Several weeks ago I was happily engrossed in a few projects. I was recording an essay I’d written for a podcast called Writing Class Radio. I was working up a flyer for a writing class. And I was putting the finishing touches on an article for AARP’s sister publication, The Ethel, about how to have civil discourse in contentious times. I was feeling productive. Hopeful, even.

And then November 5th happened. The night before the election, I forgot about all the great advice I’d collected for my article on civil discourse and ripped into a friend who suggested LGBTQ people were “sinners.” The night of the election, I was shattered.

But I wasn’t going to write about the election here. Instead, I was going to write about how I have been going through huge boxes of old photos and letters, and how entertaining and sobering and bittersweet it has been. Many times I have stopped and stared at a photo and wondered why, for the life of me, I even had a camera in hand at that moment, because this was back when cameras were bulky and inconvenient, and required film.

Does everyone have a picture of their first boss, I wondered, their first desktop computer, the first tulip they saw pushing up through snow the spring after their father died?

How did I come to have a photo of myself with a wheelbarrow in a stall full of horse manure on my thirtieth birthday? Why are there hundreds of photos of my husband’s nascent garden—pictures of nothing but neatly raked soil, then of dots of greenery poking through the dirt, then of slightly fuller greenery—and then, hundreds of pictures of the explosion of flowers and vegetables it became? Because, as a rule, I’m uninterested in foliage, and even less interested in its progression from seedling to harvest. Why did I make an exhaustive record of this?

I also came across letters and cards from family, friends and boyfriends dating back to my teen years, as well as Xeroxed copies of my very long, detailed letters back to them. It’s as if I was afraid that, without the picture-taking and letter-writing and Xeroxing, I might forget the very essence of myself and my life: how I lived, what I saw, who I loved, what was said.

I am not nearly finished going through all the boxes, but a few general observations come to mind. First, I have lived a privileged life. By this I don’t mean wealthy or showy—simply that I am lucky to have been born into the family, the country, and the decade I was born into.

Women had secured the right to vote forty years earlier. World War II, with its hateful rhetoric and pogroms against Jews, had ended sixteen years earlier. The Vietnam war would be in full force throughout my childhood, but other than one panicked moment as an eight-year-old fearing the draft would somehow find me, the world’s problems did not sway me from my childhood whims and petty grievances. I want a horse! I hate math! Both of these proclamations are present in the boxes, the first in missives to my father entreating him to buy me a mare named Sheba, and the second in yellowed report cards that attest to my difficulties with math.

Secondly, I have a vivid memory for how I felt when almost every picture was snapped. That photo of my first boss? I was standing in the drab office at the halfway house where I worked when I was twenty-one. I was smiling when I took the picture, though he was not, because I knew, in that way we can sometimes forecast our future, that he would be my beacon of what an effective leader is: thoughtful, compassionate, demanding, inclusive, and forgiving.

That photo of my first computer? I had just bought it, used, from a co-worker. I was terribly excited about it. I believed it heralded the beginning of my writing career.

And that tulip I saw pushing up through the snow the spring after my father died? I remember thinking how life goes on even when you feel the whole world ought to shut down out of homage to your disbelief.

Which brings me to my point.

The election devastated me. The voting into office a man who is anything but a thoughtful, compassionate leader, who promised to rule with an authoritarian hand and who foments distrust and hatred against groups of people whose race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion differs from his—who, ironically, poses a threat to the very democracy that allows him a voice—has left me in a state of profound grief.

Is this a true snapshot of who we are, as Americans?

I learned a new word recently: Infacility. It’s a medical term that means “the inability to quickly adjust one’s focus when looking from near to far.” The word keeps coming back to me as I think about what this election signifies: the inability of so many people to shift their focus from what the self wants and fears to what best serves the greater good of our fellow Americans, our country, and our world, over time.

It’s true that, like that tulip I happened upon thirty-five years ago, life goes on even when you feel the whole world ought to shut down out of homage to your disbelief. But it is my hope that four years from now, when we look back over our photos and letters from this time, we remember what we were thinking. How we lived, what we saw, who we loved, what was said. How, exactly, we got to this place.

And that we will have done everything necessary to fix our failed vision.

***********

Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].