Come Rain or Come Shine

Louis Cato sings

slowly thrumming his guitar

“Come Rain or Come Shine”

From French philosopher and activist Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, published posthumously in 1947: “…Real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring….  Real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” 

Real Good Champs and Poet—Karolina Muchová and Linda Nosková, Faith Shearin

Racquet-gripping children dream of competing for the most coveted of all tennis titles, kids imagining their serves and slices applauded on Wimbledon’s famed Centre Court.  On July 11th, Karolina Muchová and Linda Nosková thrill fans with a three-set championship final on the browning green grass.  The Czech duo’s triumph, though, comes in post-match interviews.  As each finalist walks to the microphone, 15,000 fans silence pin-droppingly.  Beauty and grace take centre-stage.  Spectators, including Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, cheer and cry.  Heart-on-both-sleeves runner-up Muchová’s bowed head, humor, and tears, all while praising the winner and the ball kids and her team and the tournament.  Nosková’s matching humility and affection for her friend, a girl’s shocked laughter as she holds the Venus Rosewater Dish, a daughter’s weeping gratitude as she blows a kiss skyward to her mother.    

Faith Shearin invites us to listen to some “Places I Have Heard the Ocean.”  Waves rolling in—waves rolling out.  This ancient sound also splashes in a cat’s purring, in city streets and in subways, in beds and in trees.  Roller skates’ swooshing.  High tide and low tide.  “Ocean in the rise and fall: / lungs of everyone I love.”  Salty confirmation.    

 Real Good Representative and Historian—Melanie Stansbury and Heather Cox Richardson

Intrepid progressive Melanie Stansbury stands tall for New Mexico’s first Congressional District in the House of Representatives.  “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” she encourages coffee-sipping constituents in gatherings throughout her region.  Serving on the Natural Resources and the Oversight and Accountability Committees, the Congresswoman focuses on conservation initiatives and climate change reversal.  She resolutely handles her district’s urgent needs, from the calamitous drying up of the Rio Grande River and resulting unemployment, to the loss of fresh drinking water and nutritious food supply, a cascade of setbacks creating poverty and behavioral health issues.  She speaks to everyone everywhere from the Capitol in this passionate July 14th report to her communities back home.  “The US government is committing blatant acts of homicide…they have to be held accountable.”  About our ununited union: “The whole thing is just totally twisted.”  What else?  “We are continuing our Epstein investigation.”  Representative Stansbury ends her eloquent communiqué: “I am sending you so much love from DC.  Have a good week everyone.”   

A sailor along Maine’s coastline and history professor at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson tracks and enhances our democracy’s health.  She explores politics through her wide-lensed grasp of the past and brings clarity to present-day madness.  The future, fortunately, awaits our making.  “I feel like the luckiest person on Earth that I get to be part of this moment where we re-figure out what it means to be American and what American democracy should look like.”  Her “250 to 250 Project,” celebrating that “now, as ever, We Are America,” features one-minute segments showcasing the “ideas, labor, and lives” of everyday people who changed our country.  Take a look at Week 8 for the historian’s pairings of stories with narrators—1868 Iowa School Desegregation with Connie Ryan and the Great Crash of 1929 with Paul Krugman.   Seafarer/storyteller Richardson started a writing routine in 2019, and at least three million subscribers now read her nightly “Letters from an American.”  Her July 24th letter exposes one fascist regime feint after another, while it concludes with a reminder of another July 24th message—a Fireside Chat broadcast in 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  FDR: “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.” 

forty-four years on

Don Henley busts tabloid news

smells “Dirty Laundry”

Real Good Independent News—Richardson’s Pals Simon Rosenberg and Scott MacFarlane  

Inspired by Richardson’s “Letters from an American,” veteran political analyst and high-energy fundraiser Simon Rosenberg started “Hopium Chronicles,” a daily and at times colorfully-worded fount of information designed to win elections.  His regular updates on promising House and Senate candidates provide keys to their platforms, interviews, and ways to volunteer and to contribute financially.  This tenacious voting rights advocate insists on the power of early voting.  Doublecheck your registration and polling place.  Help first-time voters register and either secure mail-in ballots or access to their polling places.  Rosenberg’s complimentary close each morning: “Keep working hard, everyone.  We have a country to save, and elections to win, together!”  

“Legacy media are corporations that have a legal branch,” Richardson shares in her interview with Scott MacFarlane, former CBS and since March MeidasTouch Network’s chief Washington correspondent.  His “Day Ahead—My Editorial Note” weaves Capitol Hill specifics into that day’s whole picture, the once Seattle bartender expertly mixing humor and gravitas.  Using his cellphone as camera and microphone, he reports from congressional hallways, alongside the Lincoln Memorial algae pond, and in front of a toddler’s roof-to-ground Kennedy Center drapery.  “People don’t want the bells and whistles—they want something that makes the point straight to the camera.”  What about his financial risk in losing a corporate paycheck?  “If I don’t have the audience I can’t make the mortgage payment—you are your own media company.”  MacFarlane left his long-sought childhood dream job, after only four years, to produce “independent, unfiltered reporting.”  No both sides—no lies.  “If we get it wrong, we lose the trust.”  Truth or consequences.  

Real Good and Marvelous—A Poetic Parallelogram

Poet Denise Levertov guides us on timeless “Sojourns in the Parallel World.”  Slowly, imperceptibly…we drift out of ourselves…into the one…main stream.  Untethered.  you-i-we-it-all—wind chatting with rain, ocean combing over rocks.  Seamless “cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing / pilgrimage of water, vast stillness.”  Too soon—tick-tock.  Back to shoe tying and grocery buying, but we’re water’s dancing pilgrims a little forever changed.

Real Good and Intoxicating—Songs Written and Sung by Two Simons

Paul Simon released a perfect song in 1973.  This April he reprised “Something So Right” on The Late Show—his same expressive hands and beat-keeping left foot.  “Look of lovelight.” Those two acoustic guitars, that flute, every bow and string, all the so right accompanists starring in their supporting roles.  “Some people never say those words ‘I love you’ / But like a child they’re longing to be told.”  Told.    

Soufflés burn deliciously in Grand Central Terminal. That voice billowing through the doors as we enter the train station at 42nd Street: “There’s more room in a broken heart.”  Carly Simon’s surprise concert, after a 14-year absence, announces her 1995 return to touring.  What an unmooring for the crowd!  Musicians and choristers join her on a makeshift stage—their refrain soars to the cathedral ceiling.  “It will be Coming Around Again / I believe in love.”  (“I do believe”)

cloudy or sunny

in or out of the money

come rain or come shine