby tells me how lucky I am to be born in the U.S., to be a natural-born citizen, as we roll south. I agree with him, smile and nod, but I wonder if “lucky” is a good thing.