"I Won't Last a Day Without You." And Civility

“I Won’t Last a Day Without You.” And Civility

“When there’s no getting over that Rainbow. When the smallest of dreams won’t come true. I can’t take all the madness the world has to give. …and I won’t last a day without you…” -The Carpenters.  We won’t last a day without some civility, from all of US.

The other day as I got ready to drive and run errands—I dug into the car’s console that held extra sunglasses, some medical masks and a variety of CDs my husband had placed there months prior to his death. Too, I found a couple of CDs I’d forgotten about, one being that of the “The Carpenters”. They were a brother, sister duo who had quite a few hits in the 1960s and 1970s.

I hadn’t remembered putting that CD in there. Neither had I remembered the exact day when I’d bought that CD. However, I did know where I bought it, it was just before the store closed a few years back after my husband had passed. It was at the “Barnes & Noble” store that was on Route 17 South near or in Ridgewood, NJ by the Paramus border. That shop there no longer exists. It was moved down into Paramus to the north side of Route 17 where it currently is. The old spot where the store resided has become some kind of assisted living residence.

Before pulling out of our driveway, I placed the CD of “The Carpenters” in the car’s Media slot, then pulled out of our driveway. I headed towards a shop to a place I hadn’t been to in nearly a year. I knew it’d be a good drive, something I hadn’t done since late June, a few months ago.

As I now drove the music played. Although ‘hawkish’, I was the mellow loner in our couple-ness. The music played with Karen Carpenter’s soft caressing voice. I thought about the time period that her voice represented in our country. Her voice and the words she’d sang were in contrast to what was going on at the time that those words were written, then performed. Mostly it was during the Vietnam War. Civil Rights Marches, Women’s Rights Movement, and Assassinations of truly great men like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

“The Carpenter’s” music arrived after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Medger Evers. The resistance of Rosa Parks and so many others. The Cuban Missile Crisis, McCarthyism, and the beginning of the Cold War. We were coming out of the throws of yet another war and still helping to rebuild Europe after World War 2. Much death and destruction appeared to be behind us. Only to be ignored because our boys weren’t ‘over there’. Too, we ignored as usual, the plight of our Indigenous people. The dismissiveness of our black and brown people. All this traveled through my mind as I drove and attempted to sing the words to the songs of “The Carpenters” I once knew.

Things we knew disappeared after 2019. Favorite restaurants, bookstores, my husband, and some civility. We’ve yet to discard the systematic racism that threads ever deeper due to the fears of our whiteness being diminished. I know many of my neighbors are not fans of DEI. I know many would have turned me in if I were Anne Frank. Or they’d go silent.

As I listened to the music and drove, I began to compare marriage to our country. We’d argue, then we’d reconvene. Figure it out and do the marriage thing all over again. We’d stayed the course of marriage and helpfulness, even in vital disagreements. We’d reconvene.

No one man is so important nowadays as to fight over their death, or their discriminating speeches filled with lies. No one man is that important. We’re distracted. And too our enemies know so. “If we saw our rivals engage in this kind of great power suicide, we would breakout the bourbon.”---Wiilliam J. Burns, former  diplomat and director of the CIA.

We need to reconvene and hold our congress and senate’s feet to the fire, so they get back to the business of bringing this country back from it’s own attempted suicide.---Jody-Lynn Reicher