Art that tries harder, smarter, quieter

to serve others.

The other day, I read about our local Taft Senators high school football team that reached the regionals. Their next opponent, Gnadenhutten, sparked a memory.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money. What they did have was pride. In being a US citizen. In how their parents, immigrants, had dug deep within their reserves and their community to find their way toward a better life. As such, our summer family trips usually involved some element of history. One year, we drove to New Philadelphia to watch the outdoor drama Trumpet in the Land about the massacre of a group of Natives, about 90 of them unarmed, at a Moravian mission settlement. They were caught up between the British and the U.S. Army in the Revolutionary War, not wanting to pick a side.

I was probably seven at the time but recognized how my parents never shied away from exposing us to the past. While there have been controversies on how actors portray the characters, the work stands for itself. Trumpet in the Land has now endured 55 years.

Robert Caro, author of the Power Broker, once said, "I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography—history in general—can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term." And so, Trumpet in the Land has lasted, as a lesson—our lives, how we live them today, will also become literature in the deepest and highest sense of that word.

The entire Oregon Coast was preserved years ago as a public coastline.

One of the graces of aging is figuring out how you might want to be represented in literature, not in how many memoirs can I publish, or necessarily as a singlet. But as a community, as a generation. What are you willing to sacrifice for the next generation to learn from our mistakes, the personal, professional, national, and global ones?

Given the outcome of 2024 elections, maybe not a lot. However, the esoteric nature of these questions has haunted me perhaps going back to 2016.

That year, I turned 50. Celebrating with a spa weekend with some high school girlfriends who I hadn’t spent much time with, we found ourselves at brunch the last morning of the weekend. 2016 was also the year of Facebook, ads, and Russian interference. So much was already tainting the waters of our time.

Within this group, we were raised in the same Catholic church and public schools. Our parents were middle to upper class teachers, shoe store owners, physicians. We all attended college in northern Ohio (from Cincinnati, OSU is north). We wore similar jeans, clogs, and hairstyles, rooted for the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers. We liked the same boys and drank the same beer.

The cold outside that January wasn’t what chilled my bones. Without really knowing their parents’ or their political affiliations, I had wrongly assumed within this group of females they would have the same enthusiasm I did to elect a woman to office. I was wrong.

On my drive back to southern Ohio, I thought about my parent’s political journeys. They were Republicans, though in my father's latter years, he was a longtime commissioner on the county housing authority. His time after losing the family shoe business, scrambling to re-establish himself in real estate, and lobbying for funds for those less fortunate, might have turned his views toward future generations at risk of being left behind. I never asked this aging version of my father, a kinder, gentler one, who would back his four daughters come what may. He died in 2012.

My mother didn't venture into politics, despite her willful ways and her oftentimes telling the priest where exactly he went astray in his sermon. By 2016, she lived in a memory care home with cognitive losses full-blown. If she and I had ventured in political muck, she might have wished to forget all about me some days. However, her dedication to service, an inheritance from her family’s ways in Italy, the hypocrisy of authorities which she was taught to admire, might have revealed a different bent from her upbringing.

How we were raised, in what surroundings, shapes so much of what we know, what we think we know. What we believe to be real, honest, truth. And thus, so much of the politics as of late has boggled what little Catholicism still is seated in my soul.

This holiday, we will sit around the table with relatives, looking across the candlesticks, asking the it’s the economy person to pass the cranberry compote, or standing next to the my vote was a throw-away person when toasting to gratitude, eating appetizers at work parties with the we’re not doing enough in the war in Gaza, showing up at events with the I don’t want a female president, or encountering the I don’t mind a black guy as president, but a black woman, that ain’t it, in other corners where we live and work. Later, we will return to ourselves and hopefully laugh a bit at the predictability of it all.

Too many post-mortems have been written about why Kamala Harris lost. I refuse to pronounce any one reason at fault. Perhaps these are simply the times when, so many of us have bought into the idea of self-care as a means to only care about ourselves.

Connie Schultz, in her first Substack following Sherrod Brown's election loss, wrote how a friend reminder her if you are lucky enough to have a following, no matter the size, you have a responsibility to try harder. Aside from removing any number of the Ten Commandments to align with the times, those doing the work of the world know it’s a matter of trying harder—and smarter. And maybe quieter, in our refusal to waste our precious pure oxygen.

Make no mistake, I am not standing in silence. Silence implies I have no voice. But this quietude is feeding into my energy stores.

This quietude allows me to look others in the eyes, grants me the ability to stand in the power of art. It’s in the nature of creators to be visionary, hopeful, and to also, despair. We must also recognize Art, which includes the literature Richard Caro references, is not static. Art, as a verb, reflects the moment. When rights are removed from ordinary citizens, when laws are formed to benefit the oppressor, Art still happens in service of those who come after us.

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Something Italian: A personal history of flight, family and food from an Italian American table continues its own sojourn with a blog update coming soon! In the interim, look out for a feature I’ll be a part of for the National Italian American Foundation called NIAF on Location in Cincinnati. And don’t forget your Edible Ohio Valley, for my article on Spelt.

November 14th - Our next virtual Caring for the Caregiver Writing Experience is Watch this space, email bwilliams@muchmorethanameal.com, or visit givingvoicefdn.org register. Mark your 2025 calendars for these upcoming dates: February 25 (virtual), May 13 (in-person), August 12 (virtual), November 14 (in-person). All sessions are 10 - 12 p.m. FREE, and open to caregivers at any stage.

December 10th, Alois Alzheimer Center, How to Strong and Kind caregiving/book talk. Caregiver Writing Experiences, January 15th and April 16th at 2 p.m.. Stay tuned for details.

April 19, Contemporary Arts Center continues its annual writing workshops, this time extended to a series of 8 sessions. Signups details Jan. 1.